hlr-preemption-check
Use when verifying that a Harvard Law Review (HLR) argument has not already been made — the law-review "preemption check" run across SSRN, Westlaw/Lexis, HeinOnline, and Google Scholar BEFORE drafting. Confirms originality and refines the claim; it does not draft the thesis (hlr-thesis-and-contribution) or the literature engagement in the body.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill hlr-preemption-check --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# Preemption Check (hlr-preemption-check) In legal scholarship, **"preemption"** means: has someone already published your argument? Running this search **before** you write is the single highest-return habit in the field — discovering that your claim appeared in a 2024 article *after* you have drafted 25,000 words is the classic wasted summer. A clean preemption check both protects originality and sharpens your contribution against the nearest prior work. ## When to trigger - You have a candidate thesis and have not yet written the body - You are about to claim "no one has argued X" or "first to address Y" - A draft is done and you want to confirm nothing close appeared while you wrote - An editor or colleague says "isn't this just [Author]'s point?" ## Where to search (run all four; do not stop at one) | Source | What it catches | Note | |--------|-----------------|------| | **SSRN / bepress** | Working papers and forthcoming articles not yet in print | Catches the most recent, still-in-press work — the highest preemption risk | | **Westlaw / Lexis** journals databases | Published law-review articles, full text | Use field-restricted and date-restricted queries | | **HeinOnline**
- When to trigger
- Where to search (run all four; do not stop at one)
- How to search well
- Reading the result (three outcomes)
- Checklist
- Anti-patterns
- Preemption is not the same as the literature review
- Worked micro-pattern (illustrative)
- Output format
- Supplementary resources
What does the hlr-preemption-check skill do?
Use when verifying that a Harvard Law Review (HLR) argument has not already been made — the law-review "preemption check" run across SSRN, Westlaw/Lexis, HeinOnline, and Google Scholar BEFORE drafting. Confirms originality and refines the claim; it does not draft the thesis (hlr-thesis-and-contribution) or the literature engagement in the body.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill hlr-preemption-check --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, a repository with 909 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.