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. In any given year, the journal's acceptance rate ranges from 13.54% to 23.24%, with a five-year average acceptance rate of 21.48%.

Thomson/Reuters publishes four issues of the Criminal Law Bulletin each year. As a result, we are typically able to publish articles within six to nine 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, Department of Criminal Justice at Fayetteville State University, who writes on legal and public policy developments concerning policing; 

• James "Alex" Purdon, Sociology and Criminal Justice, East Texas A&M 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 works at Arizona State University where he holds appointments as Director of the School of Interdisciplinary Forensics, Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and Affiliate Professor in the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. He is a core faculty member of the university’s interdisciplinary program on law and behavioral science.  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); Sex and 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 130 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; New Criminal Law Review; the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law; Police Quarterly; Policing: An International Journal; Western Criminology Review; William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice; and the law reviews of Arizona State University; Benjamin Cardozo Law School; Chapman University; the City University of New York; Florida State University; Lewis & Clark University; the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Pepperdine University; Rutgers University; Seattle University; Touro University, the University of Florida; and Willamette University. 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. He became the Editor-in-Chief of the journal in 2019. 

Our Distinguished Editorial Board

The Editor-in-Chief is assisted by a distinguished Editorial Board whose members review articles and recommend that high-quality submissions be accepted for publication.  We are proud that this distinguished cadre of editors includes 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

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 strongly 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 (22nd ed. 2025), with two exceptions.  First, we ask authors to include the full names of all authors of articles and books the first time they are cited in footnotes, reserving the use of "et al." for subsequent short-form citations that use supra with internal cross-references to the initial citations of such sources. Second, Thomson Reuters eschews the use of id. in favor of short-cites. Our staff with work with authors to align their manuscripts with the in-house rules, if needed.

• Each submission should contain an abstract of between 150 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 acknowledgments.

• 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 publication

We give our authors two paths to publication in the Criminal Law Bulletin.  Both options start with authors submitting their papers. All manuscripts undergo an internal review to determine their potential fit with the Criminal Law Bulletin’s mission. Three editors—two associate editors and the Editor-in-Chief—read each submission. We make offers of publication when all three editors agree that a submission is something we want to publish in our journal. Thus, at minimum, every piece that appears in the Criminal Law Bulletin has been subject to this type of informal peer review, rather than depending on the assessments of student-editors which is typical with most student-edited law reviews. 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.

The next steps are completely up to the authors. They can opt to proceed under the traditional model in which a team of people work on their manuscripts to prepare them for publication. That approach involves an editing process that unfolds in much the same way it does with student-edited law reviews. An attorney-editor from Thomson Reuters (which publishes the Criminal Law Bulletin) does the first round of editing. Our Managing Editor does the second round of editing. And the Editor-in-Chief conducts the final review.

Each of the three rounds of editing is aimed at achieving five goals. First, we aim to increase readability by asking authors to clarify things that appear to be unclear to us. Second, we double-check citations to ensure the proper sources are cited. Third, we endeavor to align all citations with the requirements of the latest edition of The Bluebook. Fourth, we format manuscripts to align them with our in-house style. Fifth, correct typos, grammar, and spelling errors, if any. Throughout all phases of editing, we are guided by the principle that authors’ voices ought to be controlling. Accordingly, we use a “light touch” during editing, deferring to authors’ wishes with regard to the content and writing style.

Alternatively, authors have the option of having their manuscripts formally peer-reviewed beyond the assessments of the editors who originally read their manuscripts. When authors request formal peer review, we ask both law professors and social scientists to provide feedback. The people on whom we call most frequently are those on our Editorial Board, although we reach out to others depending on the needs of any particular manuscript. After peer reviews are completed, we ask authors to consider the feedback offered by the reviewers and revise their manuscripts within what we hope is a reasonable time—typically between four and eight weeks. We can, however, accommodate longer re-submission periods if authors need more time to complete revisions. That’s because we publish year-round. We can simply reschedule the publication date for a manuscript from the issue for which it was originally planned appear into the following issue.

Finally, after the three rounds of editing are completed, Thomson Reuters uses proprietary software to ensure that legal citations are up-to-date and cross-referenced with parallel citations to other Thomson Reuters sources. Once typeset, authors receive page proofs and are given one week to review them. Publication occurs three to four weeks after the submission of corrected page proofs. 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).

Authors may publish the originally submitted materials in manuscript form (as distinct from any copy-edited versions of the manuscript) to the online websites of the Social Science Research Network (“SSRN”), Research Gate, an ArXiv repository, or Open Science Framework (“OSF”), at any time before publication in any Thomson Reuters print or electronic media. Once a manuscript is accepted, authors must indicate that their papers will be published in the Criminal Law Bulletin.  After publication, 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.”

Contact us:

Criminal.Law.Bulletin@gmail.com