The NUJS Journal of Law & Society, formerly the Indian Juridical Review, promises a revamped look characterised by a focus on “law and society”. It also promises “significant changes in the editorial process, thematic compass and publishing structure so as to make the scholarship more contemporary, focused and relevant”.

Much like the NUJS law review which has significantly boosted the trend of open access legal scholarship in India (all the articles can be accessed freely on the website), one hopes that the NUJS Journal of Law and Society will follow the same path. Incidentally, it took the students all of Rs 5000 (or perhaps even less) to have the entire NUJS law review online!

For those of you interested in issues pertaining to law and society, this revamped law review is likely to prove a good resource in the coming years. Please join me in wishing them the very best of luck. Listed below is the call for papers:

NUJS Journal of Law and Society: Call for Papers

NUJS Journal of Law & Society is currently soliciting submissions for its inaugural issue due in September, 2009. The deadline for submissions for the 2009 issue is May 10, 2009. Please send in your submissions under the categories mentioned below. The submissions would go through a two-staged peer review process and edited by the student editorial board. For general queries relating to your submissions, see the ‘Note to Authors’ or kindly write to us at [email protected].

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

NUJS Journal of Law & Society is a new, peer-reviewed and student-edited journal of interdisciplinary studies on law and society. It is based at and published from The National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata.

The journal seeks to present a dedicated forum of debate for work bearing upon the cultural, economic, political and social lives of law in India. Published annually in September, the journal solicits articles, notes and comments covering judicial decisions, legislative developments, empirical research on Indian legal system, public policy studies and theoretical analysis from related fields of inquiry. We welcome submissions from academics, practitioners, policymakers and students from within the legal community and have a strong preference for articles that are not descriptive but prescriptive and argumentatively focused. In addition to the above, we accept new ideas and perspectives under the ‘Essays’ category of the journal. Essays are reviewed for their potential contribution to existing scholarship but most significantly, to seek the possibility of a new approach to an old theme.

Submission Categories

The submissions may be made under the following categories –

• Notes: 5000 – 7000 words
• Articles: 10000 – 12000 words
• Essays: 2000 – 3000 words
• Legislative Briefs and Case Comments: 3000 – 4000 words.

NOTE TO AUTHORS

The prescribed word limits are inclusive of footnotes and submissions are expected to strictly confirm to length policy and the guidelines listed below. Kindly go through them carefully before mailing your submissions. ‘Notes’ are short articles written by students and are expected to be well-sourced. They are generally characterized with an extensive use of footnotes. As a policy, NUJS Journal of Law & Society aims to publish no more than two student notes. Essays, case comments and legislative briefs can be submitted by anyone. We promptly acknowledge the receipt of submissions and a decision on publication takes around 8 weeks. The issue is out in print within 6 weeks of a decision to publish. Requests for expedited reviews can be forwarded to the Editorial Board when the submission is being considered for publication by other journals. Please mention the name of the journal for which your article is in consideration, one contact person in the Editorial Board of that journal and a date by which you expect our response.

Submission Guidelines

1. Contact Address: Electronic form of submissions should be mailed to [email protected].

2. Deadline: The Deadline for submissions is May 10, 2009.

3. Covering Letter: All submissions must be accompanied with a covering letter, containing the name of the author, institutional affiliation, title and category of the submission and a contact address of the author, including the e-mail address. Submissions should be sent as MS word (.doc format) attachments with the title of the article as the file name.

4. Identification Details: The body of the submission must contain no identification of any kind, including the name and institutional affiliation of the author, which must be provided in the covering letter. This is to ensure an impartial review and a fair assessment of your contribution.

Style Guidelines

1. Form of Submission: Submissions must be in electronic form. All submissions must be word-processed, double-spaced in Times New Roman. Main text should be in font size 12 and footnotes in font size 10. All submissions must contain an abstract of not more than 250 words.

2. Title: The Journal does not recommend any specific guidelines regarding the titles and sub-titles. However, the main titles must be centred, typed in small capitals and emphasised in bold. The titles must be uniform, concise and descriptive.

3. Quotations: Quotations should be clearly indicated and it is vital that they are accurate. Double quotation marks should be inserted at the beginning and end of every quotation and where the quotation will run to more than forty words it should be typed as a separate paragraph and left-indented.

4. Foreign words: Foreign words not currently absorbed into the English language should be italicised, e.g., “inter alia”, “bona fide” etc.

5. References and Citations: The Rules of Citation are generally derived from The Bluebook, A Uniform System of Citation (18th Ed.)

Note 1: Please feel free to write to us for any additional queries that you might have about the theme or the structure of your submissions. Write to us at [email protected]

Note 2: NUJS Journal of Law & Society was formerly the Indian Juridical Review and beginning with our year in office, we have decided to initiate significant changes in the editorial process, thematic compass and publishing structure of the journal to make the scholarship more contemporary, focused and relevant.