ARTICLES

Scientific publishing for Legal Design

Call for Submissions!

Submit your Legal Design story now.

Call for submissions start: Friday, 15 December 2023
Deadline for submissions: 28 May 2024
Decisions and feedback: 10 June 2024
Final revisions & Publication: July 2024

1st Issue of the Legal Design Journal 2024

Call for Papers

For the first issue of the Legal Design Journal we are proposing a broad range of topics at the intersection of law, justice and design, research and practice. This are by no means exhaustive and can be seen also as way of sparking novel contributions to our nascent field. We invite potential contributors to write about, around, through, and beyond the following topics.

Legal design and access to justice
Legal design and public law (e.g., criminal law, tax law)
Legal design and private law (e.g., contract law, consumer protection, privacy)
Legal design and economic approaches to the law
Legal design and behavioural law
Legal design and environmental law
Legal design and philosophy of law
Legal design and sociology of law
Legal design and education
Law and technology (e.g., compliance of technology design, design of legal technologies)
Legal design, bioethics and health
Legal design and sustainability
Legal design and critical design
Legal design and future studies – foresight

Types of contributions:

a.     Empirical papers (describing an empirical study)
b.     Position papers (conceptual papers)
c.     Literature reviews (systematizing knowledge)
d.     Methodological papers (focusing on methods of research and enquiry)

Audience
When preparing your submission, keep in mind that the articles section of the journal aims at publishing academic articles that should be accessible to a broader audience, across disciplinary boundaries, as well as geographies and levels of expertise. This should be reflected in the readability of the submission.

About the journal
This is the first academic journal dedicated to the research and practice of legal design. The original organizers of this journal come from four continents, eleven countries, sixteen academic institutions, fifteen organizations, and countless perspectives. We have chosen a deliberately expansive and exploratory editorial frame for the first two years (and four editions) of the Legal Design Journal. We have done so in order to engage in a period of editorial co-design with those who have something to say about this subject.

Our goal is to provide a platform for great quality legal design work, and to make this as accessible as possible. Our open-access policy is central to our vision of our legal design community of practice. We hope the Journal can provide a bridge between academic and applied practical work in the field of legal design and help to further connect the legal and design worlds.

What you need to know for the submission

Ideally, your paper should include:

Abstract (ca. 300 words) and 5 key words
The state of the art
The research question(s) and motivation
Methodology and study design
Analysis and results
Discussion
Limitations
Future work
Conclusion
References
Supplementary material
Conflict of interest statement and any funding acknowledgment

Originality: the contribution should not be published or submitted (currently under review) to another journal or elsewhere.

Anonymity: All submitted papers will be evaluated based on their quality and relevance through a double-blind review process, where the reviewers ignore the identity of the authors and vice versa. Papers that are not anonymous will be desk-rejected. When preparing you submission:

Remove the names and affiliations of authors from the title page.
Remove acknowledgment of identifying names and funding sources.
Remove references to your institution, for example in survey materials or in git repositories.
When you refer to your own work, do not omit references to provide anonymity: rather, reference your past work in the third person, just as you would with any other piece of related work by another author.

File format: Provide an editable file in .docx, .doc, .odt or .rtf format

Number of words: Text submissions can be between 5,000 and 10,000 words for full articles including footnotes and excluding references. It is encouraged to include a wide range of non-textual media.

Citation style: You can either use OSCOLA or APA. For footnote style, use OSCOLA style only. For in-text style, use APA style only.

Peer Review Process:

We adopt a two-step review process:
- Desk review to ascertain the article is within the journal’s scope, has not previously been published, makes a novel contribution to the field, has been anonymized and generally meets the requirements of the call for papers. Submissions may be rejected after first screening (desk refusal).
- Double-blind peer review following criteria of originality, relevance, contribution to the field, clarity

Publication:

Open Access
The Journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. The Creative Commons License we use to achieve this is CC-BY 4.0. The authors must ensure that all content presented in their contributions can be published under this license (especially images).
International License
The Journal does not charge authors any submission or article processing charges.
Copyright
Authors retain all rights to their work. Any version of a paper published in the Journal may be deposited in an institutional or other repository of the author’s choice without embargo.
Privacy statement
The names and email addresses entered in this journal will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.