More information about preparing your materials for submission, submitting your materials and the publication process itself can be found in the relevant tabs under 'Author Instructions' (in the navigation panel on the left-hand side of this page).
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.
Peer Review Process
For information on the journal’s peer review process, please click here.