Washington Law Review publishes four times a year, in October, December, March, and June. We publish pieces for a general legal audience and invite authors to submit legal scholarship on all topics. WLR embraces a multi-faceted, intersectional approach to legal issues relevant to the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. We seek to respond to the overdue and critical need for diverse voices in law; primarily voices that have been historically underrepresented in our legal community. To that end, WLR is particularly interested in submissions from scholars of color, submissions that address legal issues faced by historically marginalized communities, and submissions that discuss legal issues specific to the Pacific Northwest and the Ninth Circuit.

Please find below more information on guidelines for submitting your piece for consideration, including how to prepare your manuscript for our anonymous review process.

For questions about submission guidelines or procedures, please email editor@washlrev.org.

 

2026–2027 SUBMISSIONS SEASON

WLR generally considers article submissions in the summer and winter submission seasons. We are very excited to announce that our 2026 Summer submissions are now open!

We are currently ONLY accepting article submissions that contain between 18,000 and 30,000 words (inclusive of footnotes). We do not accept book reviews or student submissions.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Anonymous Review Process

Washington Law Review uses an anonymous review process to reduce implicit bias in article selection. To that end, WLR asks authors to redact all personally identifying information from manuscripts. Required redactions include citations and phrases that reference the author’s prior work (e.g., “as I have argued previously” or “in a previous article”). Please confine name, affiliation, biographical information, and acknowledgements to a separate CV or resume. Our review process is anonymous until the Submission Season Committee’s final vote.

Required Credentials

WLR publishes articles by authors who are law professors or who have more than two years of experience in law practice, inclusive of clerkships. We do not publish student pieces unless written by Washington Law Review student editors or selected in a writing competition for University of Washington School of Law students.

Length and Style Guidelines

Law review articles typically situate an argument within a broader body of scholarship, analyzing the problem and proposing a solution. Published articles generally follow a traditional roadmap of introduction, background, analysis/argument, and conclusion, and provide a comprehensive treatment of a particular area of law. Articles are more formal in tone and ground assertions in consistent citation.

Articles: Law review articles typically situate an argument within a broader body of scholarship, analyzing the problem and proposing a solution. Published articles generally follow a traditional roadmap of introduction, background, analysis/argument, and conclusion, and provide a comprehensive treatment of a particular area of law. Articles are more formal in tone and ground assertions in consistent citation. WLR seeks article submissions that contain between 18,000 and 30,000 words, including footnotes.

Submission Methods: To submit an article or essay for consideration, use the Washington Law Review Scholastica portal. Please fill out your demographic information. We do not use or have access to it during submission review or on a personal basis. However, we use it in the aggregate to assess the efficacy of our efforts for diversity and inclusion.

Editing Process

During the editorial process, student editors work with authors by providing substantive and stylistic feedback on the author’s work. Our goal is to make editorial suggestions that will help authors produce high-quality scholarship without infringing on a writer’s personal style, voice, and expertise. For citations, Washington Law Review conforms to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (22nd ed.). For grammar, WLR follows the conventions of The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style (5th ed.) and The Chicago Manual of Style (18th ed.). 

For spelling, WLR follows the conventions of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary and Black’s Law Dictionary (12th ed.). WLR’s Style Guide departs from these authorities in limited circumstances, most notably in our Inclusive Language Policy. If selected, we require all authors to cite the following unless an editor approves an exception: factual assertions, direct quotations, statutes, and case references (immediately after the case and including a pincite with each following reference).