For Authors

Washington Law Review Online invites authors to submit short legal scholarship, including essays, responses, rejoinders, and other short, timely content relevant to Washington and Ninth Circuit practitioners and accessible for a general legal audience.

While law review articles often situate themselves within existing research, our essays start new conversations. Essays can be more conversational and theoretical than traditional articles, freer in form, and contribute to legal scholarship by discussing a new idea or making a philosophical critique. WLRO prefers submissions of 6,000-10,000 words including footnotes.

Further, WLRO does not conduct formal submission seasons; as such, we will consider submissions year-round.

Mission Statement

WLRO 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, WLRO is particularly interested in submissions from scholars of color, submissions that address legal issues facing historically marginalized communities, and submissions that discuss legal issues specific to the Pacific Northwest and the Ninth Circuit.

Editorial 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 their personal style, voice, and expertise.

For citations, WLRO conforms to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (21st ed.). For grammar, WLRO follows the conventions of The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style (4th ed.) and The Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.). For spelling, WLR follows the conventions of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary and Black’s Law Dictionary (11th 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 for the following unless an editor approves an exception: factual assertions, direct quotations, statutes, and case references (immediately after the case and including a pin cite with each following reference).

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

Please note that WLRO 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 they have been written by Washington Law Review student editors or selected in a writing competition for University of Washington School of Law students.