Alternative Law Journal

About Alternative Law Journal

Alternative Law Journal — In-Depth Profile

The Alternative Law Journal is Australia's leading law reform journal. Its own site says so in those words, and adds the record behind the claim: it has held that role for nearly fifty years, as a peer-reviewed quarterly journal publishing critical scholarly articles across the broad field of law and justice. It is published by SAGE Publications on behalf of the Legal Service Bulletin Co-operative Ltd in Melbourne, Australia. It carries the print ISSN 1037-969X and the online ISSN 2398-9084. Its concerns, stated on its official site, are social justice and human rights, governance and regulation, corporate social responsibility, business and human rights, critique of the legal system, developments in innovative and alternative practice, and community legal education.

This profile sets out, in one place, what an author, reader, librarian or evaluator needs to know: the journal's identity and its unusual ownership — a Melbourne co-operative's journal carried by a global publisher — its history from its 1974 beginnings as the Legal Service Bulletin to its present name, its scope across law reform and social justice, its article character, its peer review and ethics position, its publishing model and the open access charge recorded by OpenAlex, its attributed citation metrics, its indexing position as stated in fetched sources, how to approach a submission through SAGE, how it differs from a conventional doctrinal law journal, and the questions researchers ask most often about it. Every figure is attributed to its source — the journal's official site, its SAGE home, or OpenAlex — and anything that could not be verified from a fetched source is stated plainly as such.

Identity and Ownership

The identity of this journal has two halves that must be held together, because holding only one produces a distorted picture. The publishing half is SAGE Publications: OpenAlex gives SAGE Publishing as its host organisation, its SAGE journal home is the working platform for its current content, its submission route and its online archive, and the imprint places it inside one of the largest social science publishing programmes in the world. The owning, originating half is Australian and co-operative: the journal is published by SAGE on behalf of the Legal Service Bulletin Co-operative Ltd in Melbourne, the body in whose name it has been produced, and whose earlier title — the Legal Service Bulletin — it originally carried. OpenAlex records the same society link, naming the Legal Service Bulletin Co-operative Ltd, through its site at altlj.org, as the society associated with the journal.

The stored JournalsWorld record for this title originally showed its publisher as a bare numeric code, and a country label that pointed at the publisher's corporate home rather than at the journal's own home. The verified picture, from the journal's own site, is more precise: this is an Australian journal, made in Melbourne by its co-operative on behalf of the Australian law reform community, and published for it by SAGE. Its two ISSNs divide cleanly by medium: print ISSN 1037-969X and online ISSN 2398-9084, a pairing confirmed in its bibliographic records and resolved by OpenAlex to a single source. Its short name, AltLJ, is in everyday use on its own site and across the Australian legal community.

History

The journal began in 1974. A retrospective published in the journal itself, carried on its SAGE platform and found for this profile, anchors the founding in a precise moment: the initial publication of the Fitzroy Legal Service Bulletin in May 1974, at a time when a serving Australian senator was opening a legal aid office as part of a government programme to make legal rights usable regardless of wealth or of how recently a person had arrived in the country. The journal's own site compresses the same history into its present claim — Australia's leading law reform journal for nearly fifty years — and its bibliographic record supplies the title history: established in 1974 as the Legal Service Bulletin, it took its current name, Alternative Law Journal, in 1992. Its retrospective describes that change as a gain in professional and academic standing that did not cost the journal its integrity as an alternative voice for the powerless and disadvantaged.

That dual character — academically respectable and deliberately alternative — is the key to its history and to its present scope. The themes its retrospective names at its founding have endured, by its own account: the need for greater access to legal services, the limits of substantive law in areas of particular impact on disadvantaged individuals and groups, and the demand for greater social justice for those in greatest need. A journal that began from a community legal service's bulletin, rather than from a law school or a commercial publisher, carries those origins in its editorial instincts: law is to be judged by what it does to the people with the least power in front of it. The Aboriginal Law Bulletin, issued alongside its predecessor and then alongside this journal for periods between 1981 and 1995, belongs to the same history of attention to the legal position of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, a theme that remains visible in its current citation record.

Aims, Scope and Subjects

The official statement of scope is worth following closely, because it defines a kind of article as much as a set of topics. The journal publishes critical scholarly articles across the broad field of law and justice, including social justice and human rights, governance and regulation, corporate social responsibility, business and human rights, critique of the legal system, developments in innovative and alternative practice, and community legal education. Its articles are critical, often cross-disciplinary, and directly engaged with law and policy reform. Its own site adds the forms that sit alongside the scholarly articles in a long-running reform journal of this kind: opinions, regular columns, and — characteristically — art and cartoons are included in addition to articles, a reminder that a reform journal speaks to practitioners, community lawyers, activists and students as well as to academics.

OpenAlex's topic analysis of its works, fetched for this profile, maps that scope onto its citation record. Its largest clusters are Legal Education and Practice Innovations (302 works), Indigenous Peoples' Rights and Law (225 works), Discrimination and Equality Law (222 works), Criminal Law and Policy (212 works), Legal Rights and Human Rights (204 works), and Law, Rights and Freedoms (193 works). The fit between the stated scope and the published record is unusually close: a critical, reform-facing journal, centred on rights, equality, criminal justice, Indigenous rights and the practice of law itself. A manuscript that is purely doctrinal — a competent exposition of settled law with no critical edge and no reform implication — is a poor fit here, whatever its quality. A manuscript that asks what the law does, to whom, and how it should change, addressed in a voice that a community lawyer as well as a professor can use, is addressed to the centre of this journal.

Editorial Process, Ethics and Peer Review

The journal presents itself, on its official site, as a peer-reviewed quarterly journal, and it states that it is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Membership of COPE is a concrete, checkable commitment: it places the journal inside the framework of publication-ethics guidance that editors use for questions of authorship, conflict of interest, complaint and correction. This profile names no current editors-in-chief or board members, because a current roster could not be verified from the pages fetched in a form suitable for republication — names attached to this journal in older reference works date from years ago, and printing a stale roster as a current one would mislead authors about who would handle their work. The journal's SAGE home and its official site are the authoritative sources for its current masthead and its current submission guidelines, and its official site directs readers to its SAGE pages for further information and for those guidelines.

What an author can rely on, from the journal's own presentation, is the character of its reading: critical scholarship, often cross-disciplinary, directly engaged with reform. Review in such a journal tests more than technical legal accuracy. It tests whether the critique is earned, whether the reform proposal follows from the evidence, and whether the piece speaks beyond a single doctrinal niche to the wider law-and-justice community the journal serves. Authors used to purely doctrinal review should expect, and welcome, questions about consequences and audiences as well as about authorities.

Publishing Model, Access and Charges

The journal is published by SAGE as a subscription journal with an open access option, which is the standard SAGE model and the one its records show. OpenAlex does not record the journal itself as an open access source; it records 393 open access works among its 2,022 works, which is the pattern of a journal in which individual articles become openly available under author-side arrangements while the journal as a whole remains subscription-based. OpenAlex also records article processing charge prices for the title — an APC of 3,650 US dollars in its 2025 record, with earlier yearly figures below that — which belongs to that optional open access route. Those figures are quoted here strictly as OpenAlex's recorded values, attributed to OpenAlex, at the time of fetching; the charge that would actually apply to a given manuscript, and the waivers, agreements and institutional deals that might cover it, are matters for the journal's current SAGE author pages, which an author should consult before choosing an access route. No claim is made in this profile about a submission fee or a charge for subscription-route publication, because none could be verified from a fetched source.

For readers, the practical consequence is straightforward: some of the journal's content is openly reachable, and the rest sits behind the subscription and library channels that academic law libraries routinely carry for SAGE titles. For librarians, its identity — AltLJ, ISSNs 1037-969X and 2398-9084, SAGE on behalf of the Legal Service Bulletin Co-operative — is the set of facts a catalogue record needs, and all of them are verified in the sources above.

Metrics — Read With Their Sources

OpenAlex, resolving its ISSNs to source S87202933 and fetched for this profile, records 2,022 works for the journal, with 4,446 citations in total, an OpenAlex h-index of 22, an i10-index of 106, and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.75. Its recent yearly counts in the same fetched record show a steady quarterly output — 65 works in 2024 and 59 works in 2025. The h-index of 22 is higher than the figure carried in the journal's earlier short record on this site; the difference is a database difference, not a contradiction, since OpenAlex counts citations across a wider set of citing works than the Scopus-derived listings behind that earlier figure, and a practitioner-facing reform journal is cited in places — in community, policy and interdisciplinary literature — that a narrower database reaches less completely.

SCImago-derived listings for this title have reported their own figures for their coverage years, including SJR values around 0.18 for 2023, built on Scopus data; they may be quoted with that source and year attached, and not otherwise. No Clarivate Journal Impact Factor is asserted in this profile, because none could be verified from a fetched Clarivate source at the time of checking; a figure attributed to 2018 in older reference material is history, not a current indicator, and is not presented here as one. What the attributed record supports is a conclusion about character: more than two thousand works over its run under its current name, cited more than four thousand times in a broad-coverage database, with its strongest citation clusters exactly where its mission says they should be.

Indexing and Discoverability

The indexing claims made here are only those supported by fetched material. The journal's bibliographic record, as summarised in the reference material found for this profile, describes it as abstracted and indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index, in EBSCO databases, in ProQuest databases, and in Scopus, with those descriptions resting on Clarivate's master list and on Elsevier's Scopus source details as cited there at the time. OpenAlex indexes its works comprehensively and resolves it by either ISSN. Its content sits on the SAGE platform, which exposes it to the discovery layers, link resolvers and library systems that academic libraries use for SAGE titles as a matter of routine.

No DOAJ listing is claimed, and the reason is documented rather than assumed: a direct DOAJ search API query by each of its ISSNs, made in the foreground for this profile, returned no record for this title. That is consistent with its model — DOAJ is a directory of fully open access journals, and this is a subscription journal with an open access option — and it should not be read as a quality judgement in either direction. An author whose institution requires a specific index should, as always, verify that index's own current source list at the moment of submitting.

How to Submit

The journal's official site directs authors to its SAGE home for further information, and states that its submission guidelines are to be found through that route; the SAGE journal home is therefore the starting point and the authority for format, length, referencing style, and the mechanics of submission. Beyond those mechanics, which are the publisher's to set, submission to this journal asks for editorial judgement of a specific kind. First, test the manuscript against the scope in its exact words: critical, often cross-disciplinary, directly engaged with law and policy reform. A piece that does not argue for a change — in law, in practice, in understanding — is unlikely to be the journal's piece. Second, write for its real audience, which spans academics, practitioners, community lawyers and policy readers; clarity is an editorial value here, not a concession. Third, read recent issues on the SAGE platform, including the columns and shorter forms as well as the articles, because the journal publishes a wider range of forms than a conventional law review, and a shorter, sharper piece may serve a reform argument better than a long one. Fourth, settle the access question — subscription route or paid open access route — with the current SAGE author pages in hand, using the OpenAlex-recorded APC in this profile only as an attributed historical reference point, never as a quoted price.

Who Should Read and Cite It

Readers come to this journal for the Australian reform conversation in its longest-running form: human rights and social justice argument, criminal law and policy critique, Indigenous rights, discrimination and equality law, the governance and regulation of institutions, business and human rights, and reflective writing on legal practice and legal education. Scholars outside Australia will find its value in the specificity of a mature common law reform tradition that has had to work through questions — Indigenous rights above all — in forms that other jurisdictions now face in their own terms. Teachers of law and of legal studies use it because its pieces are written to be read and argued with, and community legal centres and practitioners read it because it began as their bulletin and has never stopped writing for them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Alternative Law Journal? Australia's leading law reform journal, by its own description, a peer-reviewed quarterly publishing critical scholarly articles across law and justice, published by SAGE on behalf of the Legal Service Bulletin Co-operative Ltd in Melbourne.

When was it founded, and under what name? In 1974, as the Legal Service Bulletin; it took its current name in 1992.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 1037-969X and online ISSN 2398-9084.

What does it publish? Critical articles on social justice and human rights, governance and regulation, corporate social responsibility, business and human rights, critique of the legal system, innovative and alternative practice, and community legal education — plus opinions, regular columns, art and cartoons.

Is it peer reviewed, and does it follow publication ethics guidance? It presents itself as a peer-reviewed journal, and its official site states that it is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Is it open access? It is a subscription journal with an open access option for individual articles. OpenAlex records 393 open access works among its 2,022, and records an APC of 3,650 US dollars for 2025 for the paid route; check SAGE's current author pages for the price and arrangements that would apply now.

Is it listed in DOAJ? No listing is claimed: direct DOAJ API searches by both ISSNs for this profile returned no record, which fits its subscription-with-open-access-option model.

What are its citation metrics? In OpenAlex, fetched for this profile: 2,022 works, 4,446 citations, an h-index of 22 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.75.

Verification Note

This profile was built from sources fetched directly for it: the journal's official site at altlj.org (scope, ownership, COPE membership, quarterly peer-reviewed character, SAGE publication on behalf of the Melbourne co-operative), its SAGE-platform retrospective material on its 1974 founding, bibliographic reference material on its title history and ISSNs, its OpenAlex source record resolved by ISSN, and direct DOAJ API searches returning no record. Where a detail — a current editorial roster, a current price, a current index list — could not be verified from those fetched sources, this profile says so instead of printing a stale or guessed version. The journal's SAGE home remains the authority for submission at any given moment.