National Lawyers Association

The National Lawyer's Association (NLA) is publishing a new periodic scholarly journal called the NLA Report. The NLA invites submissions from all scholars interested in how transcendent principles intersect with law and policy. The NLA seeks to facilitate genuine scholarly debate on issues regardless of the author’s religious or political tenets. The chief aim of the NLA can be expressed simply: to bring historical and transcendent based legal and policy ideas into the national discussion regardless of the political ideology of those ideas.

While holding an unashamedly Christian worldview, we work to produce a publication that encourages a diverse array of ideas and understandings. It is our deeply held belief that God is a god of reason and grace; therefore our hope is to provide a forum where ideas, not persons, are challenged and defended with the highest levels of reason, logic, and decorum to foster intellectual debate among scholars and to educate the legal, political, and lay audiences of our publication.

Submissions will be evaluated on three chief criteria: 

• the importance of the questions or ideas addressed;
• analytical care; and
• success in articulating the boundaries that often divide scholars on an issue -- even though they may hold to a Christian worldview or practice under a similar discipline. It is this third criterion that will distinguish articles published in the NLA from those published elsewhere.

Authors must identify implications that matter to scholars with different perspectives and write in a style that encourages a broad readership, keeping jargon to a minimum and, where appropriate, acknowledging reliance on assumptions that would likely be contested by other scholars.

Submission Guidelines

All articles submitted to NLA are required to be works of original scholarship, and may not have been previously published. In addition, unless other arrangements are made all articles should reflect the latest and most complete version of the author’s work. Drafts or works-in-progress will not be considered.

Submitted manuscripts must be double-spaced, typed, in a standard, easy-to-read font, and formatted to fit on 8 ½ x 11 paper.

Length Limitations

Essays: Approximately 12 - 25 pages including text and footnotes (3,000- 6,250 words)

Articles: Approximately 25 - 50 pages including text and footnotes (6,250- 12,500 words)

(Articles exceeding 60-75 pages will only be published in unusual circumstance)

All submissions should conform to the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style and should be divided into parts and sub-parts where appropriate.

All citations should conform to the most recent edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, published by the Harvard Law Review Association. Footnotes should be current as of the date of submission.

Expedited Reviews

In limited instances, we can expedite the review of a submitted article if the author is facing strict response deadlines by other journals that have already accepted the article. To request an expedited review, please send an email to submissions@nla.org. (In the subject heading, please include “Request for Expedited Review: TITLE OF ARTICLE”)

Please provide the following information in your correspondence:

1. Author name and contact information (phone and email)
2. Article title
3. Journals that have accepted the article
4. Deadlines those journals have given the author
5. The latest possible date that the author can be given a decision

The NLA will try to accommodate authors’ requests.

Submission

Authors may submit articles either via http://www.nla.org/nlareport  or directly (in either Microsoft Word or PDF format) to the Development & Acquisitions Editor, or via hard copy to:

ATTN: Development & Articles Editor
National Lawyers Association
P.O. Box 2369
Forest, Virginia 24551-2369

All submissions should contain the title of the article in addition to the Author’s name, address, email, phone number.

Authors will be notified of all publication decisions via email. As a matter of policy, NLA does not discuss the reasons for its publication decisions.

The NLA is published by the National Lawyers Association The inaugural issue will publish in 2015.