Issue 1 of Volume 49 constitutes the beginning of the second volume to appear under our editorship.
A year ago, when “our” first issue (Vol. 48, No. 1) appeared, we introduced ourselves. We are still the same, except for those changes that the advancing of life by another year and the pleasures and challenges of editing a journal produced. Our greatest editorial pleasure has been witnessing, up close, how excellent papers became yet better and then a bit better again until they finally appeared in the journal. This pleasure is closely linked with a second experience: the dedication of the many reviewers who take their task, the papers under review, and the authors seriously, as they provide helpful critiques and productive suggestions. We are more grateful to these reviewers than we can express. This includes, especially, members of the editorial board, among them many junior scholars with an already impressive scholarly standing and dedication to the journal. Finally, we thank the authors for submitting their work to the LSR. Authors understand how selective we have to be. Our invitations to revise and resubmit make clear that a revision is not a guarantee of publication. In some cases papers that received feedback and improved substantially in the revision process were still not accepted. Nonetheless, the likelihood of revised papers to appear in the Review increases from below 10% to above 50%. We are grateful to those authors who graciously accept our decisions because, while difficult, these decisions are necessary in light of the limited space available to us.
Looking back at Volume 48 we find that we have stuck to the guiding principles we laid out a year ago and we will stick to them as we move ahead with the next volumes. First, we look for excellence and relevance to the study of law and society. Second, while conceiving of the Law & Society Review as a social science journal, we are—within that frame—liberal with regard to substantive, methodological, and disciplinary orientation. Volume 48 contained research that is based on ethnographic work, interview methodology, archival analysis, case studies, and advanced statistical analyses of quantitative data. Topics were diverse as well, including racial desegregation, social inequality and access to legal advice, court decision making, legal consciousness, procedural justice and legitimacy of law, the unfounding of sexual assault cases, police use of torture, welfare fraud as a form of resistance, ethics of care, and issues of intellectual property. The geographic locations addressed in the articles reflect the global nature of law and society scholarship. While most examine law and society themes in the United States (its mainland, reservations, and Hawaii), many other countries were represented: Canada, India, Israel, Pakistan, Romania, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. The current issue adds Columbia, Papua New Guinea, and Sudan to this expression of global relevance. Finally, disciplines and specialty fields represented in this volume include anthropology, criminology, criminal justice and socio-legal studies, economics, law, political science, public administration, and sociology.
We had hoped that papers published under our editorship would constitute a good cross section of law and society scholarship. We are pleased that we fulfilled this hope, and that this worked without us introducing some kind quota system. The submission and review process brought a great diversity of papers to the top and we think this speaks well to the health of our field. It also supports our resolve to continue our policy not to introduce special issues. We understand and respect our predecessors' decisions to produce such issues but we are also mindful of the massively increased number of submissions (above 300 per year). If we included special issues, the already low acceptance rate would drop even lower, to 5 or 6% (between 20 and 25 papers per year); many most deserving papers could not appear in the journal in which they deserve to be published.
We were also pleased by the opportunity to include in Volume 48 Michael McCann's 2013 LSA Presidential Address on the “unbearable lightness of rights.” We again thank David Nelken, Sally Engle Merry, and Susan Silbey for contributing commentary.
We have sought to live up to our promise to move papers through the pipeline as quickly as is reasonable. At times we failed. Yet, the average time between submission and final decision is currently at 2 months. This is especially important for authors who will have to revise a rejected paper and submit it to another journal. We all have been there, and we know to appreciate the sense that the process keeps moving.
Finally, we encourage our readership to continue to submit their best law and society oriented work to the journal. We will treat it respectfully, productively, and speedily. We will continue our work to keep the Law & Society Review a worthy journal of the Law & Society Association, an inspiring place of scholarship for the scientific community and a transmitter of knowledge that has the potential of advancing justice.
