Focus and Scope

The Denning Law Journal is a general, peer-refereed legal journal that publishes original articles that seek to promote the values cherished by Lord Denning;

  • Freedom of the individual
  • Independence from State intervention
  • Preservation of Human rights
  • Preserving the traditions of judicial independence, integrity and creativity
  • Global libertarianism

In addition to publishing articles, the journal and its website contain sections devoted to recent legislation and reports, to case analysis and book reviews.

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

The ethic statements are based on COPE’s Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors.

Publication decisions

The editor is responsible for deciding which of the articles submitted to the journal should be published.

The editor may be guided by the policies of the journal's editorial board and constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. The editor may confer with other editors or reviewers in making this decision.

Fair play

An editor may at any time evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors.

Confidentiality

The editor and any editorial staff must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.

Disclosure and conflicts of interest

Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in an editor's own research without the express written consent of the author.

General
 
Publishers and editors shall take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred.
 
In no case shall a publisher or editors encourage such misconduct, or knowingly allow such misconduct to take place.
 
In the event that a journal’s publisher or editors are made aware of any allegation of research misconduct the publisher or editor shall deal with allegations appropriately.
 
The journal has guidelines for retracting or correcting articles when needed
 
Publishers and editors are always be willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed.

Duties of Reviewers

Contribution to Editorial Decisions

Peer review assists the editor in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communications with the author may also assist the author in improving the paper.

Promptness

Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the editor and excuse himself from the review process.

Confidentiality

Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. They must not be shown to or discussed with others except as authorized by the editor.

Standards of Objectivity

Reviews should be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Referees should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.

Acknowledgement of Sources

Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors. Any statement that an observation, derivation, or argument had been previously reported should be accompanied by the relevant citation. A reviewer should also call to the editor's attention any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which they have personal knowledge.

Disclosure and Conflict of Interest

Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage. Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.

 

Duties of Authors

Reporting standards

Authors of reports of original research should present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion of its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately in the paper. A paper should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to replicate the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behaviour and are unacceptable.

Originality and Plagiarism

The authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works, and if the authors have used the work and/or words of others that this has been appropriately cited or quoted.

Multiple, Redundant or Concurrent Publication

An author should not in general publish manuscripts describing essentially the same research in more than one journal or primary publication. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behaviour and is unacceptable.

Acknowledgement of Sources

Proper acknowledgment of the work of others must always be given. Authors should cite publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work.

Authorship of the Paper

Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study. All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors. Where there are others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research project, they should be acknowledged or listed as contributors.

The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors and no inappropriate co-authors are included on the paper, and that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.

Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest

All authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial or other substantive conflict of interest that might be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed.

Fundamental errors in published works

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal editor or publisher and cooperate with the editor to retract or correct the paper.

 

Journal History

The aim of the journal is to provide a forum for the widest discussion of issues arising in the common law world and the Commonwealth, and to embrace the wider global and international issues of contemporary concern.

Lord Denning recognised the importance of:

  • developing the common law
  • focusing on the development of law in Commonwealth jurisdictions
  • the need for judicial and community recognition of the urgency of reform and modernization of law
  • the need to preserve traditions of judicial independence, integrity, accountability  and creativity
  • reflecting upon the interplay of law and morality
  • the role to be played by the state in the defence of the individual in the modern state
  • international and comparative law
  • protection and promotion of  human and constitutional  rights
  • development of constitutional and administrative law

The Denning Law Journal strives to reflect these in its publication.

In addition to publishing articles, the journal and its website contain sections devoted to recent legislation and reports, to case analysis and book reviews.

Founded in 1985 and now published by the University of Buckingham Press The Denning Law Journal has an international editorial board.

Peer Review Process

Each article is blind peer reviewed. Initially the articles are reviewed by the editor and the assistant editor. The Denning Law Journal has an editorial board, and its members cover a wide range of disciplines within the educational field. All the members of the board have an established track record in academic publication.

Once articles are accepted to peer-review they are then sent to selected peer reviewers. Each article is peer reviewed by at least two reviewers and each reviewer will submit their review including comments and a recommendation when to accept for publication, reject or to request revisions to the articles.

Once the final articles are accepted, the authors are informed and they then move into the production process for the particular Issue, which includes proofreading and typesetting of articles. Authors will receive two rounds of proofs to ensure the final published text is of as high a standard as possible.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate gold open access under a CC-BY-NC licence to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Users have the right to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles in this journal, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose.

Author Publication Charges

There are no charges for authors to publish their work in the journal.

Self-Archiving and Institutional Repositories

UBP offers a publishing model that enables wide access to academic research, global readership for our authors and ensures the long-term preservation of published content. As a result, we permit authors to archive their contributions to this Journal. This can be either via authors' own websites, or via their institution’s or funding body’s online repository or archive

In addition, all published articles are archived by UBP at a number of repositories including LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, PKP and The British Library.

Licensing

Content is available on Open Access basis under the following license: CC Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (for more information visit: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)