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Legal history: England & common law tradition: Journals

Help with finding articles in journals

Law journals with special focus on legal history

Many of law journals you will have encountered in studying current law also accept articles dealing with legal history e.g. Cambridge Law Journal (CLJ), Law Quarterly Review (LQR), Modern Law Review (MLR), and the Harvard Law Review (HLR).

There are other journals which you may find particularly useful are:

The Irish Jurist  (IJ) at Ireland 300 I50 

American Journal of legal history

USA 300 A130 AJLH  
Criminal Justice History Crim 300 C115 CJH  
Journal of Legal History Cw UK 300 J70 JLH  
Law and History Review USA 300 L65 LHR  
Legal history (formerly Australian Journal of Legal History) Cw Austral 300 A27.5    
Law & humanities Jurisp 300 L15 L and H  
Comparative Legal History General 300 E100 CLH  

Open Access sites for Working Papers, Articles and sometimes chapters

History journals

Clearly there are so many available, this guide cannot do much more than point out some social & economic history journals which are available electronically


None of the physical print runs will be in the Law Bod - use SOLO to find out where they are. Remember to limit your search via the drop down menu - change All items to journals for example.

We also urge you to benefit from the wisdom of our history colleagues!

Journal/Article related terms you may encounter in your research

Abstracting (service):
Used to refer to a bibliographic database, the service provides abstracts of publications.

(Academic) Journal:
A regular publication of academic and research articles.

Bibliographic database:
A searchable platform that contains descriptive records of articles, books, conference proceedings, audio-visual material, maps, newspapers, and more.

Conference proceedings:
The published record of a conference.

Citation:
A quotation from or reference to a book, paper, or author, especially in a scholarly work.

Full-text:
This means you can read the item in full from beginning to end, not just the abstract or summary.

Indexing (service):
Used to refer to a bibliographic database, the service provides descriptors to help organise and navigate publications.

Periodical:
A regular publication that includes articles, stories and other text. Magazines and newspapers are examples of these.

Platform:
This refers to the site on which you can find and access the journal.

Preprints:
Pre-publication version of articles. cf Version of Record.

Serial:
A broad term that refers to items published in a series but the items are separate and standalone. Examples include indexes, yearbooks and some journals.

Version of Record (VoR) :
The fully published version, the most authoritative source of the text. 

Working (research, discussion) papers:
Pre-publication not peer-reviewed versions of academic articles, book chapters, or reviews which are are in progress, under submission, or in press and forthcoming elsewhere.