Our Mission

Readers who have been following recent developments in academic law will already know that the past several years have seen a proliferation of new law journals, most of them student-edited. The Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies is distinctive in several respects.

• First, in terms of its substance, this journal combines domestic, international, and comparative law. Indeed, we view the journal as a context where these three subjects, traditionally defined as distinct fields, can enter into productive dialogue about current changes in world relationships.
• Second, beyond law, the journal is interdisciplinary in nature, exploring the insights to be gained from social science and humanities disciplines, as well as other disciplines engaged with inquiry of relevance to law in the broad sense, as described above. These varied perspectives on global issues will facilitate a more meaningful contextualization of law and legal change in a global world.
• Third, in view of our substantive themes and the interdisciplinary nature of the journal, our editorial structure is also distinctive. As noted above, the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies is a faculty-edited, peer-reviewed journal. Our commitment to peer review is consistent with our aim of serving as a forum for exchange among scholars in the law and other disciplines. While peer review is relatively rare in law publications, it is the norm among the other disciplines that will be in conversation in our pages. Furthermore, peer review reflects our assessment that the interdisciplinary nature of global legal studies has reached a new level of maturity.
• Students are integrally involved in the creative tasks necessary for the production of the journal. Students have primary editorial responsibility for student contributions and, more generally, are central participants in the collaborative environment of the Journal’s editorial meetings. Student editors work closely with faculty editors in helping prepare faculty manuscripts for publication, as well as in helping identify topics and themes for future journal symposia.

Our hope is that the special features of the Journal will not only advance scholarship in the law and other disciplines around the broad topic of global legal studies, but that it will also facilitate exchanges of ideas between law schools and other units on university campuses. The symposium that was the basis for this first issue was just such an exchange, involving scholars and policymakers from a number of institutions, including various units on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University. We view this as an important feature of global legal studies, that is, the way in which the changing shape of the world challenges academic to reconsider its own topography, or at the very least, the location and durability of its internal bridges.