submission requirements

Before submitting your work to the Law Review, read the following requirements carefully. Submissions which do not comply with these requirements will be rejected out of hand.

I. AUTHOR ELIGIBILITY

The Law Review only accepts submissions from students or recent graduates in legal fields. The following five categories of people are automatically eligible:

  • Students enrolled in a course of study in law recognized by that jurisdiction's law society (or equivalent) as a pre-requisite to practice of law as a profession. The following degrees will be deemed to satisfy this requirement in any jurisdiction:

Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.)

Bachelor of Civil Law (LL.L. or B.C.L.)

Master of Laws (LL.M.)

Juris Doctor (J.D.)

Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.)

  • Recent law school graduates. Such authors must have graduated from one of the courses of study discussed in the previous category within 12 months before submission.

  • Students-at-law and articling students

  • Students clerking in any jurisdiction.

  • First-year associates.

The Law Review may consider submissions whose authors do not fall into any of these categories on a case-by-case basis. To request an exception, please contact our Director of Submissions at submissions.lawreview@utoronto.ca. Exceptions have been granted where:

  • The author previously submitted when eligible and was asked to resubmit.

  • The author wrote the paper while eligible but waited slightly too long to submit.

  • The author is a paralegal student or recent graduate.

II. content

The Law Review considers for publication any piece of student scholarship with a substantial legal focus written in English or French, with Canadian content.

Submissions with a purely international law focus (public or private) are welcomed, as long as the article’s focus bears some relevance to Canada. Submissions focusing on the law of a foreign country will only be accepted where they have a comparative aspect with Canadian law or a clear application to Canadian law. Submissions lacking either Canadian content or international law content will not be accepted simply on the basis that they might be of interest to legal professionals in Canada.

III. citations

The Law Review uses the most recent version of the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation ("McGill Guide") for all citations. American authors may use the Bluebook, but must undertake to convert their citations to comply with the McGill Guide if their submission is accepted for publication. Other international authors may use the accepted format of legal citation in their home jurisdiction, but must undertake to convert their citations to comply with the McGill Guide if their submission is accepted for publication. 

All citations should be in the form of footnotes. Submissions with endnotes will be rejected. Bibliographies or reference lists should be omitted.

Iv. formatting

Submissions must be double-spaced, use Times New Roman 12-point font, and be submitted as a PDF document no larger than 10 MB.

v. IDENTIFYING INFORMATION

The Law Review takes anonymization of submissions very seriously. Only one person in the Law Review knows the identity of authors before a final decision is rendered on their submission, and that person uses that information to actively prevent actual or perceived conflicts of interest. For a full description of our anonymization process, click here.

To enable that vigilance, all submissions must be stripped of personally identifiable information. To be clear, that means that you must remove any information that could be used to identify you personally, such as your name, university, and footnote references to classes and classwork. This information must be removed throughout your submission document: not only from the title page, header, and footer, but also where it appears in the body of the text. If you have any questions about anonymization, whether something should be removed, or how to remove it, contact our Editorial Manager at editorialmanager.lawreview@utoronto.ca.

Vi. necessary components

All submissions must be accompanied by a short cover letter. It should explain, in less than one page, how your submission makes a novel contribution to legal scholarship.

Any submission longer than 10 pages must also include a table of contents, abstract, and keywords, in that order, at the start of the document.

All headings and sub-headings in your submission should appear in the table of contents. The table of contents cannot have more than 3 levels of headings (i.e. headings, sub-headings, and sub-sub-headings).

The abstract must be no more than 200 words and appear after the table of contents. It should both summarize your submission and explain why your topic matters.

Following the abstract, on the same page, list up to six keywords for database searching. A phrase can be up to 3 words or strings of characters (e.g. "Charter section 7" and "Charter s 7" each count as 3 word phrases)

There are no firm length requirements for submissions to the Law Review. The average length of a paper published in the Law Review is generally between 20 and 35 pages, however the Law Review has published shorter and longer submissions in the past.