Welcome to Volume 51, Issue 1—the first issue edited by our binational, cross-disciplinary team. We would like to begin this issue by thanking the outgoing editors, by introducing ourselves, and by offering a brief overview of important editorial principles for our team.
The journal comes to us after excellent editing work by Tim Johnson and Joachim Savelsberg. Tim and Joachim continue to share great advice for the transition, and have prepared us well to deal with the many issues that arise day-to-day in the job of editing a journal. Tim and Joachim's three-year tenure at Law & Society Review saw the publication of many wonderful articles and issues, including the 50th anniversary issue celebrating LSR's golden anniversary. The LSR’s continuing high impact factor is compelling evidence of Tim and Joachim's careful stewardship. Although any new editorship team necessarily involves transition, we will continue many long-standing practices. We continue to look for top quality, innovative scholarship to publish, and to provide effective and full reviewer response to the manuscripts submitted to us. But our new team brings a unique sense of energy and perspective stemming from the team's structure. We are the first team that is a triad—three scholars at three separate institutions (Indiana University, Virginia Tech, University of British Colombia), two located in different areas of the United States, and one in Canada. We represent different perspectives and history in the field and in our profession. Two of us are political scientists, two of us teach in law schools as interdisciplinary legal scholars, one of us teaches in a public policy school. We hope that these three different sites of editorial leadership allow us to contribute to the work our predecessors have done broadening LSR's reach.
As scholars, one of our common points is an interest in how individuals respond to the construction by law of subject positions. Canadian legal scholars have been particularly engaged in exploring indigenous legal questions and Margot Young brings a commitment to that expansion of law and society coverage, along with feminist and social justice expertise. Jeannine Bell has long worked on the intersecting issues of law, crime, and racial injustice with scholarship that is focused on hate crime, hate speech, and policing, and how these concerns affect the lives of racial minorities in the United States. Susan Sterett has worked on multilevel analyses of crafting social welfare and other membership claims by race and gender, working both from appellate courts cases and from interview data to analyze those who organize claims and those who make individual claims. In our work we use a range of approaches to data collection, ranging from ethnography to analysis of survey data.
Even though our work touches on many different areas in socio-legal research, we recognize the need for assistance from specialists in areas with which we are less familiar. We have assembled a team of associate editors and advisory board members who capture a broad array of socio-legal scholarship across the globe. Our advisory board includes sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and legal scholars, who teach in variety of departments in the United States, Canada, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Their names and institutional affiliations are listed in the front pages. Welcome to all and thank you for joining Law & Society Review.
We anticipate much continuity, although also plan some changes to reach audiences in new ways. We are grateful for the work of the journal editors of the past fifty years. The Law & Society Review demonstrates a rich intellectual diversity among law and society scholars and must continue to be accessible to all methodological approaches in the socio-legal tradition. We will continue to publish articles that are theoretically guided and empirically based. We will look for articles that focus on theorizing within the law and society tradition. Word length matters too. Like our predecessors, we will hold to a range of 8,000 to 14,000 words.
Editing a journal as successful as the Law & Society Review is a privilege. Submissions are wide-ranging and high quality. Editing, as so many of you know, also requires tracking down reviewers, which can take time. It is hard to reject pieces but we have limited space from the publisher. Currently, the acceptance rate is approximately 10 percent of the more than three hundred submissions we receive each year. From where we sit as editors of LSR, it is clear that the field of law and society is a robust and diverse scholarly enterprise.
The Law & Society Review will also be embracing a few new developments. We hope to increase the number of virtual issues. For instance, in the ten months since we began editing LSR, we have compiled two virtual special issues (on sexual assault and race in policing) in response to well-publicized events. These virtual issues, available on the LSR website, contain articles published in the Law & Society Review in the last ten years, and they will work to ensure that scholarship in the journal concerning issues in national and international conversations continues to be widely available. We will also publish special issues and have posted a call for proposals on the journal's website. Another initiative, a Law & Society Review blog, is geared to short statements about recently published articles and ongoing research, as well as developments in sister journals in the law and society tradition. Similarly, we are in the process of getting a video channel online that will allow authors who have published in LSR to download short clips talking about their articles. We hope that these clips will deepen the reach of individual articles and of the Law & Society Review itself.
It takes a team to produce LSR. This is the first issue for our new book review editor, Jennifer Balint. Jennifer teaches in the Socio-Legal Studies Program in Criminology at the University of Melbourne. Thank you to Jinee Lokaneeta for her work as outgoing book review editor. Continuing on is our superb managing editor, Danielle McClellan. Equally essential are our smart editorial assistants: Emily Flores, Melvene Lanier, Anne Groggel, and Siobhan Yorgun. We would like to end by thanking the many scholars from around the world who have graciously undertaken the work of reviewing manuscripts for us over the last ten months. We value the time and effort they have expended on behalf of the journal. They are the “peer” in peer review, and, consequently, make us what we are. We are so grateful for their hard work.
