Submissions
The Review welcomes submissions on all areas of law. Academics, legal practitioners and law students within Australia and overseas are encouraged to submit.
Information for contributors
The Review publishes three issues per year. Deadlines for submissions are 31 December, 30 April and 31 August.
The next deadline for submissions is 31 December 2011 for our 2012 volume 36(1) issue.
The advisory word limit for submissions is 8000 to 12 000 words (excluding footnotes and headings). Shorter comment-style pieces, case notes and book reviews are also welcome. Submissions should also include an abstract of approximately 120 words.
Prospective contributors are requested to submit manuscripts in electronic form by email attachment in Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format.
All articles appearing in the Review are refereed by at least two anonymous referees. All publication decisions are made by the Editors of the Review, who are law students at the University of Melbourne.
Publication Policy
All authors are required to complete a copy of the Review's Publication Policy, a copy of which is available on this website. In accordance with the Publication Policy, the Review has an exclusive submissions policy and does not accept manuscripts that are currently under consideration by other publications or have been previously published, in whole or in part, elsewhere.
The Editors will not consider any manuscript until a completed copy of the Review’s Publication Policy is returned by the author.
Please download the Publication Policy from the link on the right.
The Editors request that contributors remove submissions from publicly accessible sources, including internet sources such as SSRN, until a decision on publication has been made. This is to ensure anonymity in the referee process. Submissions accepted for publication may be posted on SSRN prior to the printing of the issue with the Editors' permission.
Citation Guide
Citation in the Review is governed by the Australian Guide to Legal Citation which is produced and published by the Melbourne University Law Review Association, in collaboration with the Melbourne Journal of International Law. It is preferred if submissions are formatted in accordance with the AGLC. Bibliographies should be excluded. Citations should be in the form of footnotes
The Australian Guide to Legal Citation can be ordered or downloaded (view-only version) from the links on the right side of this page.
Open Access Policy
The Review supports open access. Recent articles published in the Review appear free of charge on austlii.edu.au (in html format) and on the Review's website (in searchable pdf format). In accordance with the Review's Publication Policy, authors may also publish the searchable pdf format of their article on SSRN or an equivalent database, without obtaining the consent of the Editors, so long as no fee is charged to access that database. Authors may do so immediately upon receiving the final pdf file of their article from the Editors; they do not need to wait any particular length of time after the print edition has been released.
In accordance with the Review's Publication Policy, authors must obtain the Editors' consent if they wish to republish their article in a larger published collection or on an online forum that users access for a fee.
As noted above, to facilitate the double blind refereeing process, the Review requires contributors to remove submissions from publicly accessible sources for the duration of the referee process.
Review Process
The Review's submission process has several steps. The Editorial Board reviews every manuscript that is received. The Board then determines, on the basis of a number of considerations, whether or not to send the manuscript to referees. Not every manuscript is sent to referees. The decision not to send a manuscript to referees is made after consulting the Review's Faculty Advisers.
Manuscripts that proceed past the initial stage then undergo a double blind refereeing process in which they are reviewed by at least two experts in that subject matter. The Board makes publication decisions on the basis of those referee reports. Although we endeavour to provide authors with a timely decision on their submission, the referee process can take time. We suggest that authors allow 8-10 weeks for a decision from the date the Review receives the manuscript and completed Publication Policy.