Why publish in these electronic law journals?

We believe that these electronic law journals present an excellent vehicle for reaching a wide number of legal academics, students, practitioners and socio-legal think thanks for the following reasons:

Each  issue of the journals will include articles of the highest academic merit, which will be reviewed by an international group of academics (see the refereeing process for further information). This should in turn promote a global feel to the journals and the enablement of cross-cutting dialogue between international scholars.

In addition to refereed academic articles, the journals also include important articles, reports and commentaries from the coal face - from academics, pressure groups and think tanks, legal practitioners and politicians. They are pluralistic in the sense that they attempt to hear all types of voices on a particular subject, including subaltern ones. This wide mix is sustainable because electronic journals, unlike their hardcopy sisters, need not have problems of space or be hung-up about the audience in ways that paper journals are. Our intention is to bridge the divide between academic and practitioner work, between different intellectual traditions world-wide.

Electronic journals are likely to have a much wider audience than that of esoteric paper journals, because:

• Firstly the audience is global. We are aware that there is information poverty between the rich countries and the poor ones. Nevertheless, we are also aware, that because of the growth of the internet in developing countries, because we are a free journal (unlike most hardcopy to electronic publications) and because of our electronic bazaar philosophy, our reach is greater.
  
• It can overcome the distance between the author and the reader by promoting comment and conferencing facilities.
  
• The publication dates are timely and the journals therefore have a fresh contemporary feel to the material in them. We can even publish revised versions of articles where necessary and substantive changes have taken place since the original publication. While there will be fixed issues of the journals with publication dates, articles can be published in between those dates where the circumstances merit publication. Many prestigious paper journals have an extensive backlog of articles, which may be out of date by the time of publication.
  
• As an electronic journal is not bound by paper conventions, we can do much more with hypertext and multimedia and instant discussions of issues, promoting in essence, an adventurous seamlessness of knowledge.