UC HASTINGS COLLEGE OF THE LAW

COMM/ENT - Home

Symposium

Scholarly Publications

Article Submission Guidelines for Volume 26

Thank you for considering publishing your article with COMM/ENT. We are always in search of articles that are interesting, novel, well-written, and relevant to a variety of current topics related to communications and entertainment law.

COMM/ENT is published four times per year. We receive submissions throughout the year, and we review articles and make publication offers on a rolling basis as they come in.

We choose around twenty articles to publish every year, out of hundreds of submissions. If you are considering submitting an article to us, observing the following guidelines can greatly increase the chances that we will offer you publication:

1.	All submissions should contain the following information in the article itself:

The article title, on the first page

The author's name, underneath the article title on the first page

2.	In addition, please provide us with the following information, either in a cover letter or the e-mail message accompanying your submission:

Your current contact information, including phone number, e-mail, and physical mailing address

Some brief biographical / C.V. information about you (very brief is fine)

3.	In your cover letter or e-mail to us, please briefly describe your thesis, or provide a separate abstract of about 50-100 words; and tell us how your piece provides a novel, nonobvious, and useful contribution to the body of legal knowledge. In short, this is your chance to give us a preview of your article that will make us eager to read it.
4.	Hard-copy submissions should be formatted in a way that makes them easy to read. General formatting and other guidelines for hard- copy submissions include the following:
	-	12-point Times New Roman or other variable-width font is preferable to Courier.
	-	Lines should be 1.5 or double-spaced.
	-	Margins should be at least 1".
	-	Articles should contain footnotes rather than endnotes.
	-	Double-sided printing is acceptable.
	-	One hard copy is adequate.
	-	If you want your manuscript to be returned, please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
	-	Enclosing a soft copy on floppy disk is not required; however, we will request an electronic copy upon accepting a piece for publication.
	Please send hard-copy submissions to the address below.
5.	E-mail submissions are accepted, even encouraged. Please send them to us at the address comment@uchastings.edu. Microsoft Word file format is preferred for the article, and plain-text e-mail (not HTML) is preferred for the cover note. We can review submissions in Adobe .pdf file format, but upon acceptance we will request Microsoft Word format for editing & publication. Please format the document as you would a hard-copy submission; but if you are sending it from outside the U.S., please format it for U.S. Letter size (8.5"x11") rather than A4 size paper.

5a.

If you submit your article via e-mail, please make sure the Subject: line of the message contains at least the following three elements:

The word "Submission" (this triggers a mail filter which directs all new submissions into a separate mailbox)

Your last name (this helps our editors easily find your article in their own e-mail folders after it's been forwarded to them from the COMM/ENT inbox)

The article's title, or a shortened version thereof (this also helps us find articles in e-mail folders, and helps us remember who wrote which article)

Example subject line: "Article Submission: Cardozo / The Scope of the Duty"

5b.

It's easier for us to keep track of your document attachments if you give them file names that help identify them as yours. For example, finding Prof. Smith's article and resume in an Attachments folder is made much easier when those files are named "Smith-FCCArticle.doc" and "LeeSmith-CV.doc" than if those files were just named "Article.doc" and "CV.doc."

6.	Please submit only a final, ready-to-edit article, that has been completed, revised, and proofread. COMM/ENT's publication schedule is very tight, and due to the risk of delay, we cannot consider an article for publication if its substantive content is incomplete. Likewise, we do consider the author's attention to technical detail regarding matters such as spelling, punctuation, and formatting as a factor in our publication decisions.
	If, as is common, your article covers an area where the law or the facts may undergo new developments between submission and publication (e.g. where there's an ongoing court case or regulatory process), and you wish to incorporate those developments into the final version of the article, please let our editors know this before accepting an offer of publication, so we can manage our editing process accordingly and avoid version control problems, scheduling delays, and needless duplication of effort by you or us. Otherwise, publication offers are made on the assumption that the article as submitted is the final draft.
7.	COMM/ENT follows the format of THE BLUEBOOK: A UNIFORM SYSTEM OF CITATION (17th ed., The Harvard Law Review Ass'n. 2000) for citations. If you have reviewed your own citations for form, accuracy, and pinpoint references, and re-checked your supra and infra numbering, before sending us your piece,* that will make our editing job much easier -- which is a factor that we consider in deciding which pieces to publish.

Please send hard copy submissions to:
Senior Articles Editor
COMM/ENT
UC Hastings College of the Law
200 McAllister Street
San Francisco, California 94102-4978

Updated April 2004

* Neat trick for authors: To easily automate the renumbering of supra and infra references when footnotes are added or deleted during your drafting and revision process, use cross-references when composing your articles in MS Word. For instance, if you have a footnote that says, "See Posner, supra note 27," you can do the following:

1. Type "See Posner, supra note " and place the cursor where the cross-reference goes.

2. From the drop-down menu toolbar, select "Insert" > "Cross Reference ..."
(In Office XP, the sequence is "Insert" > "Reference" > "Cross Reference ...")

3. In the Cross-Reference dialog box, select the type of cross-reference to insert (in this example, it's a footnote); then select the footnote number to reference (in this example, footnote 27).

4. Click Insert, then Close.

Now your footnote will say, "See Posner, supra note 27," but if you later add or delete footnotes before note 27 ( thus changing the number of the note containing the Posner reference to 26, 28, etc.), this reference will automatically update to show the correct number.

Contact: COMM/ENT