The story
A better way to move scholarship forward.
Hein Scholar began as one researcher’s answer to a problem he had lived through from both sides, and became a publisher’s commitment to solving it at the scale of the whole field.
The founder
Joseph Avery
Avery holds a JD from Columbia and a PhD from Princeton, and did postdoctoral work at Yale’s Information Society Project. The research that became this platform was supported by National Science Foundation SBIR Phase I and Phase II awards and by Google for Startups AI, and spent time in Princeton’s eLab accelerator.
What he built came out of seeing the submission process from both ends — as someone writing for law reviews, and as someone close enough to the machinery to see what the tooling was costing everyone involved. The problem was never that editors lacked judgement or that authors lacked rigour. It was that the infrastructure between them asked both to do avoidable work at the worst possible time of year.
At a glance
Education
Columbia JD · Princeton PhD
Postdoctoral
Yale Information Society Project
Research support
NSF SBIR Phase I & II · Google for Startups AI
Accelerator
Princeton eLab
How it got here
From research project to Hein Scholar.
1
The problem
Seen from both ends of the submission process: writing for law reviews, and close enough to the machinery to see what it cost everyone.
2
Claudius Scholar
Built independently as a research project, supported by NSF SBIR Phase I and II awards and Google for Startups AI.
3
Carried forward by Hein
A promising research platform gained a publisher’s archive, support organisation and institutional relationships behind it.
Hein Scholar
Still a platform in its own right, not a feature bolted onto something else — now connected to HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library.
The problem was never judgement. It was infrastructure.
Editorial boards already know how to choose. Authors already know how to write. What neither should have to absorb is a submission system that makes the hardest weeks of the year harder than they need to be.
Why this publisher
The archive is the point.
A preemption check is only as good as the corpus underneath it, and that is precisely what Hein has: the Law Journal Library, built over decades, with every title digitized back to its first published issue.
No amount of clever matching compensates for a thin corpus. Pairing the platform with the archive is not a merchandising decision — it is the reason the central feature works at all.
See how the Preemption Check works →
1.5M+
Articles
780K+
Notes
3,500+
Journal titles
60
Countries
HeinOnline Law Journal Library. Every title digitized back to its first issue.
Help us build the next chapter.
The journals and libraries that come in early shape what this becomes. The conversation is worth having before your next cycle opens.