Legal Commentary

LexOpus (http://lexopus.wlu.edu) is a recently launched service at Washington and Lee Law School offering free online submissions to law journals. The service has two facets: 1) An author can make an article available to all interested law journals, inviting journals to make offers. Journals are able to limit by subject matter the articles that they see as open to offers. 2) An author can make offers to law journals in an author-specified journal list, LexOpus making on behalf of the author a short-term exclusive offer to each law journal in sequence. For non-peer-reviewed journals 'short term' is one week. Author offers continue past each journal's exclusive period, on a non-exclusive basis, until rejected by the journal or withdrawn by the author, but any journal with an exclusive period always has acceptance priority. An author can make a work 'open to offers' as well as submit to specific journals, or can do one or the other. As the system does permit uploading of revisions, authors might make working papers open to offers and then, if no acceptable offers have been received, when the finished work is available submit that version to specific law journals. Works can be suppressed from public view if the author so desires. Questions can be directed to:  John Doyle Washington and Lee Law School Lexington, VA 24450