About the Journal

European Law Open (ELO) delivers a dynamic, critical and contextual approach to European law in an Open Access format. The journal is open to different voices, different concerns, and different methodologies, offering a platform for rigorous analysis of both EU law itself and wider European law and governance in their political, cultural, social and economic contexts. Intellectually ambitious ‘Core analysis’ research papers are published alongside shorter ‘Dialogue and debate’ pieces as well as reflections on books and classic articles. European Law Open is the bold new platform for the diverse voices of the EU law community.

Launched in 2022, the journal’s first issue focuses on a variety of the most urgent concerns the EU faces.

Why European Law Open?

The last decade has witnessed fundamental changes in EU law and integration that require a critical revision and possibly an overhaul of the categories, tools and principles that have informed the work of academics, judges and lawyers, and shaped our collective understanding of EU law. ELO confronts the normative principles, institutional structures, decision-making processes and substantive values that purportedly found the Union and shape its law. It inquires into the extent to which they can withstand challenges or have been scathed by the diverse trajectories and, perhaps, fragmentation that EU law has witnessed in the past decades and by the changing contexts in which it has developed. European Law Open also fosters analyses that assess the contribution of legal scholarship to the creation and solidification of the current prevailing understandings of EU law, with a view to persistently questioning the taken for granted assumptions underpinning EU law (the “dogmas” of EU law).

While the changes we point to have been long in the making, the coronavirus shock has confirmed and further rattled the foundations of EU law, in ways that will have a major impact both on political integration and on the legal fabric of the single market and the single currency. It has been in many respects a period of deep discontinuity and profound rupture, a period that has showed more strongly than ever the need for legal scholarship that is capable of understanding and addressing the current political, economic and societal challenges, of proposing different ways of thinking and alternative paths of normative development.

Why Open?

The label ‘open’ stands for some of the key tenets of what the journal stands for in its search for more distanced and critical narratives of EU law: 

• It is Open Access, opening public knowledge for public use.
• It is Methodologically Open: sharing an awareness that EU law is contingent and indeterminate in isolation, and should be analysed and interpreted in its political, social, and economic context, in both more theoretical and more doctrinal fashion.
• It is Teleologically Open: We do not embrace either the idea that EU law is but an instrument towards the apolitical finality of ‘integration’, or the binary choice between Europeanisation and a return to the national.
• It is Academically Open: Embracing the variety of the different national legal traditions and attentive to the influence that cultural, political and economic context exerts over the framing of problems and the furthering of solutions. It is also open to contributions from different disciplines on EU integration, fundamental to a comprehensive understanding of EU law.

What is European Law Open committed to?

These key tenets define the premises of ELO’s approach. The journal is committed to methodological pluralism, interdisciplinarity, and to learning from the insights of fields such as history, sociology, political science, political economy, political philosophy, and anthropology. This is especially important in the task of analysing and confronting the darker legacies of European law, including its colonial, imperial and racist roots. It is equally committed to excellent doctrinal legal research that maps, systematises, criticises and develops positive law, especially in the blind spots of European law such as migration and asylum law, criminal and civil cooperation, defence, international commercial law and investment protection treaties. Re-founding EU law requires the combination of interdisciplinarity, which allows to open up new perspectives on the role and implications of EU law, with solid doctrinal work that constructs, interrogates and improves legal categories. This is the task that the journal takes on.

To achieve this goal, it is essential to build bridges with scholars which so far have worked mostly or only within national legal-dogmatic traditions or within a classic comparative legal tradition, and can employ in their engagement with European law the conceptual frames and methodological tools of democratic constitutional law. Breaking the artificial (and certainly outdated) divide between scholars dwelling with European law and scholars dealing with national law, the journal not only enriches EU law by bringing into it different national constitutional traditions and different scholarly traditions, but it also widen its reach. The articulation between EU and national legal scholarship can be done by fostering research that focuses on actual social, economic and political problems.

Article Types

 ELO publishes quarterly with each online-only issue combining ‘Core analysis’ research articles with shorter ‘Dialogue and debate’ pieces along with in-depth explorations of books and classic articles. Dialogue and debate aims to foster new ways to write about or discuss EU law through innovative engagements with contemporary issues and debates. It includes shorter reflections, dialogues and essays that are still fully self-standing academic contributions. They are a fundamental ‘trade-mark’ of the journal, since their length and flexible format helps to build a community around ELO and draw on a more diverse authorship.

Authors may select from the article types described below. For ‘Dialogue and debate’ they should read this list for guidance but are encouraged to think creatively and submit any kind of content they think fits the description above. Following review the Editors may decide to re-categorise the article type of any submission. Authors are welcome to contact the Managing Editors at [email protected] to discuss the most appropriate article type for their submission, projected word counts or to propose a submission type not yet listed. The journal is open and flexible when it comes to content types and envisages adding new types organically.

Article type	Description	Word count	Review process
Core analysis	Scholarly research papers that are intellectually ambitious, well-crafted and generally longer than pieces in many journals. This article type will: Provide scholars with a format that can harbour deep doctrinal and contextual engagement with the subject matter, allowing authors to articulate and elaborate new hypotheses and new theories. Allow the journal to host thorough analyses of the new developments of European law that are usually not covered in full and in detail by other journals.	10-20,000 excluding references.	Double-anonymous peer review.
Dialogue and debate	Innovative engagements with contemporary issues and debates that are shorter than Core analysis pieces. This could include short timely essays, discussions of methodology, state of the art and state of the debate pieces and interviews but authors should not feel restricted by these suggestions and may propose other ideas to the Editors.	3- 8,000 words excluding references.	Double-anonymous peer review.
Books and classics	These pieces aim at deep engagements around old and new books and revisiting “classic” articles. They should delve into what each contribution has to say about the past, present and the future, about scholarship and social reality. This might include in-depth review articles as well as other formats such as interviews with authors and debates or discussions focused on an individual book.	4- 12,000 words excluding references.	Review by editorial team.

Symposia

European Law Open will consider proposals for symposia submitted by our deadline of April 30th in any given year. See the latest Call for Symposia here.

Symposia will be published as part of the journal’s ‘Dialogue and debate’ section and should include 5-8 shorter essays of 3,000-8,000 words each plus an Introduction. Symposia might focus on a topical subject of interest or provide reflections or dialogues on a research article already published in this journal or on a book.

The themes covered by symposia should be in line with the journal’s aim to cover areas of EU law or topics that have been neglected by mainstream academia and to offer innovative perspectives on ongoing debates. The ELO Editorial Board also asks that organizers seek to include a diverse authorship in these collections.

Your proposal of no more than 7,000 words should be submitted by email to [email protected] marked for the attention of the ELO symposia editors (see the list of editors here). It must be submitted in time for the deadline above and include:

• The title of the proposed symposium.
• A statement outlining the idea, the originality, and the rationale for the symposium.  
• A brief cv of the symposium organizer(s).
• An introduction, or framing paper for the collection, authored by the symposium organizer(s) (2,000-4,000 words) anticipating 5 to 8 pieces, each of 3,000-8,000 words.
• An overview of the collection. 
• The titles, authors, and abstracts of approx. 300-500 words for each of the proposed pieces. 
• A timeline, including a date by which all articles should be completed. 
• A commitment by the symposium organizer(s) to manage the double-anonymous peer review of each contribution and to edit each contribution. 
• An understanding that the ELO editorial team will also review each piece and reserve the right to choose not to publish all or some of the contributions if they are not convinced that they meet the journal’s quality standards. 

The journal intends to follow selected symposia with a live online discussion. Please indicate if this is something you are particularly interested in.

Style

Authors are requested to put their content into journal style, closely following these general style conventions and the journal’s particular reference style.

Authors are requested to put their content into journal style, closely following these general style conventions and the journal’s particular reference style. A full journal style guide can be found here.

General style conventions

• Paper title should use sentence case.
• Headings should be styled as followed:

1. 1. First Level Heading
2. A. Second Level Heading
3. Third Level Heading
4. Fourth Level Heading. Text

• First-person or third-person narrative may be used, depending on author preference.
• Use the British variants of English-language spelling, for example ‘ise’, not ‘ize’. (except in quoted material, which should follow the original in every respect).
• Keep quotes as original, including size, spelling etc. Quote marks should be single, with double for quotes within quotes. Material of three or more lines' length will be distinguished by indentation. Indented quotes should not have quotation marks. Interpolations should be indicated by the use of square brackets. To indicate omitted words, three full points . . . separated equally from one another and from any preceding or succeeding words or quotations marks are sufficient.
• Italics should be used for Latin phrases and other non-English expressions unless that have been absorbed into everyday language e.g. bona fide, de facto.
• Use above and below for cross-references, not supra and infra.
• Do not use bold text in the text at all. For emphasis, use italic.
• In the main text, except for measurements and percentages, the numbers one to ten should be written as words, but for higher numbers the numerals (e.g. 11, 23, 364) should be used.
• All acronyms must be expanded on first use, even EU, USA, UK or UN, for those which are commonplace in one country are not in others. This applies to CJEU, ECHR, ICJ, EU, EZ (Eurozone).
• Full stops should not be used after initials, law reports or in abbreviations, eg pp, para, ss, Sch, ie, ff, etc.
• Article in the text but Art in footnotes.
• Judgement not judgment.
• Member States should be capitalised.
• Unless referring to a court by name, court should not be capitalised.
• Write per cent (not %) except in illustrative brackets.
• Internal cross-referencing should be to footnotes only (not pages).
• Within footnotes use above and below for preceding and subsequent references.

References

ELO uses footnotes for references rather than endnotes. All references should be formatted using the OSCOLA referencing style. A quick reference guide to how to cite the most common primary and secondary sources can be found here. Please also refer to the full journal style here. Where there are differences between OSCOLA and the ELO style guide, the ELO style guide should be followed.

Journal titles should always be reproduced in full rather than abbreviated.

Journal titles should not be italicised: (2022) 2 European Law Open 432, not (2022) 2 European Law Open 432.

Book titles should be reproduced in full and italicised: The Great Transformation (Beacon Press 1944).

Judgments and rulings issued by European Courts should be cited by reference to their ECLI (European Case Law Identifier). In the case of rulings from the ECJ, ECLI should be used in preference to the old reference to the Court reports.

For works with three or more authors, cite the first author’s name followed by “et al” without a full stop.

For DOIs both the URL format (http://dx.doi.org/10/1017...) and the abbreviated format (doi: 10.1017…) are acceptable.

For long hyperlinks (in excess of 25 characters), please shorten using tinyurl.