Why this exists

Calls for papers are scattered everywhere: journal websites, academic blogs, conference pages, mailing lists, professional organizations. There's no comprehensive aggregator that collects them, and maintaining one by hand is labor-intensive enough that past efforts haven't lasted.

The Docket takes a different approach: automated collection. Rather than relying on someone to manually check sources and enter data, the system does the checking itself even as it still ultimately operates under human supervision.

How it works

The Docket uses artificial intelligence to aggregate CFPs, but it does more than check pages for new content. When a blog post mentions a CFP with details hosted elsewhere, the system follows the link. When it encounters a PDF announcement, it retrieves and reads the document. When a page is blocked, it tries alternative approaches before flagging the issue.

This agentic approach extends to collection maintenance. The system tracks which sources are still active, identifies outdated content, catches duplicates across sites, and assesses new venues—determining, for instance, whether a journal uses peer review. When something requires human judgment—a source that may have moved, a case that's genuinely ambiguous—it escalates rather than guessing.

Underlying all of this is a language model that can interpret academic content in context: recognizing that "March 15" without a year means the upcoming March, that journal abbreviations refer to their full titles, that certain language patterns signal a call for papers rather than general news. But language understanding is infrastructure. What makes the system useful is its ability to do research and administrative tasks at a scale that wouldn't be feasible manually.

It's not perfect. The system casts a wide net, and occasionally catches CFP-adjacent content—a job opening for editors cheekily styled as a call for submissions, for instance. Every listing links to its original source so that you can verify the details of each opportunity.

What's included

We monitor a range of source types: law reviews and specialty journals, academic blogs that post CFP announcements, conference and symposium calls, and professional organizations in law and related fields.

Coverage spans the major areas of legal scholarship: constitutional law, criminal law, corporate and business law, intellectual property, international law, tax, health law, environmental law, legal theory, and more. We also monitor interdisciplinary sources in philosophy and social sciences where they intersect with legal scholarship.

New sources are added over time. If there's one you think we should be monitoring, let us know.

Who maintains this

The Docket is developed and maintained by the Innovation Fellow at the William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawaiʻi. The service is free, with no ads or data monetization; operational costs are modest and covered by the law school.

While built at Richardson, the service is freely available to anyone. We believe that making it easier to discover publication opportunities benefits the scholarly community as a whole.