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Academic freedom is essential in the pursuit of scholarly truth and dissemination of knowledge. Submissions to all SOAS-owned journals are considered on their academic merits, irrespective of their topic. SOAS is opposed to any attempt to restrict access to our publications on the basis of their content.

Style Guide for Journal of African Law

The editors ask authors to observe the following guide on style in preparing their submissions.

An abstract of 100–150 words and five or six keywords should also be provided. All submissions should conform to the styling of the Journal of African Law. As soon as a manuscript is submitted, authors will receive a message acknowledging receipt. Research articles should be no longer than 12,000 words, including footnotes. "Recent developments" and "case notes" should not exceed 5,000 words (all inclusive).

We do not accept manuscripts submitted by a third party. All manuscripts must be submitted by the author(s) directly through the ScholarOne site. Submission to and publication in the Journal of African Law is free of charge, except where the author elects to publish Gold Open Access, in which case an article processing fee will be levied after acceptance.

Submission of a manuscript to JAL implies that it has not been submitted elsewhere nor published in any form. We allow a maximum of two submissions per 12-month period.

GENERAL

Abstracts and keywords

Please provide an abstract at the beginning of the article. It should be no more than 150 words in length, have no footnotes, be indented and be in Arial font, 10 pt. Please also provide five or six keywords. Please pay particular attention to the choice of the keywords (compound nouns and phrases are accepted).

Open access policies

Please visit Open Access Publishing at Cambridge for information on our open access policies, compliance with major finding bodies, and guidelines on depositing your manuscript in an institutional repository.

Anonymisation

All submitted manuscripts should be rendered anonymous and devoid of identifying information for the purposes of double-anonymous peer review. PLEASE NOTE: any submitted manuscript containing the name of the author(s), their affiliation details or any identifiable reference(s) to their previous work(s) in the references will automatically be unsubmitted or rejected by the Editorial Office.

Copyright

The policy of the Journal of African Law is that authors (or in some cases their employers) retain copyright and grant SOAS, University of London a licence to publish their work. In the case of gold open access articles this is a non-exclusive licence. Authors must complete and return an author publishing agreement form as soon as their article has been accepted for publication; the journal is unable to publish the article without this. For full details, see the journal's publishing agreement page.

For open access articles, the form also sets out the Creative Commons licence under which the article is made available to end users: a fundamental principle of open access is that content should not simply be accessible but should also be freely re-usable. Articles will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) by default. This means that the article is freely available to read, copy and redistribute, and can also be adapted (users can “remix, transform, and build upon” the work) for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, as long as proper attribution is given. Authors can, in the publishing agreement form, choose a different kind of Creative Commons license (including those prohibiting non-commercial and derivative use) if they prefer.

Professional titles

Please use lower case for professional titles.

M Smith, barrister, professor of law, and director of the Institute of Legal Wrangling.

When naming a judge, please indicate their rank in the standard manner but without full stops.

Bloggs, CJ, and Smith, CJF, both agreed that the law was unreasonable.

Line spacing

Present all submissions in one and a half spacing for text and single spacing for footnotes.

Headings and fonts

All headings should be in Arial font, preceded by a blank line and (except for heading 4) flush left.

The main text and footnotes should be in a Roman font:

Text in 10pt
Indented quotations in 9pt
Footnotes in 8pt

Paragraphs

The first line of the first paragraph after a title, heading or indented quotation should be flush left. Subsequent paragraphs should be indented. Please do not leave a blank line between paragraphs. All text should be fully justified.

Spelling

Use British English, but with “ize”, not “ise”, endings.

Capitalization

Please use lower case for professional titles and generic terms such as government, director, minister, common law.

The titles of treaties, acts, agreements, declarations, resolutions, conventions, charters and protocols should be capitalized according to UK style and not italicized. The titles of White Papers and published reports should be in italics and capitalized.

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women 1979.

Foreign words and phrases

Truly foreign words (except foreign language proper nouns) should be italicized and followed by a translation in square brackets. Please do not italicize words and abbreviations generally accepted in the English language (eg, inter alia, de facto, passim, ibid, ie etc). All other foreign phrases should be followed by a brief translation either in square brackets or in an explanatory footnote.

Abbreviations

No full stops for abbreviations (such as PhD, Mr, ie, UN, ibid, NWLR, JP) or for initials within names (eg, J Bloggs).

Article, chapter, section, ordinance, proclamation, paragraph etc should be in full and in lower case in the text, but abbreviated in footnotes to art, chap, sec, ord, proc, para etc. Abbreviated forms used in the text must be in full in the first instance, followed by the abbreviated form/acronym in brackets. Per cent to be written in full in text (without full stops); use % in footnotes.

Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS Agreement).

Quotations

Use double quotation marks, followed by single quotation marks within a quotation. Please use “smart” quotes, rather than straight. Quotations more than five lines long in text should be indented and presented with quotation marks. Do not use < ellipses > at the beginning or end of a quote. To indicate where words or phrases have been omitted from within a quotation, use “ … ”.

Colour figures

If you request colour figures in the printed version, you will be contacted by CCC-Rightslink who are acting on our behalf to collect Author Charges. Please follow their instructions in order to avoid any delay in the publication of your article.

Punctuation

Punctuation should be “outside” quotation marks (unless the punctuation is clearly part of the quotation) and footnote cues should come after punctuation.

He stated that the “scheme would ‘bankrupt’ society”.3
The authorities are prosecuting this “dictator”, not that one.
Before he was arrested, he asked, “How will the government fund the construction of the new school?”

Numerals and dates

In the main body of text, numbers and ordinals from one to ten inclusive should be spelled out; after that use digits:

One, two, three,… ten, 11, 12
First, second, … tenth, 11th, 12th

Dates attached to legislation do not need to be preceded and followed by commas. Dates should be shown:

12 October 2006
1990s
21st century

Use the longer “n dash” to separate groups of digits for page numbers and dates, and abbreviate figures in the hundreds or thousands as appropriate:

One - ten, 20–24, 125–28, 1923–25, 2345–401

Always use digits for footnotes, percentages and references to sections or pages of a document:

2 per cent, 6 %
Page 7

Section 2.1 of article 3 of the constitution

Footnotes

Footnotes, rather than endnotes, should be used. Use “above” and “below” to refer to other footnotes in the article; please do not use supra, op cit, loc cit, infra, etc.

CITATIONS

Books

Author’s initial and surname Title in Italics (volume or edition, year of publication, publisher) at page number.

To Serve is Great: I Did it for Love

Chapters in edited volumes

Author’s initial and surname “Chapter/article title in lower case” in Editor’s initial and surname (ed) Book Title in Italics (year, publisher) page number of beginning of chapter at page number of quote.

Servicing the Great

Journal articles

Author’s initial and surname “Title in lower case” (year) volume/issue Title of Journal in Italics page number of beginning of article at page number of quote.

W Bloggs “To serve is great” (2003) 2/1 Legal Daily 23 at 34.

Give all journal titles and book titles in full and in italics.

Newspapers

Author’s initial and surname “Title in lower case” (date of publication) Title of Newspaper (location if deemed necessary) at page number.

W Bloggs “Servers reject calls to serve” (23 November 2003) The Local Daily (Manchester) at 23.

Unpublished papers (eg conference papers or research papers)

Author’s initial and surname “Title in lower case” (paper presented at name of conference, place, date) at page number of quote.

W Bloggs “Service: a new perspective” (paper presented at the Second European Conference on Trends in Overseas Aid, Stockholm, 16 September 2005) at 7.

Electronic sources

Cite using the phrase “available at: < http://… >”. Please provide date last accessed, if necessary, in brackets after. Please remove all hyperlinks.

W Bloggs “Servers reject calls to serve” (23 November 2003) The Local Daily, available at: < http://www.calltoarms.localdai... > (last accessed 6 March 2004).

Cases

Cite cases in accordance with the normal practice in the relevant jurisdiction. Case names should be italicized.

Bloggs v Smith [2001] 3 XYZ LR 76

Abbreviating and cross-referencing citations

Author’s surname Abbreviated Title in Appropriate format for Book / Article etc, above/below at note XX.

Bloggs To Serve is Great, above at note 2.

Do not use op cit, loc cit, supra, infra to refer to other footnotes. Use “ibid” to refer to an immediately preceding work with the same page number. Use “id” to refer to an immediately preceding author, or immediately preceding work with a different page number.

OTHER SECTIONS

Recent developments/case notes/statute notes

The formatting requirements are the same as for research articles, but the length should not exceed 5,000 words. Please include an abstract and keywords, as for full articles.

Book reviews

Give the book’s title in italics and place the author’s name under the title, as for articles. Use an asterisked footnote to show the author’s affiliations etc. All book information should be in Arial font.

Provide additional book information as follows, in 9 pt: Place of publication, publisher, year. Number of pages. Hardback price, ISBN; paperback price, ISBN.

To Serve is Great: I Did it for Love
William Bloggs *
London, Legal Publishers, 2003. xi + 234 pp. Hardback £12.50, ISBN 0-234-234-X; paperback
£2.00, ISBN 1-234-234-9

Give the reviewer’s name in upper case at the end of the review, flush right.

Note: Full journal text is made available on:

Last updated March 2021

Policy on prior publication

When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.

English language editing services

Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.

In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.

Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.

Competing Interests

All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.

Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.

If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.

Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.

Authorship and contributorship

All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.

Author affiliations

Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.

For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.

ORCID

We encourage authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:

Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.

See our ORCID FAQs for more information. If you don’t already have an iD, you can create one by registering directly at https://ORCID.org/register.

ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.

Supplementary materials

Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.

Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.

Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.

Author Hub

You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools

We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.

In particular, any use of an AI tool:

to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s)
to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript
must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission

Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.