Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Legal research involving individuals through interviews, surveys, focus groups, observations, empirical legal studies, community-based research, case documentation, practitioner interviews, judicial or institutional personnel, or other human-participant methods must comply with applicable institutional, national, professional, and research-ethics requirements.

• The approving ethics committee or institutional review board must be identified where approval is required.
• The ethics approval/reference number should be reported where applicable.
• Authors must explain how informed consent was obtained where required.
• An approved waiver of consent must be disclosed and justified.
• Participant privacy, dignity, confidentiality, legal interests, and personal safety must be protected.
• Consent for publication is required where participants may reasonably be identified.
• Additional safeguards must be reported when vulnerable populations, victims, children, detainees, refugees, or other legally sensitive groups are involved.
• Research procedures must not expose participants to unnecessary legal, social, political, professional, or reputational risk.

Legal research may involve confidential judicial records, case files, legal correspondence, client information, institutional documents, law-enforcement records, court materials, internal regulations, unpublished decisions, sensitive personal information, or proprietary legal databases.

• Authors must have lawful and authorized access to all data and documents used.
• Personal, judicial, institutional, and legally sensitive information must be anonymized or de-identified where appropriate.
• Attorney-client privilege, judicial confidentiality, privacy rights, and other legally protected information must be respected.
• Contractual, statutory, regulatory, institutional, and third-party restrictions on data use must be followed.
• Authors must not disclose sealed, privileged, protected, classified, or otherwise restricted information without appropriate authorization.
• Case details, quotations, or contextual information must be presented carefully to avoid unintended identification where confidentiality applies.
• Restrictions affecting data or document sharing must be clearly stated in the Data Availability Statement.

Authors must report legal reasoning, research methods, source selection, and analytical procedures with sufficient clarity to permit scholarly evaluation and, where possible, replication or verification.

• The legal, doctrinal, empirical, comparative, socio-legal, normative, historical, qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods approach must be clearly identified.
• Jurisdictions, legal materials, cases, statutes, treaties, regulations, participants, institutions, or data sources must be explained.
• Case selection, document selection, sampling, recruitment, inclusion, and exclusion procedures must be transparent.
• Legal databases, search strategies, coding frameworks, interview guides, or research instruments should be described where relevant.
• Methods of statutory interpretation, case analysis, comparative legal analysis, content analysis, thematic analysis, or empirical analysis must be explained appropriately.
• Assumptions, limitations, jurisdictional boundaries, conflicting authorities, exclusions, and analytical choices should be disclosed where relevant.
• Systematic reviews should follow an appropriate reporting framework where applicable.
• Empirical and qualitative legal studies should follow suitable transparent reporting standards where applicable.

Editors are responsible for maintaining a fair, confidential, independent, and evidence-based editorial process.

• Base decisions on scholarly quality, originality, legal reasoning, methodology, relevance, and ethical compliance.
• Apply journal policies consistently and without inappropriate discrimination.
• Maintain confidentiality of manuscripts, reviewer reports, author responses, sensitive legal information, and editorial records.
• Protect reviewer identities under the journal's double-blind model.
• Declare conflicts of interest and recuse themselves when impartiality may be compromised.
• Select reviewers with appropriate legal, jurisdictional, doctrinal, empirical, and methodological expertise.
• Prevent coercive citation, authorship manipulation, peer-review manipulation, and inappropriate editorial influence.
• Address complaints, appeals, and integrity concerns fairly.
• Take proportionate corrective action when the scholarly record is unreliable.
• Ensure that APC payment or waiver status does not influence editorial decisions.

• Provide objective, constructive, respectful, independent, and timely assessments.
• Accept assignments only when appropriate expertise and sufficient time are available.
• Treat manuscripts, legal documents, case materials, supplementary files, and correspondence as confidential.
• Disclose financial, professional, institutional, collaborative, academic, legal, political, or personal conflicts.
• Decline reviews where impartiality may reasonably be compromised.
• Report suspected plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, duplicate publication, misuse of legal sources, or other misconduct confidentially to the editor.
• Avoid personal criticism, hostile language, unsupported allegations, and discriminatory comments.
• Recommend citations only when genuinely relevant to the manuscript.
• Never use unpublished information for personal or professional advantage.
• Do not upload confidential manuscripts, legal documents, privileged information, or unpublished research data to public generative AI systems.

• Submit original work that has not been formally published and is not under review elsewhere.
• Report legal sources, methods, analyses, arguments, findings, limitations, and conclusions honestly and accurately.
• Retain supporting documents, records, and research materials where appropriate.
• Provide accurate citations and verifiable legal and scholarly references.
• Obtain required ethics approvals, informed consent, permissions, and document-use authorization.
• Protect participant, client, judicial, institutional, and legally confidential information.
• Represent statutes, regulations, judicial decisions, precedents, and other authorities accurately and in context.
• Disclose funding sources and the role of funders.
• Disclose actual or potential conflicts of interest.
• Ensure all listed authors qualify for authorship.
• Obtain approval from all authors for the submitted version and author order.
• Disclose relevant use of generative AI.
• Notify the journal promptly if a significant factual, legal, citation, or ethical problem is discovered.

Authorship must reflect substantial scholarly contribution and accountability. Authors should satisfy recognized scholarly authorship principles, including substantial contribution to the research, participation in manuscript preparation or critical revision, approval of the final version, and accountability for the integrity of the work.

1. Substantial contribution to the conception/design or acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of legal or empirical material;
2. Drafting or critical intellectual review of the manuscript;
3. Final approval of the version to be published; and
4. Agreement to be accountable for the accuracy and integrity of the work.

• Author contributions should be described using appropriate CRediT roles.
• Non-author contributors should be acknowledged with permission.
• Authorship changes require written justification and agreement from all affected authors.
• Artificial intelligence tools cannot qualify as authors.

Authors, reviewers, editors, and Editorial Board members must disclose relationships that may influence, or reasonably appear to influence, their judgment.

Authors must identify funding sources, grant numbers where applicable, and the role of the funder in study design, source selection, data collection, legal analysis, interpretation, manuscript preparation, and publication decisions.

• A Data Availability Statement must be included in empirical research manuscripts.
• Legal databases, repositories, persistent identifiers, access conditions, or restrictions should be reported where applicable.
• De-identified empirical data, analytical code, coding frameworks, legal-source lists, questionnaires, or supplementary material should be shared where ethically and legally possible.
• Restrictions arising from privacy, confidentiality, privilege, sealed proceedings, statutory limitations, contracts, or proprietary legal databases must be explained.
• Fabrication, concealed deletion, inappropriate alteration, selective exclusion, or misleading presentation of legal authorities or empirical data is prohibited.
• The Editorial Team may request underlying data, source lists, coding records, legal documents, or supporting materials when necessary to evaluate research integrity.

All manuscripts may be screened using Turnitin. The journal normally requires an overall similarity index below 20%, subject to editorial assessment of the nature and location of the matching material.

Unattributed copying, inappropriate paraphrasing, translation plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and undisclosed reuse of previously published material are prohibited.

• AI must not replace human scholarly judgment, legal reasoning, source verification, or authorship responsibility.
• Meaningful AI-assisted activity must be disclosed according to journal policy.
• Authors remain fully responsible for accuracy, originality, citations, legal authorities, analysis, interpretation, and conclusions.
• AI tools cannot be listed as authors or co-authors.
• AI-generated cases, statutes, citations, quotations, legal analyses, references, or interpretations must be independently verified against authoritative sources.
• Reviewers and editors must not upload confidential manuscripts, legal documents, privileged information, or unpublished data into public generative AI systems.
• AI-assisted material must be checked for fabricated cases, nonexistent legislation, false citations, factual errors, jurisdictional inaccuracies, bias, and misleading legal interpretation.

Eligible manuscripts undergo double-blind peer review by at least two independent reviewers.

• Reviewer selection is based on legal field, jurisdictional, doctrinal, empirical, comparative, and methodological expertise.
• Authors and reviewers remain anonymous to one another during review.
• Reviewer recommendations inform, but do not determine, the final editorial decision.
• Conflicting reviewer recommendations may result in additional review.
• Editors who are authors or have conflicts must not participate in handling the manuscript.
• Acceptance or rejection is based on scholarly merit, legal relevance, analytical quality, and ethical compliance rather than financial or commercial considerations.

The journal does not tolerate conduct that undermines the reliability, transparency, fairness, or integrity of scholarly publishing.

Credible concerns are evaluated fairly, confidentially, consistently, and without presuming misconduct before relevant evidence has been assessed.

1. Initial assessment: determine whether the concern is specific, credible, relevant, and within the journal's responsibility.
2. Clarification: request explanations, original documents, legal sources, data, records, case materials, or supporting evidence where necessary.
3. Independent advice: seek legal, jurisdictional, methodological, statistical, ethical, or other professional expertise where appropriate.
4. Institutional coordination: contact institutions, research-integrity offices, funders, ethics committees, courts, professional bodies, or other responsible organizations where necessary and legally appropriate.
5. Editorial action: take proportionate action according to the evidence and seriousness of the concern.

Formal notices will identify the affected article, explain the reason for the action, remain freely accessible, and be linked permanently to the scholarly record where applicable.

A manuscript is not considered formally withdrawn until the Editorial Office has reviewed the withdrawal request and provided written confirmation. Ethical concerns such as duplicate submission, authorship disputes, suspected plagiarism, fabricated legal authorities, data manipulation, or research misconduct may continue to be investigated even if an author requests withdrawal.

Authors and other stakeholders may raise concerns about editorial procedures, reviewer conduct, conflicts of interest, confidentiality, citation coercion, authorship handling, publication charges, legal-source accuracy, ethical matters, or research-integrity procedures.

An editorial appeal should identify a material factual or legal error, procedural irregularity, substantial misunderstanding, inappropriate application of journal policy, or relevant evidence that was overlooked.

Where independent assessment is necessary, complaints or appeals will be considered by an editor or qualified person who was not materially involved in the original matter.

• Authors must submit original work and respect third-party intellectual-property rights.
• Permission must be obtained for copyrighted third-party material, proprietary databases, reproduced legal documents, tables, figures, or other protected content where required.
• Authors retain the full copyright of their work.
• The journal receives a non-exclusive right of first publication.

Manuscripts, reviewer reports, author responses, ethical documents, participant information, confidential legal materials, privileged information, allegations, investigations, and editorial correspondence are treated as confidential.

The journal maintains appropriate editorial records to document manuscript decisions, reviewer activity, revisions, ethical assessments, complaints, appeals, corrections, and integrity investigations in accordance with applicable legal and institutional requirements.