Aims and Scope

The Journal of Law and Courts (JLC) is the flagship journal of the Law & Courts Section of the American Political Science Association. In addition to political science scholarship, the journal has interdisciplinary aims and publishes a broad range of research for members of the law and courts intellectual community. The journal is dedicated to combating intellectual fragmentation and promoting communication and fertilization across traditional boundaries. JLC publishes articles tackling theoretical and empirical questions that strike a wide audience of scholars as important across legal and judicial issues relating to politics, process, policy, ethics, justice, and/or culture. JLC employs highly rigorous arguments and methods, and is written in a manner interesting and accessible to scholars with perspectives different from the author's.

The core mission of the interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Courts is to publish outstanding peer-reviewed articles, each of which speaks to a large and diverse audience of scholars interested in legal institutions, actors, processes, or policy. The Journal’s scope is wide, with topics including but not limited to the following: causes and effects of litigation, the development of judicial institutions, the impact of courts and law, judicial decision making, judicial independence, juries, the legal profession, and the selection of judges. Scholarship published in the Journal may focus on law and courts of any type, any time, and any place.

Submissions are evaluated on three chief 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. Theoretical and empirical studies are equally welcome. Empirical studies may be descriptive or causal and may employ any rigorous method, qualitative or quantitative.

Types of Article

The journal accepts the following types of article:

• Research Article*
• Research Note*

* If publishing Gold Open Access, all or part of the publication costs for these article types may be covered by one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access.

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. Brief papers—empirical research notes or sharply focused and tightly argued essays—will be looked on favorably.

Most JLC articles consist of original scholarship. The two types of exceptions that will be considered for publication are theoretically sophisticated “state of the discipline” pieces and papers elucidating little-known empirical methods—qualitative or quantitative—that could be valuable to many researchers in the law and courts community. 

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.

Preparing your article for submission

Preparation of Copy
For review, the main manuscript file can be submitted as Word, PDF, or LaTeX. Please ensure that your manuscript file is anonymous by deleting all self-identifying references. Should your manuscript be accepted, you will be asked to submit a final Word or LaTeX version that contains author information.

An Overleaf template for the Journal of Law and Courts is available, which can support authors in formatting their manuscripts prior to submission. Please see below for more information.

Preparation of Figures and Tables
Tables and Figures should be clearly legible and included in the manuscript and located at approximately the point where they are first referenced and should not be collected at the end of the manuscript. Tables and Figures should be numbered consecutively starting with Figure/Table 1. Tables may be prepared in the software used to create the manuscript (e.g., LaTeX, Microsoft Word, etc.), but please keep in mind that if accepted, Figures must be supplied as separate, high-resolution files.

Miscellaneous Formatting
Authors should typically write in the first person, present tense and avoid the passive voice.

Variables used in empirical analyses should be intuitively and clearly named. For example, one should not name a variable that measures a judge’s ideological location as “judicial ideology” but instead “judicial conservatism”. An indicator variable capturing whether a judge is female should not be named “Judge Gender” but instead “Female Judge”.

For empirical analysis using statistical methods, such as regression, complete details for the results must be included. For each coefficient reported, a standard error or other metric of uncertainty must be reported. The use of stars to indicate hypothesis test results is discouraged.

Citations and References
Submissions should follow the author-date system of documentation as outlined in The Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.). Simple citations of works are given in the text in chronological order by enclosing the author's last name and the year of publication in parentheses—for example, (Friedman 2003)—and are keyed to an alphabetical list of references at the end of the article. Specific page or section citations follow the date, preceded by a comma: (Friedman 2003, 96). Other examples are as follows: for dual authorship of a single work, (Newman and Principle 2002); for three authors of a single work, (Koehlstedt, Smith, and Brown 1999 [subsequent citations would list Koehltedt et al.]); for two works by the same author, (McMullin 1990, 1985); for two works by different authors, (Burian 1977; Westfall 1980); for reprints, (Hume [1740] 1978).

Footnotes are used for material commenting on or adding to the text and should be used for citations of archival materials, unpublished interviews, and such sources. Within footnotes, citations to published works should refer to the author's last name and date. Do not use op. cit. Footnotes should be typed double-spaced on the pages where they occur. Do not use endnotes.

Full documentation appears in the references. References must list all works cited in the text. List works alphabetically by author and, under author, by year of publication. References not cited in the text should not appear in the reference list. Legal cases should not be in the reference list.

Example references: 

Book, one author
Smith, John. 1990. Law and Courts Today. New York: Publisher.

Book, multiple authors
Smith, John, and Susan Brown. 1998. Law and Courts Today. New York: Publisher.

Book Chapter
Smith, John. 2003. “Law and Courts Today.” In A History of Law and Courts, ed. Susan Brown and James Jones, pp. 94–114. New York: Publisher.

Journal Article
Smith, John. 2008. “Law and Courts Today.” Journal 61 (1): 149–64.

Unpublished Paper
Smith, John. 2011. “Law and Courts Today.” Unpublished manuscript, University of Law.

Numbered Working Paper
Smith, John. 2010. “Law and Courts Today.” Working Paper no. 567, Think Tank, New York.

Abstract and Keywords Preparation

For further guidance on how to prepare your Abstracts and Keywords, please refer to these guidelines.

How to prepare your materials for anonymous peer review

To ensure a fair and anonymous peer review process, authors should not allude to themselves as the authors of their article in any part of the text. This includes citing their own previous work in the references section in such a way that identifies them as the authors of the current work.

Please refer to our general guidelines on how to anonymise your manuscript prior to submission.

Tables and Artwork

Please refer to the following guidance about preparing artwork and graphics for submission.

Seeking permissions for copyrighted material

If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. Guidance on how to do that can be found here.

Ethics and Transparency Policy Requirements

Please ensure that you have reviewed the journal’s Publishing ethics policies while preparing your materials. 

Please also ensure that you have read the journal’s Research transparency policy prior to submission. We encourage the use of a Data Availability Statement at the end of your article before the reference list. Guidance on how to write a Data Availability Statement can be found here. Please try to provide clear information on where the data associated with you research can be found and avoid statements such as “Data available on request”.

A list of suggested data repositories can be found here.

Data Availability and Replication Policy

The Journal of Law & Courts is committed to scientific transparency. The JLC is committed to the Data Access and Research Transparency principles summarized in the APSA Guide to Professional Ethics in Political Science and supports the Journal Editors’ Transparency Statement.
 
Therefore, as a condition for acceptance for publication in the Journal of Law & Courts, the corresponding author must make available all materials that are sufficient to enable interested researchers to reproduce all of the analytic results that are reported in the text and supporting materials. Typically, this requirement will be met by depositing replication materials in the JLC’s Dataverse repository. In some instances, it might be appropriate to make use of other repositories, such as the Qualitative Data Repository. In such instances, JLC still requires a Dataverse repository, though we recognize the Dataverse repository might rely on such alternative repositories for complete replication materials. Unless other arrangements with the editor have been made, these materials should be publicly available at the time final manuscript files are transmitted to the JLC office, and the location of the data repository should be indicated as a footnote on the title page of the final manuscript file. Note that authors also can make their verification files available elsewhere (e.g., their personal website, other data repositories, etc.) as long as all of the necessary files are included in the repository on the JLC Dataverse. 
 
If the replication materials necessary to satisfy this requirement cannot be made public, due to ethical considerations, the use of proprietary data, or other concerns, it is the corresponding author’s obligation to notify the journal at the time of submission. In the event proprietary data cannot be shared and an exemption from this requirement has been approved by the Editor, authors must still provide a copy of any code or programs used to create the final results. This documentation should include details of how the proprietary data can be obtained by others.

You can access the Journal of Law and Courts Overleaf template here. There is a direct link to submit your manuscript from within the Overleaf authoring environment. Once you have completed writing your article, please use the "Submit to Journal" button and select the link for Journal of Law and Courts to be directed to the journal's submission system.

Funding statement

A declaration of sources of funding must be provided if appropriate. Authors must state the full official name of the funding body and grant numbers specified. Authors must specify what role, if any, their financial sponsors played in the design, execution, analysis and interpretation of data, or writing of the study. If they played no role this should be stated.