We are absolutely thrilled to announce a new policy at the Law & Society Review (LSR) that allows authors to publish translations of their work! Starting now, all past and future LSR authors who write about people or places whose primary language is not English are welcome to submit translated versions of their published English-language article in another language (one relevant to the context of their study). In many cases, the authors themselves are already proficient in the other language and, therefore, can handle the translation themselves. In other cases, authors may need to hire a translator proficient in the other language; in that case, the translator would receive coauthor credit. (This is an excellent opportunity for graduate students who are fluent in both English and another language and trained in the field of law and society.) The translated versions of articles already published in English in LSR will also be published in LSR and linked on our website so scholars can access both English- and other-language versions of LSR articles. Additionally, we encourage future LSR authors to provide translated abstracts for their English-language articles as part of the article submission process. Details about our new translation policy can be found on our Author Instructions page.

We see this policy as a major advance. In our view, this new translation policy is beneficial for readers, authors, the journal, and the field at large: Multilingual readers or those who do not read English with ease will have access to a select but hopefully growing number of LSR articles that they can read, learn from, and apply in their own work and lives. Authors can now reach a larger audience, including more people from the countries or groups they study. With a wider reach, the journal can have more readers and hopefully a new round of authors who did not know about LSR before. Finally, with more scholars able to read LSR articles, we believe the field will also expand and become even more global.

Having more people to read, engage, and, yes, cite LSR articles are all important practical motivations, but we are also excited for an underlying justice-related motivation: it is important that scholars, journalists, policymakers, and normal citizens from the countries our authors write about have access to the research conducted there so they too can benefit from the insights our authors provide.

We also see our new translation policy as an important symbolic move: LSR is the official journal of the Law and Society Association, which is emphatically an international and even global association of sociolegal scholars. With this new policy, we are making clear the field’s commitment to our scholars coming from, living and working in, or writing about counties outside of the anglophone world.

We hope other journals will follow suit and incorporate their own translation policies!

Dr. Ashley T. Rubin

for the Law & Society Review editorial team