Editorial Policies

Focus and Scope

The University of Pittsburgh Law Review, founded in 1934, is the longest-standing publication of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. It is produced by students and aims to publish excellent academic scholarship.

 

Section Policies

Articles

Checked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Note

Checked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Review Essays

Checked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Book Review

Checked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Tributes

Checked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Notes and Comment

Unchecked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Notes

Unchecked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Article

Unchecked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Note and Comment

Unchecked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Tribute

Unchecked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Essay

Unchecked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Introduction

Unchecked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Review Essay

Unchecked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Front Matter

Checked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Special Reports

Checked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed
 

Peer Review Process

The University of Pittsburgh Law Review carefully considers all manuscripts that it receives. Our selection process has many steps: each piece is reviewed, at least two editors review every submission, and many pieces go through substantially more stages of review, including an Articles Committee vote, a preemption check, editor staff peer review, and a vote by the editorial board. Although we make every effort to honor requests for expedited review, we do not omit any of our review stages in response to such requests. When requesting an expedited review, please understand that our selection process takes time.

There is no best time to submit a manuscript to Law Review. We will never reject an article for lack of space; rather, we will hold it over for consideration by the next volume. While we encourage contributors to submit articles as soon as they are ready, we do not review articles between mid-May and the beginning of August, so there is no need to rush during this period.

We also review and periodically publish essays. A piece will be considered an essay if it is 25 law review pages or fewer in length, and its primary purpose is to advance an idea, summarize a development, or initiate or engage in discussion. We strongly encourage authors to submit essays for consideration.

We notify authors of our decisions by email. We normally do not inform authors of the status of their manuscripts other than through email. As a matter of policy, we do not discuss the reasons for our publication decisions.

 

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content. Our publisher, the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh, abides by the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of Open Access:

 

“By “open access” to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

 

Researchers engage in discovery for the public good, yet because of cost barriers or use restrictions imposed by other publishers, research results are not available to the full community of potential users. It is our mission to support a greater global exchange of knowledge by making the research published in this journal open to the public and reusable under the terms of a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license.

 

Furthermore, we encourage authors to post their pre-publication manuscript in institutional repositories or on their Web sites prior to and during the submission process, and to post the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version after publication. These practices benefit authors with productive exchanges as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.


There are no article processing charges or any other costs required of authors by this journal. Submissions received through the third-party platform ExpressO are subject to their processing charge.

 

Archiving

This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration. More...