Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum

About Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum

Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum — At a Glance

The Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum (often shortened to DELPF) is a student-edited publication of Duke Law School in the United States. It examines environmental issues from legal, scientific, economic and public policy perspectives, a positioning confirmed on the Duke Law Scholarship Repository, which lists the journal with print ISSN 1064-3958 and online ISSN 2328-9686. Those two identifiers are the anchor for this profile: they match the ISSNs stored on this Journals World record, and they are the identifiers a reader should use when checking the journal in a library catalogue, in SCImago, or on the publisher's own pages. The journal is affiliated, in addition to the Law School, with Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences and with the Sanford School of Public Policy, and that triple affiliation explains much of its character. Where a conventional law review speaks mainly to lawyers, this Forum was built to speak across disciplines, and its articles routinely combine doctrinal legal analysis with scientific evidence, economic reasoning and policy design in a single piece.

Identity and Identifiers

Identity matters for this journal because environmental law titles are easy to confuse. Several American law schools publish environmental law reviews with similar names, and citation databases sometimes shorten the title to a form that could belong to another publication. The reliable disambiguation is the ISSN pair. The Duke Law Scholarship Repository gives 1064-3958 as the print ISSN and 2328-9686 as the online ISSN, and SCImago lists the same two numbers, in the same order, for the Duke title. If a catalogue, a syllabus or a citation shows a different ISSN, the reader is almost certainly looking at a different journal, however similar the name may appear. The stored record on Journals World originally described the publisher only by an internal numeric code; that code is not a publisher name, and the correct institutional attribution is Duke Law School and Duke Law Publications, as set out above. Readers verifying this journal for a tenure file, a submission decision or a library order should therefore start from the repository page, confirm both ISSNs, and only then move on to questions of scope, indexing and fit.

History and Development

According to the journal's own history, reproduced on its Duke site and in the SCImago scope note, the Forum began in 1991 as an interdisciplinary magazine published annually by Duke University School of Law. Since then it has grown into a traditional environmental law journal, while retaining its interdisciplinary roots. That evolution is visible in the archive. Early volumes had the character of a magazine that introduced environmental questions to a broad legal readership; later volumes present full scholarly articles, with footnoted legal argument, engagement with scientific literature and sustained policy analysis. From Volume 7, in fall 1996, two issues were published per volume, a change noted in the repository description, and the journal also developed an annual symposium each fall, bringing academics, practitioners and policy makers to Duke to address a shared theme. Recent volumes confirm that the journal remains active at a high level: the Duke site carries, for example, Volume 36, Issue 1 (2026) material on state siting of renewable energy, and Volume 35 (2024) material on cap-and-trade policy and climate change mitigation. A journal that began as a magazine in 1991 and is publishing its thirty-sixth volume in 2026 has a continuous, checkable publication history, and prospective authors can read that history directly in the freely accessible archive rather than relying on a summary.

Publisher and Institutional Home

The journal's home is Duke Law School, one of the law schools at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. SCImago names the publisher as Duke Law Publications, and the Duke Law Scholarship Repository hosts the journal among the law school's journals and peer-reviewed series. The institutional setting is not decorative. A student-edited law journal lives or dies by the strength of its host institution: the host provides the faculty environment, the library, the symposium audience and the continuity that allows a new editorial board each year to inherit a functioning publication. DELPF draws its staff from three parts of the university — the Law School, the Nicholas School for the Environment, and the Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy, now the Sanford School of Public Policy — and its own description explains that new members, both JD and non-JD, are brought onto the journal on the basis of writing skill, research ability and interest in environmental law and policy. That mixed staff is a deliberate editorial resource. An article that turns on the science of wetlands, the economics of emissions trading or the politics of energy siting can be edited by students who are actually studying those subjects, which is rarer than it sounds in legal publishing.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The scope, in the journal's own words, is scholarship that examines environmental issues by drawing on legal, scientific, economic and public policy resources. In practice that covers the full terrain of modern environmental law. Readers will find work on climate change law and policy, including emissions trading, adaptation and the legal architecture of national climate commitments; on energy law, including renewable energy siting, grid questions and the tension between state and local control of land use; on natural resources law, water law and public lands; on pollution control and the major federal statutes that govern air, water and waste in the United States; on environmental justice and the distribution of environmental burdens; and on the administrative law and litigation strategy that determine how environmental rules are made and challenged. The 2026 article on state siting of renewable energy, which weighs streamlined state approval for clean energy against local control and agricultural concerns, is a representative example: it is a legal article, but its argument cannot be understood without the underlying energy, land-use and climate facts, and the Forum is designed for exactly that kind of piece. Authors whose work is purely doctrinal, with no environmental or policy dimension, will find the journal a poor fit; authors whose work sits at the meeting point of law and an environmental problem will find it a natural home.

Editorial Model and Peer Review

DELPF is a student-edited and student-run publication, following the American law review model. That model differs from the peer review model used in most scientific journals, and authors from outside legal academia should understand the difference before submitting. Manuscripts are assessed by student editors, working within the journal's institutional culture and with the benefit of the journal's cross-school staff, rather than by anonymous external referees chosen for a single manuscript. The journal's own material stresses writing skill and research ability as the qualities it looks for in its members, and its symposium and article choices reflect editorial judgement about which environmental questions matter now. The repository listing describes DELPF among Duke Law's journals and peer-reviewed series, and the stored Journals World record describes it as peer-reviewed; the precise description an author should rely on for a CV or a promotion file is the one given by Duke itself, and authors whose institutions require a specific form of external peer review should confirm in advance how a student-edited law journal is treated under their local rules. That is a general feature of American law reviews, not a defect of this journal, and it is better clarified before submission than after acceptance.

Publication Pattern and the Archive

The Forum has adopted the Open Access Law Journal Principles, and its issues are openly accessible. The repository description states that all issues are provided for download in PDF format free of charge from Volume 1 (1991), on a per-volume basis, and that starting with Volume 7 two issues were published per volume. For a researcher, that complete open archive is one of the journal's strongest features. It allows a prospective author to read whole recent issues, to see how articles are framed, how much scientific and economic material the editors expect, how footnotes are used, and whether the conversation in the journal is one the author's own work can join. It allows a reader without a subscription to reach the scholarship directly, which matters in environmental law, where practitioners, agency staff, community organisations and journalists are part of the real audience. It also allows a librarian or an evaluator to verify the journal's claims about its own history in minutes. Authors should use the archive as their primary style and fit guide: the published articles are a more reliable guide to what the editors accept than any third-party description, including this profile.

Indexing and Bibliometric Indicators

SCImago lists this journal with H-index 24, coverage 1996–2000 and 2002–2026, and publisher Duke Law Publications; those figures are taken from the SCImago journal page fetched in the foreground for this profile, and they should be attributed to SCImago when quoted. An H-index of 24 means, in SCImago's Scopus-based accounting, that 24 articles in the journal have each been cited at least 24 times. For a specialist law journal, whose citation community is smaller and slower than that of a general science title, that is a solid, credible record of sustained use, neither inflated nor negligible. The journal's category position should be read in the same measured way: environmental law journals compete in rankings built largely for scientific fields, and a modest quartile position in such a ranking says little about standing within legal scholarship, where reputation, host institution and readership carry weight that citation counts capture only partly. A DOAJ listing for this title could not be verified from the DOAJ search API output obtained for this profile, and OpenAlex figures for this journal could not be verified for this profile because the OpenAlex API returned a rate-limit response when queried; no OpenAlex citation figure is therefore quoted here. Authors who need a Web of Science or Scopus status statement for a specific reporting year should check the relevant master list directly, because indexing lists change and a statement that was correct in one year may not hold in the next.

Publication Model and Costs

The journal's access model is unusually clear. It has adopted open access principles for law journals, and its archive is free to read and download, as described above. That means readers do not face a paywall for the published scholarship, and authors do not need to negotiate a separate open access route in order for practitioners and policy readers to reach their work. Article processing charges for this journal are not publicly disclosed in the official material fetched for this profile, and no submission fee figure is quoted here for the same reason: a fee should only be stated when an official page states it. American student-edited law journals traditionally operate on an institutional model funded by the host school rather than on author-facing charges, but an author who needs a definitive answer for a grant or a departmental form should ask the journal directly through its Duke contact route and keep the reply on file. What can be stated with confidence, from the journal's own pages, is the reader side of the model: the scholarship is openly accessible, volume by volume, back to 1991.

Who Should Consider This Journal

The best-fit author is a legal scholar, an interdisciplinary researcher or an advanced practitioner whose work addresses an environmental problem through law and policy together. Doctoral researchers in environmental law, fellows at university institutes, and scientists or economists who co-author with legal scholars will all find the journal's cross-disciplinary staff and readership congenial. The symposium tradition is also relevant to fit: scholars who want their work to be part of a curated conversation on a theme, rather than a standalone item in a general issue, should watch the journal's symposium topics and calls. By contrast, authors with a purely scientific manuscript, with no legal or policy argument, should look to an environmental science journal; authors with a narrow doctrinal note on a non-environmental subject should look to a general law review; and authors who require a journal with a Journal Impact Factor for a specific institutional rule should verify whether a law journal without that particular indicator satisfies the rule before investing in a submission. Fit, for this title, is primarily about subject and method, and only secondarily about metrics.

Preparing a Submission

The journal welcomes unsolicited submissions, and its Duke pages direct submissions and questions about the publication process to the journal's editorial contact at Duke Law. Before submitting, an author should do four things, each grounded in the journal's actual practice. First, read at least one recent issue in full from the open archive, including a symposium piece, to calibrate length, tone and the balance between legal argument and supporting science or economics. Second, frame the abstract and introduction so that a reader from the Nicholas School or the Sanford School, as well as a law reader, can see the contribution quickly; the editorial staff is drawn from all three schools, and a framing that speaks only to doctrinal lawyers undersells interdisciplinary work in this venue. Third, check every citation to the journal itself and to other environmental law titles against the original sources, using the ISSN pair in this profile to make sure the right journal is being cited. Fourth, state the environmental problem and the legal or policy change the article proposes in the opening pages; the Forum's published articles characteristically move from a concrete problem — a siting dispute, a trading scheme, a warming atmosphere — to a developed argument, and manuscripts that postpone their claim for many pages are harder for any editorial board to place. None of this guarantees acceptance, but it aligns a manuscript with the journal as it actually operates.

Risks, Confusions and Verification Steps

Three confusions recur with this title. The first is title confusion with other environmental law reviews, addressed above through the ISSN pair. The second is publisher confusion: the stored record that this profile replaces named the publisher only as a number, and citations or database entries that copy that number as if it were a name should be corrected to Duke Law School / Duke Law Publications wherever they appear. The third is metric confusion: a single H-index or quartile, quoted without its source and year, is routinely misread as a judgement of an individual article. The SCImago figures in this profile are journal-level, Scopus-based and year-specific to the listing fetched; they describe the venue, not the quality of any one piece published in it. A careful reader verifying this journal today should follow a short sequence: open the Duke Law Scholarship Repository listing and confirm the title and both ISSNs; open the SCImago page and confirm the H-index and coverage; read a recent issue in the open archive; and, for any question of fees, peer review treatment or indexing status that carries institutional consequences, obtain the answer from Duke or from the relevant master list directly. Each step takes minutes, and together they replace guesswork with a documented record.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum? Print ISSN 1064-3958 and online ISSN 2328-9686, as listed by the Duke Law Scholarship Repository and by SCImago.

Who publishes the journal? It is a student-edited publication of Duke Law School; SCImago lists the publisher as Duke Law Publications. It is affiliated with the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences and the Sanford School of Public Policy.

When did the journal begin? It began in 1991 as an interdisciplinary magazine published annually, and has since grown into a traditional environmental law journal, according to the journal's own history.

Is the journal open to read? Yes. The journal has adopted open access principles for law journals, and its issues are provided for download free of charge from Volume 1 (1991) through the Duke repository, as described on the repository pages fetched for this profile.

What is its H-index? SCImago lists an H-index of 24, from the SCImago journal page fetched for this profile. Quote it with its source and year, as a journal-level indicator.

Does it charge authors? An article processing charge is not publicly disclosed in the official material fetched for this profile; ask the journal directly if a documented answer is required.

Is it the right venue for a purely scientific paper? No. Its scope is environmental issues examined through legal, scientific, economic and public policy resources together; a paper with no legal or policy argument belongs in a science journal.

Sources and Editorial Note

This profile is anchored to the Journals World record for this post (title, slug and stored ISSNs 1064-3958 and 2328-9686) and was researched from the Duke Law Scholarship Repository listing for the journal, the journal's own Duke pages including its history and recent volume material, and the SCImago journal page for the title, all fetched in the foreground for this batch. The DOAJ search API was queried and no listing statement is made on its basis, for the reasons given in the indexing section. OpenAlex was queried through its ISSN endpoint and returned a rate-limit response, so no OpenAlex figure is used. Where a fact could not be verified from a fetched source, this profile says so in plain terms rather than filling the gap.