Law Archive

From the Law Archive website, click on “Submit a Paper,” and follow the instructions.

COS has a detailed article on these topics and more at their preprint FAQ page.

Purpose:

Papers submitted to Law Archive undergo a moderation process to ensure the inclusion of law related scholarship only. Law Archive uses pre-moderation. If your paper is accepted, it will be assigned a DOI and become publicly accessible via Law Archive. The paper file cannot be deleted, but it can be updated or modified. Moderators are a cohort of dedicated volunteer librarians and faculty. The inclusion of a paper on Law Archive should not be deemed as an endorsement of the content by Law Archive, Yale Law School, or any other affiliated institution.

Policy:

The moderation team will evaluate submitted papers according to the following criteria. Acceptance requires all the following to be met.

1. Scholarly content
   • Submissions to Law Archive must be scholarly in nature. Scholarly papers are often intended for an academic or subject matter expert audience and include a citation of sources. Moderators may reject papers that do not engage with current or prior legal authorities and scholarship.
   • We do not intend to evaluate the scholarly quality of the submitted paper, only whether it could fairly be categorized as such.
2. In a research area we support
   • In evaluating whether a paper is in a research area we support, namely the law, we will ask ourselves: (1) if the paper directly deals with the law or legal information or (2) for interdisciplinary works, whether a legal perspective is an integral part of the paper’s thesis.
3. Plausibly categorized
   • Authors may categorize the subject of their paper according to the indicated taxonomy. Selections should include, but need not be limited to, the discipline of law.
4. Correctly attributed
   • We will only accept papers that are correctly attributed. In validating this information, we will perform a general Internet search for a prior public authorship claim of the work.
   • For papers whose text was written either by or with the assistance of generative artificial intelligence, we ask for an explicit declaration of the use of generative artificial intelligence either in the paper or in the abstract submission field. Given the current inaccuracy of testing tools, we appeal to authorial integrity.
   • Anonymous and pseudonymous papers may be accepted provided they otherwise meet the necessary requirements for acceptance. We recognize that the relationship an individual has with a specific name can change or evolve for a variety of reasons, both personal and cultural. While we do accept and encourage the use of ORCiD or other demonstrations of consistent identity, we do not believe this should hinder the distribution of legal scholarship.
5. In languages we can moderate
   • We only accept papers written in English.
6. In a searchable text format
   • We will only accept papers in a searchable text format such as, word processing documents, searchable PDFs, and other text files. Image-scanned documents are not accepted. If you need assistance in making a PDF file text searchable, please see this tutorial from Adobe.

Procedure

Decisions on submitted works are made on a first come, first served basis.  If accepted, you will receive an email informing you of such. If rejected, you will similarly receive an email which will also include the reason for the rejection.

If you would like to appeal your rejection, please send an email to lawarchive@yale.edu with an explanation that responds to the reason for your rejection within one week.

Due to staffing and time, moderators will not engage with pre-submission evaluation or discussion of a paper.

Once a paper has been approved by a Law Archive moderator it becomes part of the scholarly record and generally cannot be withdrawn. The rationale: once papers are submitted to Law Archive and approved, they receive Digital Object Identifiers and persistent URLs by COS. They are indexed by services like Google Scholar and are immediately citable and retrievable. A commitment to the preservation of the scholarly record compliments our mission to increase accessibility of legal scholarship.

Google Scholar indexes pre-prints and papers on the OSF Preprints server.

OSF offers institutional pages complete with branding for a fee. For more information, please check out the OSF Institutions support page.

For examples, you can check out our Institutions page or OSF's project page mock up. 

Law Archive is primarily funded by Yale Law School. Open Science Foundation is diversely funded including support by the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation.

Law Archive has its administrative base at the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School and is directed by an Advisory Board of the following interstitutional law librarians and faculty:

Jack Balkin - Yale Law School
Femi Cadmus - Yale Law School
Michelle Cosby - Washington and Lee University School of Law
Amy Emerson - Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law
Sandra Enimil - Yale University Library
Peter Hook – Washington University School of Law
Thomas Mills - Notre Dame Law School
Nicholas Parrillo - Yale Law School
Roger Skalbeck – University of Richmond School of Law

Law Archive has a steering committee of librarians at the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School that provides the administrative hub of the archive.

Julian Aiken
Femi Cadmus (Chair)
Jason Eiseman
Rachel Gordon
Alex Jakubow
Cate Kellett
Nor Ortiz (Administrator)
Mike VanderHeidjen (Administrator)

Law Archive is managed by Michael VanderHeidjen and Nor Ortiz at Yale Law School

For information about submitting a paper or any other related questions, please contact the Law Archive Administrators at lawarchive@yale.edu.