Author Guidelines

The board of editors warmly welcomes contributions in the wide scientific area of Law and the Humanities. When considering submitting a contribution, please check the following guidelines.

1. General practical recommendations

1.1.    Manuscripts must be submitted online through https://www.humanitiesandrights.com/journal/index.php/har/about/submissions. Authors need to register with the journal prior to submitting or, if already registered, can simply log in and begin the five-step process.

1.2.    The submitted text should not have been published previously, nor is it sent to another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in ‘Comments to the Editor’).

1.3.    The text should be written using OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, or RTF document file format.

1.4.    Where available, URLs for the references have been provided (as hidden link).

1.5.    The text is single-spaced, uses a 12-point font, employs italics rather than underlining (except for URL addresses), and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate point, rather than at the end.

1.6.    Illustrations, figures and tables are also delivered separately. A common image format for figures (e.g. pdf, eps, gif, tif, jpg) should be used. The resolution of images should be at least 300 dpi.

1.7.    The author has full copyright of the text submitted. If several authors have collaborated, this is explicitly mentioned. Authors fully respect the rules of conduct for research integrity, and have full and exclusive responsibility for any breach of these. Plagiarism, including duplicate publication of the authors' own work without proper citation, and misappropriation of the work are unacceptable practices.

1.8.    If images are used, authors take full and exclusive responsibility for all copyright issues of both original artists and photographers. In order to reproduce any other third party material (like tables or figures) authors must obtain permission from the copyright holder and be compliant with any requirements the copyright holder may have pertaining to this reuse. When seeking to reproduce any kind of third party material authors should request: non-exclusive rights to reproduce the material in the specified article; print and electronic rights; the right to use the material for the life of the work; and worldwide English-language rights.

1.9.    If there are multiple authors, then one should be nominated for communication with the journal’s editors (in ‘Comments to the Editor’).

1.10.  Authors will receive a proof of their manuscript by email. Proofing instructions will accompany it. Only essential corrections should be made at the proof stage.

2. Author guidelines

2.1.    LENGTH: Manuscripts count at least 3,000 words and should not be longer than 15,000 words, including abstract, keywords, notes and illustrations.

2.2.    LANGUAGE: Manuscripts are written in (American or British) English, as long as contributions are internally consistent. If English is not the author's first language, he/she is responsible for a thorough language review before submitting a text. The board of editors may refuse a text for linguistic reasons, or ask for a second or third language editing. The editors do not endorse nor takes responsibility for language editing.

2.3.    FIRST PAGE: The first page of the submitted manuscript holds the title and contains an abstract of maximum 200 words, as well as 4 to 6 keywords. The abstract explains the contribution’s main argument and scholarly contribution. Reference citations and abbreviations should be avoided in this abstract.

The first page also gives an index of all subheads.

In the submitted manuscript the author’s name is omitted for peer review reasons. An empty footnote 1, however, is foreseen to hold the author’s bio in the published version.

2.4.    TITLE: Start again with the title at the top of the second page of the manuscript.

2.5.    AUTHOR’S NAME: To ensure the double-blind peer review system can work, please avoid authorial identification throughout the manuscript.

2.6.    BIO: Please supply a short biographical note (= footnote 1) of max. 200 words (for each author) in a separate file.

2.7.    SUBHEADS: Make subheads in your text, going at maximum to the third level: 1, 1.1 and 1.1.1.

Paragraphs begin flush left after subheadings. There is no extra space between paragraphs.

2.8.    NO INDENT, NOR RIGHT-JUSTIFY: Do not right-justify the right margin. Do not indent paragraphs, nor footnotes.

2.9.    NO HYPHENATION: Turn off hyphenation to eliminate end-of-line hyphens (except for words that contain hyphens).

2.10.  FOOTNOTES: Please use footnotes (1, 2, ….), not endnotes. In the main text, the numbers of notes (in superscript) are placed after the punctuation mark. Footnotes contain abbreviated literature references, containing only the author’s name and the year (ended by a or b if two works of the same other date back to the same year), e.g. MARTYN 2016a, followed by a comma and the page(s) referred to (without ‘p.’).

2.11.  LIST OF REFERENCES: The manuscript ends with an alphabetical list (based on the family name of the author; anonymous works come first, taking into account the first word(s) of the title) of references of all works cited or referred to in the text and the footnotes. The list contains books, articles, book chapters, dissertations and online publications, al ranked alphabetically in one single list.

2.12.  LEGENDS: Tables, graphs, images and figures are accompanied by a legend. They are numbered consecutively.

2.13.  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Acknowledgements and the mentioning of funding sources should be included at the end of the text, as a last paragraph, after a white line, and written in font 11.

2.14.  EDITING: Manuscripts are copyedited by the editors. These edits bring manuscripts into conformity with the journal’s house style.

2.15.  FOREIGN LANGUAGES: All single words, phrases or longer quotations in Latin and any other foreign language appear in italics.

2.16.  QUOTATIONS: Inverted commas (‘single quotation marks’) are used for quotations. Long quotes, i.e. of more than 50 words, in the main text should appear as a separate paragraph – without quotation marks – with a continuous indent, and in font 11.

2.17.  QUOTATIONS IN OTHER LANGUAGES: Quotations in languages other than English should be translated in English in a footnote.

2.18.  PUNCTUATION: Abbreviations (like UN, EU, MP) do not have full points between them. For names of authors and in references, there is no space between the initials (e.g. R.C. van Caenegem), although full names should be used if possible. Full points should be outside closing quotation marks, except where the quotation consists of a grammatically complete sentence beginning with a capital letter. Other punctuation marks should be outside closing quotation marks, except where they belong to the quotation. Do not insert double spaces after full points at the end of sentences. Use per cent (without full point), not % in the text.

2.19.  NUMBERS: Numbers below 100 and all numerals beginning sentences should be spelled out. Numerals of fewer than five digits appear without a comma.

2.20.  DATES/YEARS: Please spell like ‘1 January 2020’, ‘in the twenty-first century’, ‘in the 1990s’. Year spans should be contracted, e.g. ‘1830-31’.

2.21.  ITALICS: Italics are used for book and journal titles, for court case names, and for words in languages other than English, except those in common use, e.g. habeas corpus. Italics are not used for common Latin abbreviations like e.g., i.e., ibid., cf.).

3. Reference style

3.1.    As far as literature references is concerned, manuscripts should use abbreviated references in the footnotes and give full bibliographical information in the literature list at the end of the article, as follows:

Books

Name, Firstname, Title of the book, City, 1999.

Journal articles

Name, Firstname, “Title of the article”, Journal’s Title, 1999, 1-15. (If the pagination of a periodical is continuous throughout the year, it is not necessary to give the number or the season, only the year. If the page counting restarts each number, please give the number, like ‘1999.3’.)

Chapters in books

Name, Firstname, “Title of contribution”, in: Firstname Name (ed.), Title of the book, City, 1999, 101-15.

Newspapers

“Title of the article”, Newspaper, 2 January 2020, 15.

Unpublished dissertations

Name, Firstname, Title of the dissertation, thesis submitted for the degree of ***, University of ***, City, 1999.

Online publications

Name, Firstname, Title of the publication, [date if available], URL (accessed 2 January 2020).

3.2.    For references to formal sources of law like legislation and case law (only in footnote, not in the final list, which only holds literature references), it is recommended to use consistently the reference style of the (most important) country under scrutiny, e.g. the OSCOLA style guide for Great Britain or the Blue Book Style for the United States.

3.3.    For archival sources, name: city, archive (an acronym may be used after the first citation), archival fund, document number, e.g. Brussels, State Archives (hereafter BSA), Conseil privé autrichien, n° 644 , page.

3.4.    Authors should define non-standard abbreviations at the first occurrence.

3.5.    At the end of a reference, please also insert the DOI number whenever available.

3.6.    Page spans should be given in full, e.g. 1156-1159. The abbreviation ‘p.’ is NOT needed.

3.7.    References should be separated in the notes by semi colons (;). References to legislation come first (and chronologically), followed by case law references (chronologically too) and finally literature (alphabetically).

3.8.    Do not use academic titles, e.g. ‘Cláudio Brandão claims in his recent article’, not ‘Professor Brandão claims…’).

3.9.    For books with up to three authors, list all of them. For sources with more than three authors, list the first two authors, followed by ‘et al.’

4. Peer Review

4.1.    Manuscripts are initially reviewed by the editors. At this stage manuscripts may be rejected without peer review if it is felt that they are not appropriate for the journal.

4.2.    After principal acceptation, manuscripts are sent out for peer review (double blind peer review), two anonymous independent reviewers. The editors will never communicate with the author on the names and expertise of the reviewers.

4.3.    Based on the feedback from these reviewers and the editors' judgment, the manuscript is either ‘accepted’, ‘rejected’ or ‘accepted under condition of necessary revision’.

4.4.    Rejected texts cannot be re-submitted.

4.5.    If the text needs modifications, the author should make these within three months’ time. The re-submitted adapted text is re-evaluated by at least one of the reviewers, and can be refused by a common decision of this reviewer and the editors.

5. Open access

5.1.    Authors will retain the copyright in their work. They will however be required to grant the editors an exclusive licence to publish the article in electronic form.

5.2.    If the manuscript contains material for which you do not have Open Access re-use permissions, please state this clearly by supplying the following credit line alongside the material: “Title of content. Author, Original publication, year of original publication, by permission of [rights holder] / This image/content is not covered by the terms of the Creative Commons licence of this publication. For permission to reuse, please contact the rights holder”.

5.3.    If there is a data set associated with the paper, please provide information about where the data supporting the results or analyses presented in the paper can be found. Where applicable, this should include the hyperlink, DOI or other persistent identifier associated with the data set(s).

5.4. The journal don't have article submission charges or article processing charges.