SUBMISSIONS

    INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS

    LEAD Journal will consider for publication manuscript submissions of original work. LEAD Journal specifically seeks to foster scholarship in following areas:

    • Comparative approaches to the study of international environmental law, with a special emphasis on North-South issues.
    • Regional environmental law regimes among developing countries.
    • Implementation of international environmental law at regional and national levels.
    • Influence of international environmental law on national and regional environmental law regimes, and cross-fertilisation.
    • Cross-sectoral analysis in the study of environmental law, especially study of the relationship between trade and the environment, property rights and the environment, intellectual property and the environment, human rights and the environment.
    • International & regional environment governance.

    HOW TO SUBMIT

    All contributions must be submitted to the Managing Editor at submissions@lead-journal.org. We would prefer to receive contributions in Word.

    Authors are asked to provide alongside their submission a publishing agreement indicating that their submission is an original submission which is not under consideration for publication elsewhere and has not been published in any form or media, including on the internet.

    Authors must format their contributions in accordance with the Oxford University Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA). The current edition can be found on this link and the appendix for international law sources on this link.

    Download Publishing Agreement

    ARTICLES

    Articles should be between 5’000 and 10’000 words in length.  LEAD Journal solicits innovative analysis, backed by thorough research, of current development and emerging trends in concepts, policies and practice relating to environmental law at all levels – local, national, regional or international. Comparative and multidisciplinary approaches are encouraged. Contributions regarding any jurisdiction are welcome, especially relating to the developing country regimes. As the Journal has an international readership, authors should ensure that the context of the laws are clearly explained (in footnotes where appropriate) to readers who may be unfamiliar with specific national regimes or social and economic situations. Contributions which are merely descriptive of new laws and policies are considered undesirable unless these have wider relevance.

    DEVELOP-MENTS IN THE FIELD

    LEAD Journal welcomes submissions under the “Developments in the Field” (DiF) section. DiF pieces differ from scholarly articles that provide in-depth academic research on global environmental law. They should offer a concise description and analysis of emerging trends and notable activities or events in global – i.e., international, regional, national, local – environmental law. More specifically, DiF submissions should focus on timely and current milestones, innovations, or other legal, policy, and practical developments in the field of global environmental law and related areas. For example, a DiF submission could recently enacted environmental legislation, regional or international development in environmental law, an innovative mechanism to enforce environmental norms, or a novel project in the field of nature conservation. LEAD Journal welcomes contributions from a wide range of contributors, including scholars, legal practitioners, civil society actors, environmental advocates, and international institution officials, that capture developments from various geographies and settings.

    DiF pieces should be between 2,000 and 3,000 words long (including footnotes). For style and citation requirements, authors should refer to the general submission instructions.

    DiF submissions will be subjected to a simpler peer review process than for longer scholarly articles to ensure timely publication.

    CASE NOTES

    A contibution under the Case Notes section should be an analysis of significant case law on environmental issues. It should be between 2500-4000 words in length. Contributions from any jurisdiction are welcomed provided they are relevant to the environmental jurisprudence of developing countries. Prior discussion on potential material for this section is encouraged. A single analysis may cover a number of related cases.

    EDITING PROCESS

    The Submissions Committee reviews or sends for review contributions once they are received and makes the final decision regarding publication.

    Specialists in the topic in question may be requested to review selected contributions if these do not fall within the areas of competence of the members of the editorial board.

    If accepted, the Managing Editor informs the author(s). After copy-editing is completed, the author is sent a final version for approval.

    Once contributions have been peer-reviewed, amendments are discouraged. However, where law and policy is developing rapidly, it is generally possible to include an appropriate postscript at a late stage of production.

    Note: Views expressed in any authored contribution published in this Journal are those of the respective authors. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of the statements they make and for checking the accuracy of all references.

    PUBLICATIONS

    LEAD Journal neither charges authors for publishing articles nor remunerates authors.

    LEAD Journal publishes articles on a rolling basis as “advance articles” and publishes in principle two issues a year.

    RIGHTS

    Articles on LEAD Journal website are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Unported License. The full text of the license can be found by following this link.

    LEAD Journal is an open access journal. By “open access”, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

    Please note that LEAD Journal strictly prohibits:

    • screen shots of LEAD Journal website (www.lead-journal.org)
    • framing (ie including our webpage within another frame set);
    • framing pdf documents found on any part of the LEAD Journal (www.lead-journal.org) and IELRC (www.ielrc.org) websites;
    • caching one or the totality of our web-page(s):

    Instead of the above links should be used.

    PUBLICATION ETHICS

    Our Publications Ethics and Malpractice Statement can be found on this link.