Call for Papers

Submit your manuscript at www.editorialmanager.com/jlcourts

Editor: Justin Wedeking , University of Kentucky

Editorial Board: Brandon Bartels, Pamela Brandwein, Keith Bybee, Javier Couso, Charles Epp, Julio Rios Figueroa, Leslie Goldstein, Stacia Haynie, Ran Hirschl, Jeffrey Lax, Lynn Mather, Julie Novkov, Suzanna Sherry, Torben Spaak, Georg Vanberg, and Katarina Zajc

Submit an article that explores process, policy, ethics, justice, and/or culture in law and society.

The Journal of Law and Courts invites submissions from all scholars interested in process, policy, ethics, justice, and/or culture in law and society. Submissions are evaluated on three criteria: 1) the importance of the questions or ideas addressed; 2) analytical rigor; and 3) success in crossing boundaries that often divide scholars from different disciplines or even segments of the same discipline. Authors should 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.

Articles should be succinct, with theoretical discussions and literature reviews limited to central issues and closely related works. Papers should not exceed 10,000 words, except where extra length is essential to the integrity of the article, as, for instance, in a work of qualitative research where fairly extensive descriptions are required to allow readers to evaluate the evidence. With few exceptions, JLC articles will consist of original scholarship. The two types of exceptions that will be seriously considered for publication are theoretically sophisticated “state of the discipline” pieces and papers elucidating little-known empirical methods that could be valuable to many researchers in the law and courts community.

In general, papers substantially devoted to advocating a particular approach to research or theory will be disfavored, as inconsistent with the Journal’s aims; that is, the focus of strong submissions will be on what is being studied, not how it is being studied. Furthermore, although empirical or conceptual analyses of the substance of law are highly appropriate subjects for JLC articles, papers whose primary purpose is to describe or evaluate doctrinal developments will not be considered for publication.