About the Journal

The Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly is a leading peer-reviewed journal that provides an international forum for articles, commentaries and notes in all areas of legal scholarship and across a range of methodologies including doctrinal, theoretical and socio-legal. The journal regularly publishes special issues within this broad remit.

Established in 1936, the journal has a history and rich vein of legal scholarship, combining distinct publications on the law of Northern Ireland, and prominence within the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast, with leading contributions to the discussion and shaping of law across the common law world and further afield. The School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast took over the publication of the journal from SLS Legal Publications (NI) Ltd in 2008, where it has since been published quarterly. The journal became an online-only publication in January 2017.

Availability, open access and promotion

The Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly is committed to making its contents widely available, to broaden our readership base. At least one article per issue is made available on an open access basis and may be published in advance. All articles become available on an open access basis on our website one year after publication.

All contributions to the journal become available on HeinOnline one year after publication (with issues going back to its launch in 1936) and LexisNexis three months after publication (with issues from 2019). The journal’s contents appears on a growing range of indexing and abstracting services.

Since 2018 the journal’s contents is promoted via social media and the Contributors’ Blog.

In the summer of 2020, we expanded the reach and use of the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly by adding 17 more years of content to the journal’s existing archives. These now go back to 1999 (volume 50) and are widely accessed by our readership. Visit our Archive pages for further details.

Submissions

The journal welcomes submissions of articles, commentaries, notes and book reviews on a rolling basis. Please see our 'For Authors' section for further details. If you have any queries about the suitability of your article for the journal or if you have an idea for a special issue, please contact the Chief Editor Dr Mark Flear. For the contribution of commentaries and notes, please contact Dr David Capper. For book reviews, contact Dr Clayton Ó Néill.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions pay for a minimum of three months of exclusive access to the journal’s latest contents (and up to one year for those who do not have access to LexisNexis).