Criminal Law Bulletin
About the Journal
The Criminal Law Bulletin is a venue of choice for distinguished legal and social scientific scholars whose work focuses on matters concerning substantive criminal law, criminal procedure, criminal and forensic scientific evidence, or the legal and ethical issues that affect how justice system professionals perform their tasks in policing, crime labs, the courts, and in corrections. Unlike most law reviews, the Criminal Law Bulletin is not a student-edited law journal. Rather, our journal is peer-edited by faculty members in law and criminology. The journal's acceptance rate over the past three years averages to 19.41%.
Thomson/Reuters publishes six issues of the Criminal Law Bulletin each year. As a result, we are typically able to publish articles within four to six months of the date of acceptance. In addition to a formal print version, the Criminal Law Bulletin is also published online so that it is accessible via Westlaw and related databases, such as Westlaw Next.
In addition to publishing scholarly articles, the Criminal Law Bulletin reports on all of the major federal and state court decisions dealing with the legal aspects of the administration of criminal justice. The journal also publishes book reviews and practical guidance from regular columnists, including:
Steven Friedland, Elon University School of Law, who writes on criminal evidence;
Edward J. Imwinkelried, University of California Davis Law School (emeritus), who writes on forensic science;
Delores Jones-Brown, John Jay College of Criminal Justice (emerita), who writes on legal and public policy developments concerning policing;
Francesca Laguardia, Department of Justice Studies at Montclair State University, who writes on recent contributions to the legal scholarly literature;
James E. Robertson, Department of Sociology and Corrections (emeritus) at Minnesota State University, who writes on annual developments in correctional law in the federal courts system;
Christine S. Scott-Hayward, School of Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Emergency Management at California State University, Long Beach, who writes on correctional and sentencing law and policy; and
Christopher D. Totten, Department of Criminal Justice at Kennesaw State University, who writes on criminal law and procedure.
About the Editor-in-Chief
Henry F. Fradella is a Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University, where he also holds an affiliate appointments as a professor of law in the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. He earned a B.A. in psychology from Clark University; a master’s in forensic science and a law degree from The George Washington University; and a Ph.D. in justice studies from Arizona State University. He has written or co-authored 14 books including The Law of Interrogations and Confessions (W.B. Sheridan Law Publishers/Academica); Sexual Privacy and American Law (W.B. Sheridan Law Publishers/Academica); Punishing Poverty: How Bail and Pretrial Detention Fuel Inequalities in the Criminal Justice System (University of California Press); Stop and Frisk: The Use and Abuse of a Controversial Police Tactic (New York University Press); Sex, Sexuality, Law, and (In)Justice (Routledge); Mental Illness and Crime (Sage); From Insanity to Diminished Capacity: Mental Illness and Criminal Excuse in Contemporary American Law (Academica); a criminal law casebook (Oxford); and five textbooks (Oxford and Cengage). His more than 90 articles, book chapters, reviews, and scholarly commentaries have appeared in outlets such as the American Journal of Criminal Law; Criminal Justice Policy Review; Criminology and Public Policy; the Federal Courts Law Review; Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice; Law & Psychology Review; the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law; Police Quarterly; the University of North Carolina Law Review; and the Rutgers Law Journal. In addition to having published several articles in the Criminal Law Bulletin, Dr. Fradella served as the journal’s Legal Literature Editor between 2004 and 2007.
Our Distinguished Editorial Board
Dr. Fradella is assisted in editing the Criminal Law Bulletin by a distinguished editorial board who review articles and make recommendations that high-quality submissions be accepted for publication. We are proud that this distinguished cadre of editors include the following scholars:
Bennett L. Gershman, Elisabeth Haub School of Law, Pace University
Evan J. Mandery, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
Erik Luna, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University
Keramet Reiter, Department of Criminology, Law & Society, University of California, Irvine
Christopher E. Smith, School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University
Cassia C. Spohn, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Arizona State University
Michael S. Vaughn, College of Criminal Justice, Sam Houston State University
Jeffery T. Walker, Department of Criminal Justice, University of Alabama at Birmingham
David B. Wexler, University of Puerto Rico School of Law
Marvin Zalman, Department of Criminal Justice, Wayne State University
manuscript Submission
The Criminal Law Bulletin welcomes unsolicited submissions from both legal and social science scholars, as well as from justice practitioners, law students, and graduate students in criminology, criminal justice, and related fields. Although the editors will consider manuscripts of any length between 3,000 and 25,000 words, they prefer manuscripts containing between 4,000 and 15,000 words, inclusive of text, footnotes, tables, and figures.
Citations in manuscripts should appear in consecutively numbered footnotes, not endnotes, and follow the style and conventions of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (21st ed. 2020).
Each submission should contain an abstract of between 100 and 300 words.
In the initial footnote(s) of the paper, each submission should present a biographical sketch of not more than 300 words for each author that includes, at a minimum, the degrees earned by the author, where the author obtained those degrees, where the author is currently employed, if applicable; and any acknowledgements.
The editors strongly encourage authors to submit manuscripts in which internal supra and infra references utilize Word's cross-reference feature so that internal cross-references to other footnote numbers can be automatically updated as other footnotes are added or removed during the editing process.
Manuscripts should be prepared in Microsoft Word and either uploaded via Scholastica or emailed to Criminal.Law.Bulletin@gmail.com.
Manuscript REVIEW and offers of publication
All manuscripts undergo an internal review to determine their potential fit with the Criminal Law Bulletin’s mission. Manuscripts that are under consideration for publication may be accepted by the editors or, at the request of any submitter, may be sent for peer review. All offers of publication are conditioned on authors signing Thomson/Reuters' copyright agreement and upon authors making required revisions, if any, in response to editorial feedback.
Thomson/Reuters provides authors who publish their scholarship in the Criminal Law Bulletin an electronic copy of their articles in Adobe portable document format (pdf).
Submitted manuscripts (as distinct from our copy-edited version of any article) may be posted in full on SSRN until copyright is transferred to the Criminal Law Bulletin, but once a manuscript is accepted, authors must indicate that their papers will be published in the Criminal Law Bulletin. Authors may subsequently post a PDF of their published articles in full so long as they wait at least 90 days from the date the article is published in print, provided that it is clearly marked “© <year> Thomson Reuters/West.”