Call for Submissions

General Information

UDC Law Review is currently preparing its 29th volume and invites article submissions that critically examine legal, jurisprudential, and legislative developments. We welcome scholarship that evaluates how public policy and law are weaponized to reinforce systemic oppression, calls for community-driven legal and policy strategies to resist and reform these systems, and unpacks how legal institutions criminalize difference and erase intersectional identities.

In a time marked by legislative rollbacks, educational censorship, anti-DEI backlash, and growing racial inequities in housing, policing, and public health, this volume will explore how law continues to function as both a weapon and a shield in the ongoing struggle for Black and brown liberation.

Topics For This Volume

The 29th volume of UDC Law Review will focus on the following topical framework:

Legal Erasure and Policy Backlash

This pillar invites work that explores the rollback of civil rights protections, the dismantling of DEI frameworks, voter suppression laws, anti-critical race theory legislation, and historical memory bans.

Intersectionality

This pillar invites work that unpacks how the intersection of race with other social identities—such as gender identity, immigration status, class, and more—shapes the experiences of racially marginalized communities within the American legal system, with particular emphasis on the Black community.

Community-Driven Legal Strategies

This pillar invites work that highlights grassroots and non-traditional legal efforts to resist oppressive systems. Examples include mutual aid, community lawyering, participatory defense, and legislative advocacy grounded in lived experience.

Corporate Power, DEI, and the Law

This pillar invites work that examines increasing corporate resistance to racial equity initiatives and explores legal strategies to protect and advance diversity programs, labor protections, and the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in both private and public sectors.

Centering Silenced Voices

This pillar invites work that focuses on the lived experiences and legal narratives of groups often excluded from mainstream discourse—Black and brown trans individuals, queer youth, disabled activists, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, undocumented Black and brown migrants, and others living at the margins of multiple systems.

Radical Legal Futures

This pillar invites work that explores legal theories that challenge traditional views of the American legal system. Examples include critical race theory, abolitionist legal theory, Black feminist legal thought, and visionary frameworks that imagine life after liberation.

Submitted articles need not address all topics, nor fit perfectly into a specific pillar, to be considered for publication.

About the UDC Law Review

UDC Law Review is the journal for the only public law school in our nation’s capital. We take great pride in publishing articles relevant to legal issues concerning the District of Columbia, the National Capital Region, and the United States. Downloadable copies of past issues can be found on UDC Law’s Digital Commons.

Requirements

Font, Formatting, and Style

Articles tendered must be a Microsoft Word-compatible file type (e.g., .docx, .doc, or .rtf). All submissions should be formatted with 1” margins on all sides. Use 12-point Times New Roman font for the main text and 10-point Times New Roman font for the footnotes.

Citation Format

Please use footnotes, not endnotes. Footnotes must conform to the latest edition of The Bluebook. Authors must be prepared to supply any and all cited sources upon request.

Length Limitations

UDC Law Review strongly prefers articles under 25,000 words in length (40-70 pages), including text, footnotes, and appendices in accordance with the joint letter issued by a group of law journals across the country designed to improve the quality and accessibility of legal scholarship.

Submissions

UDC Law Review accepts electronic submissions via Scholastica. Authors must submit through our Scholastica portal: https://udclawreview.scholasticahq.com/for-authors. The author’s curriculum vitae should be submitted along with the manuscript. Please direct any questions regarding submission requirements to lawreview@udc.edu.