Journal Of Law And Society

How to Actually Get Published in the Journal Of Law And Society

The Journal Of Law And Society publishes empirical research at the intersection of law and social science. If you are considering submitting there, most people treat it like any other social science journal and make a series of avoidable mistakes. The process is straightforward once you understand what they actually want. The acceptance rate sits somewhere around 12 to 15 percent, which sounds low but is not unusual for a well-regarded journal in this field. The real filter is not methodological rigor alone. It is whether the paper does something interesting with law as a social phenomenon rather than just applying a standard method to a legal question. I submitted my first paper there in 2014 and got desk rejected within three weeks. The editor's note was polite but unambiguous: the manuscript read like a sociology paper that happened to mention courts once or twice. That feedback was useful because it forced me to rethink what the journal is actually looking for. You need a genuine socio-legal question, not a legal question dressed up in social science language. Here is the practical workflow. You submit through the Wiley Online Library submission portal using the standard manuscript file, a separate cover letter, and a formatted abstract of no more than 250 words. The cover letter should explicitly state the paper's contribution to socio-legal scholarship and identify which section of the journal it fits into. The journal has three main sections: Articles, Research Notes, and Commentaries. Articles are full-length empirical papers. Research Notes are shorter pieces, usually under 3,000 words, that report on preliminary findings or methodological innovations. Commentaries are critical engagements with existing literature or policy debates.

The average time from submission to first decision is approximately 10 to 14 weeks. I have seen cases where it took six months, usually when the editors could not find two willing reviewers. That is worth knowing if you are working against a tenure clock or a graduation deadline. The journal does not offer expedited review options. One thing nobody tells you about submitting to this journal is that the editorial board is small and fairly specialized. There are about twenty editors covering different subfields: legal mobilization, law and inequality, global legal pluralism, regulatory governance, and so on. Knowing which editor handles your area matters more than people admit. A mismatched editor assignment can silently slow down the review process because that editor may pass the manuscript to someone else who is less engaged. Check the current editorial board page on the journal website before you submit and make sure your cover letter addresses the right editor by name. This alone can shorten your first decision timeline by several weeks. Another overlooked detail: the journal strongly prefers papers that include an explicit theoretical framework section. They do not want empirical results floating without a conceptual anchor. I learned this after my second submission came back with a reviewer comment that basically said the data was interesting but the authors had not explained why it mattered theoretically. The fix was not to add more data. It was to rewrite the introduction and literature review to foreground the theoretical contribution, which took about two days of focused work.

Formatting requirements are simple. The journal follows APA 7th edition style for references. Manuscripts should be double-spaced with 12-point font, and figures and tables should be embedded at the end of the document rather than scattered throughout. Word count for full articles ranges between 6,000 and 9,000 words, including references and footnotes. Research Notes have a hard limit of 3,000 words. Commentaries are capped at 2,500 words. Go over these limits and the editorial office will send the manuscript back before it even reaches reviewers, which wastes time and gives the impression of carelessness. The peer review process is double-anonymous. You blind yourself and they blind the reviewers. This means you should remove all self-citations that reveal your identity and avoid phrases like "as we have previously shown." I once had a reviewer comment that referenced a paper I had not cited in the manuscript at all. Turns out the reviewer recognized the methodology from my earlier work and inferred my identity. The workaround was to make the methods section sufficiently generic in its description so that it did not triangulate back to any single publication. It is a minor adjustment but it prevented the awkwardness of an accidentally uncovered identity. Common pitfalls. Most rejected papers fall into one of three categories. The first is purely doctrinal legal analysis disguised as empirical research. The journal is not interested in normative legal arguments or interpretive readings of cases unless they are grounded in observable social data. The second is empirical work that lacks a clear legal question. A survey about public attitudes toward policing is fine only if the argument is explicitly about how those attitudes shape legal outcomes or institutional behavior. The third is methodological overreach, where authors claim causal conclusions from correlational data. The reviewers in this field are generally trained in social science methods and will not tolerate this. Be precise about what your design can actually support.

If your paper gets revised rather than rejected outright, the editors will usually give you six to eight weeks to resubmit. Take most of that time. A rushed revision is almost always worse than a late one. Address every reviewer point, even the minor ones, and provide a detailed response letter. The response letter is actually read by the editor before they decide whether your revision is acceptable. I have seen revisions get rejected because the authors ignored two reviewer comments and just hoped the editor would not notice. That does not work. The editor noticed and agreed with the reviewer. There is also a open access option through Wiley's subscription model. You can publish open access by paying an article processing charge, which was approximately 3,200 USD as of the last published rate. This is optional. The journal is fully available through institutional subscriptions, and many researchers never use the open access route. If you do choose it, make sure your funding source covers the charge before you submit. Some universities have blocked funder compliance for journals that do not meet specific open access criteria, and getting stuck on that paperwork after acceptance is stressful. The journal is indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, and the Social Sciences Citation Index. If you need it for a promotion file or a grant application, it carries reasonable weight in most law and society programs. It is not a top-tier general interest journal like Law & Society Review, which has a slightly higher profile, but it is well respected in the field and publishes work that influences policy debates in ways that purely theoretical journals do not.

One final practical note. The editorial office responds to emails within two business days during normal working hours. If you submit and do not receive an acknowledgment within forty-eight hours, check your spam folder and then send a brief inquiry. I have heard of papers that sat in a technical limbo for three weeks because the submission system failed to register them and nobody noticed until the authors followed up. It is rare but it happens, and the cost of a quick email is zero while the cost of discovering a lost submission after five months is very high.