Journal of the European Law Faculties Association · ejle.eu

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Information For Authors

About the Journal

The European Journal of Legal Education (EJLE) is an international, peer-reviewed open access journal publishing high-quality, original research. It is the journal of the European Law Faculties Association.

Please note that this journal only publishes manuscripts in English.

Aims and Scope

We are interested in articles about any aspect of legal education which will be of interest to legal academics teaching in law faculties anywhere in Europe. This will include articles concerned with:

  • learning theory and pedagogy;
  • the use of technology in legal education;
  • classroom and clinical approaches;
  • academic, vocational and professional legal education;
  • the issues surrounding the regulation and political influences on law faculties;
  • research into legal education.

However, we do not assume we have identified an exhaustive list of topics. Articles presenting research into legal education elsewhere in the world will be of interest, especially if presented so that their relevance to a European audience is made clear.

Peer Review

The European Journal of Legal Education is committed to peer-review integrity and upholding the highest standards of review. Once your paper has been assessed for suitability by the editor, it will then be double blind peer reviewed by independent, anonymous expert referees.

Preparing Your Paper

Structure

Your paper should be compiled in the following order: title page; abstract; keywords; main text; acknowledgements; declaration of interest statement; funding statement (where applicable); appendices (as appropriate); and any tables and figures.

Word Limits

Papers should typically be up to 10,000 words, inclusive of the abstract, tables, references, figure captions, footnotes. Please include a word count for your paper.

Style Guidelines

Please refer to these quick style guidelines when preparing your paper, rather than any published articles or a sample copy.

Please use single quotation marks, except where ‘a quotation is “within” a quotation’. Please note that long quotations should be indented without quotation marks. Use typographic (curly) quotation marks and apostrophes throughout, rather than straight ones.

Headings: Contributors should strive to keep to two levels of heading within an article wherever possible. A third is acceptable in extremis. Headings should be in sentence case and unnumbered: please do not number your headings or sections. Ideally, use your word processor’s built-in heading styles to mark the levels; failing that, give a clear and consistent visual indication — for example, bold for main headings and italic for subheadings — so that it is unambiguous which heading belongs to which level. The editor applies the journal’s heading styles on typesetting.

Italics: Use italics for non-English words and phrases, including Latin terms, and for book, journal and film titles.

Abbreviations and initials: Full stops should be omitted in abbreviations, initials, and within case names: eg, ie, Co, Ltd, R v Massey. ie and eg should not be used in the text but are acceptable in notes.

Our preferred referencing style is for references to be placed in footnotes using the facility provided by MS Word and indicated by superscript Arabic numerals placed in the text. References should follow the Oxford University Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA). However, we operate a format-free policy: referencing in any footnote-based style is acceptable, provided it is consistent and coherent within the article itself. One citation per footnote is preferred, and all citation should appear in the footnotes rather than in a separate reference list.

Miscellaneous

  • Publishing for the web is slightly different from publishing on paper and gaps between words or sentences look quite noticeable online. Therefore only one space (rather than the conventional two spaces as with a Word document) is required between the end of one sentence and the start of another.
  • Spelling should comply with British, not American forms, e.g. -ise, not ize, as in nationalise. Please also set the proofing language of the whole document — including the footnotes — to English (UK), so that spelling and grammar checks behave consistently.
  • Numbers one to twelve and per cent to be spelt out.
  • Use italics rather than underlining (except for URLs), and place any tables and figures within the text at the appropriate point rather than at the end. Please submit clean, consistently formatted manuscripts: the editor applies the journal’s house styles at typesetting, but well-ordered files speed production and reduce errors.
  • Where available, URLs for the references should be provided, together with the date of most recent access.

Formatting

Papers should be submitted in Word format. Figures should be saved separately from the text.

Checklist: What to Include

  • Author details: All authors of a manuscript should include their full name and affiliation on the cover page of the manuscript. Where available, please also include ORCiDs and social media handles (Facebook, X or LinkedIn). One author will need to be identified as the corresponding author, with their email address normally displayed in the article PDF and the online article. Authors’ affiliations are the affiliations where the research was conducted. If any of the named co-authors moves affiliation during the peer-review process, the new affiliation can be given as a footnote. Please note that no changes to affiliation can be made after your paper is accepted.
  • Should contain an unstructured abstract of approximately 200 words, without citations.
  • Between three and five keywords, separated by commas.
  • Funding details: Please supply all details required by your funding and grant-awarding bodies as follows:

For single agency grants

This work was supported by the [Funding Agency] under Grant [number xxxx].

For multiple agency grants

This work was supported by the [Funding Agency #1] under Grant [number xxxx]; [Funding Agency #2] under Grant [number xxxx]; and [Funding Agency #3] under Grant [number xxxx].

  • Disclosure statement: This is to acknowledge any financial interest or benefit that has arisen from the direct applications of your research.
  • Figures, where used, should be supplied as high-quality, editable files in a standard format (for example PNG, JPEG, SVG, EPS or Word). Save figures separately from the text.
  • Tables should present new information rather than duplicating what is in the text. Readers should be able to interpret the table without reference to the text. Please supply editable files.

Using Third-Party Material in your Paper

You must obtain the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in your article. The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission. If you wish to include any material in your paper for which you do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, you will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission.

Use of generative AI

Authors must disclose any substantive use of generative AI tools (for example, large language models) in the conception, research, analysis or writing of a submission, briefly describing how and where such tools were used – normally in the acknowledgements or in the account of method. Generative AI tools cannot be listed as authors and cannot satisfy the requirements of authorship: the named authors remain fully responsible for the originality, accuracy and integrity of the whole work, including any AI-assisted content and any sources or citations it produces. Routine assistance such as spelling and grammar checking does not need to be disclosed.

Submitting Your Paper

All papers should be submitted using the EJLE website: https://www.ejle.eu

The author’s original manuscript should be fully anonymised.

This journal uses Open Journal Systems (OJS) software to manage the peer-review process. If you haven’t submitted a paper to this journal before, you will need to create an account in OJS. Please read the guidelines above and then submit your paper in EJLE Author Centre, where you will find user guides and a helpdesk.

Please note that the EJLE uses originality-checking software to screen papers for unoriginal material. By submitting your paper to the EJLE you are agreeing to originality checks during the peer-review and production processes.

On acceptance, we recommend that you keep a copy of your Accepted Manuscript.

If you have any questions about a submission, please contact the editors at editors@ejle.eu.

Publication Charges

There are no submission fees, publication fees or page charges for this journal.

Open access and copyright

EJLE is a fully open access journal. For the licence under which articles are published and the rights that authors retain, please see the journal’s separate Open Access and Copyright Policy.

How to submit your manuscript for anonymous peer review

To ensure that article referees or peer reviewers do not know your identity (as author[s] of the manuscript being reviewed), you will need to make sure that you remove any information in your manuscript (including footnotes and acknowledgements) that could identify you, and disguise all references to personally identifiable information such as the research institution where your work was carried out.

  • If you are submitting your manuscript via an online submission system, or as an email attachment, you should send two separate files, one with the author(s) details, and one without.
  • In text, you can replace any information that would identify the author(s) by substituting words such as: [name deleted to maintain the integrity of the review process].
  • Do not mention a grant awarded to a named person. (This information can be added later.)
  • Do not add any running headers or footers that would identify authors.
  • Refer to your own references in the third person. For example, write ‘Smith and Black (2007) have demonstrated’, not ‘We have previously demonstrated (Smith & Black, 2007)’.
  • Remove personal and hidden information from the file before submitting. In current versions of Word, use File ▸ Info ▸ Check for Issues ▸ Inspect Document, then remove document properties and personal information. Note that hidden text, tracked changes and comments can persist in a file even when not visible, so always inspect the document before uploading.
  • When you submit the final draft of the manuscript for publication, you will need to put back any references to yourself, your institution, grants awarded, etc.).
  • Avoid or minimise self-citation. If it is necessary to cite your own work, delete the names of authors and other identifying information and place substitute words in brackets, such as: [name deleted to maintain the integrity of the review process]. In the reference list, you should delete the citation and add it before submitting your final draft.