Focus and Scope

Mission and Aims

The purpose of the Brazilian Journal of Empirical Legal Studies is to foster and circulate the production of empirical research from the most diverse areas of knowledge, as long as they dialogue directly with the legal field.

We believe that the consolidation and dissemination of transdisciplinary empirical research is a way to contribute to a more qualified understanding of the legal phenomenon and constitute an important element of social transformation.

Target Audience

The journal's target audience comprises professors, researchers and postgraduate students who are interested in different aspects of law as an object of research and in theoretical reflection on social science research.

Editorial Line

The journal accepts papers from different disciplines and methodological perspectives. However, the manuscript must be compatible with the editorial line of the journal, which is focused on empirical legal research.

The Brazilian Journal of Empirical Legal Studies welcomes submissions that fall into one of these three axes:

i) results of empirical research about any aspects of law;

ii) epistemological reflections on empirical legal research;

iii) reflections on social research methodology that could be useful for researchers in the legal field.

The journal foresees the possibility of organizing, at the discretion of the editors, special thematic issues in which submissions will also have to fit the proposed theme. The Editors reserve the right not to immediately publish the approved manuscripts, considering the maximum number of papers per volume, the prioritization of articles written in English and Spanish, as well as the minimum exogenous ratio of 75%, that is, the percentage of articles with authors outside the state of São Paulo, Brasil.

Article Types

We welcome papers, translations, reviews and interviews for publication. For further information about each kind of work, please visit the "Submissions" section.

Submission guidelines

Please check the submission guidelines in the Submissions section..

Peer Review Process

The Brazilian Journal of Empirical Legal Studies adopts double blind review process. The manuscripts submitted will be initially evaluated by the journal editorial board in order to assess their compliance with the subject matter and formal requirements of the journal.

After this first qualifying stage, the manuscript is submitted to at least two anonymous reviewers for analysis of the content and quality of work. This will be carried out without any knowledge of the authorship. Once the reviewers' opinions have been issued, the editors shall decide on direct approval, a conditional approval subject to modifications or a refusal of the paper. This decision is based on the judgements of merit made by the reviewers and the judgement made by the editors, which takes into account the merits of the manuscript and the convenience of its publication to the journal.

The authors of unapproved manuscripts may submit them to a new evaluation as long as the criticisms previously received have been resolved.
All the reviewers are professors and/or researchers with recognized research experience in the Law field. Reviewers are recruited either by an invitation from the editorial team or by an open recruitment call.

All efforts are done to complete the whole review process within 6 (six) months. Reviewers have one month to issue their assessment. However, due to the potential difficulty in finding reviewers in certain areas and the delays they may incur, this deadline cannot be guaranteed.

Periodicity

The journal was biannual until 2016. In 2017 it started publishing quarterly. In 2021, the Brazilian Journal of Empirical Legal Studies has moved to Continuous Article Publication (CAP). In that manner, papers are published individually at the moment they are accepted, rather than waiting for all articles intended for that volume to be ready. The papers are published in a certain volume which, in the case of this journal, coincides with the calendar year. Each volume, therefore, is being built throughout the year, according to the individual publication of the papers. The main advantage of the CAP model is to speed up the process of publishing articles, allowing the public to access research without having to wait for the volume to close. This is especially important in the case of empirical research, which can quickly become outdated. From this change, papers are identified solely by DOI.

Open Access Policy

This is an open access journal, which means that all content is freely available, at no cost to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other legal purpose, without requesting permission from the editors or authors. This declaration is aligned to the Budapest Open Access Initiative's (BOAI) definition of open access.

The works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Archiving Policy

This journal adopts 1) the LOCKSS system (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), which allows storing and distributing the journal's content to participating libraries; 2) the CLOCKSS system (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), which is based on the open source software LOCKSS and allows libraries to preserve selected regularly registered journals. Each file is continuously validated against other records in the library and if the content is characterized as corrupted or lost, the other records or the journal are used to restore it.

Funding

The Brazilian Journal of Empirical Legal Studies is funded by Rede de Estudos Empíricos em Direito (REED) and has the support of the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea).