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Submission Guidelines

The ILSU Working Paper Series strives to provide authors with serious, detailed constructive feedback, as a means to foster the quality improvement of submitted papers. In order to achieve this goal, editorial changes and comments are already performed during the review process (as opposed to after a publication decision has been made), to help authors deal with criticism as they are still immersed in the topic they have written about, and therefore in a position to tackle it more effectively.
In view of the foregoing, authors are advised to submit before simultaneously sending their works out to multiple law reviews or, however, to clearly indicate in the cover letter their intention to preferentially consider a possible offer for publication from the ILSU Working Paper Series over offers received from other law reviews: precedence will be given to authors complying with such guideline (please notice that the ILSU Wps does not require an exclusive publication license, therefore compliance with this "preferential submission" guideline does not freclose subsequent publication in other reviews; to find out more, go to our Terms of Publication).

Subject-wise, the ILSU Wps welcomes law-related papers from undergraduate, graduate or doctoral students from any Italian University or, alternatively, from foreign Universities provided, in the latter case, that the papers deal with issues relevant - in a broad sense - for Italian lawyers (possible topics include: general issues on foreign - e.g. US, UK, etc. - contract, tort and business law, as long as they are presented in a manner that renders them accessible to foreign lawyers; comparative and international law; intellectual property law). Of course, submissions by practitioners and academics are also more than welcome.

All papers should be typewritten using MS Word (or a compatible software) according to the following technical and stylistic specifications:

  • Font: Times New Roman, 12 pt;
  •  Paper layout: 8,5 x 11 inches, with one-inch margins all around;
  •  All notes should be in footnote rather than endnote format;
  • All excerpts quoted from someone else’s work should be referenced in a footnote;
  • References in footnotes should contain all information necessary in order to allow readers to access the sources themselves. Working papers written in Italian should conform to LexIndex - Regole per una corretta citazione giuridica (ILSU Wps Editorial Board ed., 1st ed. 2008). For English-language papers, instead, citations should conform to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (Columbia Law Review Ass’n et al. eds., 18th ed. 2005).

Along with their works, authors should also submit:

  • an updated curriculum vitae;
  • an abstract in English of the submitted article, whose length should not exceed 150 words, if possible.

The ILSU Wps Editorial Board only accepts electronic submissions of .doc files and all submissions should be sent to the addresses specified in the Contact page.
 

 

Review Process

Submitted manuscripts undergo a double-blind review. Upon reviewing assigned papers, members of the Editorial Board are required to fill out a feedback form, which is later returned to authors: regardless of acceptance/rejection decisions, such part serves as a means to provide authors with constructive criticism. Normally, such form is also accompanied by a version of the paper, containing detailed edits and/or comments in MS Word Edit-Track mode.

Articles are assessed according to the following parameters:

  • clarity (the author conveys his/her thoughts in a manner that makes their logical structure apparent to the readers);
  • intellectual rigour and originality (the author’s conclusions are not obvious, given the set of premises stated in his/her contribution);
  • accessibility to an international readership (works should be as self-contained as possible, meaning that papers dealing with particular issues of a given legal system should contain concise explanations of all those notions which foreign jurists may be unfamiliar with);
  • academic integrity (works should not infringe the ILSU Wps Editorial Board’s plagiarism policy).

Publication decisions may be of four kinds: publication of the article as it stands; publication with minor revisions; request to re-submit upon a major revision of the submitted piece; rejection. Finally, accepted papers are published under our standard Terms of Publication.