Indian Journal of Law and Justice

About Indian Journal of Law and Justice

Indian Journal of Law and Justice — Journal Profile

The Indian Journal of Law and Justice (IJLJ) is a peer-reviewed law journal published by the Department of Law at the University of North Bengal in West Bengal, India. It carries the print ISSN 0976-3570, the only ISSN stored on this Journals World record and the number printed on the journal's own covers and issue pages. The journal appears twice a year, in March and September, and its own institutional history traces publication back to March 2010. That makes it one of the longer-running university law journals in eastern India: by March 2026 it had reached Volume 17, Number 1, a run that a reader can follow issue by issue through the archive and the university repository. This profile explains what the journal is, who publishes it, what it publishes, how it is indexed according to its publisher, how its citation record should be read, and what an author should check before submitting. It also corrects several garbled fields on the stored directory record, because those fields, left unexamined, would mislead anyone comparing law journals.

Readers should note the corrections first. The stored record describes the publisher with a bare number rather than a name. That number is a data artefact, not a publisher. The publisher is the Department of Law, University of North Bengal, a public university department, and every primary source for the journal — its official website at ijlj.nbu.ac.in, the university's own departmental documents, and the journal's printed covers — gives that department as the publishing body. The stored record also describes the journal's focus with a quartile label, which is a ranking band and not a subject. The journal's actual subject is law in the broad sense, together with allied social-science questions that bear on legal systems, courts, rights, and public policy. Finally, the stored coverage span of 2019 to 2025 should not be read as the journal's lifespan. The journal began in 2010; a span beginning in 2019 is consistent with a database coverage window, such as the period for which a citation database has indexed its contents, and not with its founding date. Keeping those three distinctions clear — publisher, subject, and coverage — is the starting point for using this journal well.

Quick Facts

History and Institutional Home

The journal grew out of a relatively young law department. The Department of Law at the University of North Bengal has described itself as a recent centre of legal education compared with older institutions in northern India, and the journal's founding editorial presents the title as the product of a long internal process: faculty members wanted a departmental journal for several years before the first issue appeared, with moral support credited to the then Vice-Chancellor, Professor Arunabha Basumajumdar. The department's prospectus dates the journal plainly: a biennial journal entitled Indian Journal of Law and Justice, bearing ISSN 0976-3570, has been published by the department since March 2010. In its earliest framing the journal set out to encourage deep analysis and research on the many aspects of law, on the reasoning that everyone is expected to know the law of the land while in practice nobody can know the whole of it, and that careful scholarship is one answer to that paradox.

The journal's trajectory since 2010 is visible in its volume numbering and in its editorials. Volume 5 appeared in 2014, Volume 11 in 2020, Volume 12 in 2021, and the run continued through Volume 16 in 2025 and Volume 17, Number 1 in March 2026. The editorials chart a deliberate widening of ambition. The Volume 12 editorial, written as the journal entered its eleventh year during the global pandemic, described a title already recognised by the University Grants Commission and included in the UGC CARE list, and announced that since 2019 the journal had also been taken into HeinOnline, so that subscribers to that legal database could read it. Later editorials, including those for Volume 16 and Volume 17, describe a further step: the journal presents itself as enlisted by UGC CARE and indexed in Scopus, alongside HeinOnline and EBSCO. Those indexing statements are the publisher's own claims, made in its own pages, and this profile reports them as such; authors who need indexing for promotion or degree requirements should still confirm the current status in the database lists themselves, because indexing can change and because a claim in an editorial is evidence of what the publisher asserts, not a live database record.

The institutional setting matters for understanding the journal's character. The University of North Bengal serves the northern districts of West Bengal and draws students from neighbouring states and from Bhutan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Its law department runs a legal aid clinic with the State Legal Services Authorities, a Centre for Child Rights formed in 2018 in partnership with UNICEF, and a Centre for Cyber Law and Cyber Security also established in 2018. A journal housed in that department naturally leans toward questions of access to justice, rights protection, and the working of law outside metropolitan centres, even though its author base and subject matter are now international. The same departmental documents that describe the journal also describe edited volumes arising from its seminars, on subjects from public health law and privatisation of higher education to environment, governance, and human rights, which gives a fair picture of the intellectual neighbourhood in which the journal developed.

Scope: What the Journal Publishes

The journal welcomes work that promotes a better understanding of legal phenomena and of decisions made by judges, courts, and regulatory agencies. Its own statements of scope, repeated across editorials, accept theoretical papers provided they have a strong basis in law and allied social issues, case studies, and empirical analyses including empirical investigations. It declares no favour for any particular topic, while expressing a particular interest in new and emerging problems, and it has historically encouraged work on the Indian subcontinent, on the reasoning that the subcontinent's considerable institutional diversity can build a more robust body of theory and empirical evidence. At the same time it explicitly does not confine itself to that region, and aims to showcase the diversity of legal issues supplied by an international mix of authors. In practice, an author with a doctrinal, comparative, socio-legal, or empirical manuscript on a live legal problem is the journal's natural contributor, whether the setting is Indian, comparative, or drawn from another jurisdiction entirely.

The contents of recent issues show how that scope works in practice. Volume 17, Number 1 (March 2026) ranges widely: legal strategies for women's empowerment in Bangladesh; an evaluation of Nigeria's Official Secrets Act and freedom of the press; governance of public procurement in India, including the scope of judicial review of tender documents; the legal rights surrounding frozen embryos; protection of Indian migrant domestic workers in the Middle East; the vulnerability of refugee children to human trafficking in the Indian context; reproductive autonomy and abortion jurisprudence after the 2021 amendment to the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act; compensation for police custodial deaths; corporate social responsibility in Chhattisgarh and Odisha; corporate criminal liability after recent criminal-law reforms; transgender rights, both generally and within the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita; victims' rights; prisoners' remission rights under the new criminal laws; a comparative critique of Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita against Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code; the role of Constituent Assembly debates in constitutional interpretation; ecological federalism; youth-led climate action and a proposed constitutional right to climate dissent; protection of brain data in the age of artificial intelligence; forest governance and the rights of indigenous forest dwellers; gubernatorial overreach and cooperative federalism; juvenile justice; and artificial intelligence strategy measured against constitutional values. Volume 16, Number 2 (September 2025) shows the same pattern, with work on deterrence of economic crime, workplace discrimination against women in Nigeria, rural livelihood legislation, artificial intelligence through the lens of ecocide law, an empirical evaluation of legal aid counsels, gender justice in environmental governance, copyright hurdles for traditional cultural heritage, the right to die, cartel deterrence, transformative constitutionalism, and the socio-economic rights of indigenous peoples. A journal whose recent tables of contents look like this is not a narrow specialist title; it is a general law review with a strong constitutional, rights, and governance centre of gravity.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

The March 2026 issue names Dr Sujit Kumar Biswas as Chief Editor, and his editorials speak for the journal's current direction: an emphasis on scholarship at the cutting edge of law and policy research, gratitude to a standing editorial team, and an ongoing move toward accepting online submissions of articles and research papers in order to improve and expedite peer review. University documents describe the journal as double-blinded, peer reviewed, and refereed, and that description is consistent across the department's prospectus, its annual reporting, and its calls for papers, which repeat the formula of a double-blind peer-reviewed, UGC CARE listed biannual journal indexed with Scopus and HeinOnline. Authors should treat double-blind preparation seriously: manuscripts need anonymisation that survives a careful read, including removal of identifying acknowledgements and self-references phrased in the first person, because a departmental journal that advertises double-blind review as a core credential will normally return manuscripts that compromise it.

Two practical consequences follow from the journal's structure. First, because it publishes only two issues a year, each issue carries a substantial set of articles — the March 2026 issue lists well over twenty contributions — and acceptance therefore leads into a queue governed by issue planning rather than continuous online publication. Authors working to a degree, probation, or assessment deadline should ask the editorial office about the expected issue for an accepted paper rather than assuming rapid appearance. Second, because the journal's archive is hosted through the university's own site and repository, the version of record for older articles is often a PDF held in the university repository at ir.nbu.ac.in, where individual articles carry volume, issue, ISSN, and page details. Anyone citing the journal should cite from that version of record, including its stated pagination, rather than from secondary summaries.

Indexing and Discovery, Stated Carefully

Indexing is where directory profiles most often mislead, so this profile separates three kinds of evidence. The strongest evidence in hand is the publisher's own repeated statement: editorials in Volumes 16 and 17 state that the journal is enlisted by UGC CARE and indexed in Scopus, HeinOnline, and EBSCO, and university publications independent of the journal's own pages repeat the UGC CARE, Scopus, and HeinOnline claims. A HeinOnline presence is also consistent with the Volume 12 editorial's announcement that the journal had been acknowledged by HeinOnline since 2019. The second kind of evidence is aggregator reporting: secondary journal-metric services that draw on SCImago and Scopus data report the journal as an Indian law title from this publisher with Scopus-era coverage beginning around 2019 and a small but real citation footprint, which is consistent with the publisher's Scopus claim and with the stored record's 2019 start year. The third kind of evidence is absence: the Directory of Open Access Journals returned no listing for ISSN 0976-3570 in its search API when checked for this profile, so no DOAJ listing is claimed here. The journal is best described, on the evidence available, as a university law journal with publisher-claimed Scopus, HeinOnline, EBSCO, and UGC CARE status — a combination that matters greatly to Indian academics in particular, for whom UGC CARE listing and Scopus indexing carry formal weight — while any individual author should verify the live status in Scopus and the current CARE list before relying on it.

Metrics and How to Read Them

The stored record gives an h-index of 3 for this journal, and secondary reporting sourced to SCImago data agrees with that figure: an h-index of 3 means that three of the journal's articles have each been cited at least three times in the underlying database. Secondary services also report a very low SCImago Journal Rank, around 0.12 in recent reporting, and small year-to-year impact-style figures well below 1. Those numbers need context rather than embarrassment or exaggeration. Law is a slow-citing field in which much influence flows through courts, textbooks, and domestic commentary that citation databases capture poorly; Indian law journals in particular publish a large share of doctrinal and jurisdiction-specific work whose readership is real but whose Scopus citations accumulate slowly. A small h-index for a journal whose Scopus coverage appears to begin around 2019, as both the stored record and secondary reporting suggest, is therefore unsurprising: six or seven indexed years of a biannual journal produce a modest corpus, and modesty of corpus caps the h-index mechanically. What the figures do establish is that the journal is cited, that its citation record is tracked by the standard secondary services, and that it sits, as the stored record's quartile indicates, in the lower quartile band of its Scopus subject grouping in recent years. Authors should weigh that honestly: this is a credible, indexed university law review with a developing citation profile, not a high-impact international title, and a manuscript whose career value depends on a large citation audience should be placed with that reality in mind.

A further caution concerns look-alike numbers. Figures labelled as impact factors for this journal on third-party websites are not the Clarivate Journal Impact Factor unless they can be traced to Journal Citation Reports, and this profile found no evidence in its primary sources that the journal holds such a factor. Readers comparing journals should use one consistent source — Scopus CiteScore data, SCImago's SJR, or the journal's own statements — and should distrust any page that presents a large, precise impact figure for this title without naming its source and year. Where this profile gives numbers, it names their origin: h-index 3 from the stored record, consistent with SCImago-sourced secondary reporting; other precise values are deliberately left as not published in the primary sources consulted, rather than borrowed from unattributed aggregator pages.

Who Should Publish Here, and Who Should Not

The journal suits several kinds of author well. It suits the Indian law academic who needs a UGC CARE listed, Scopus-claimed venue for doctrinal, constitutional, criminal-law, or rights scholarship, and who values a readership of Indian and South Asian legal scholars. It suits early-career researchers and students — the editorials note with pride that both students and established scholars publish in its pages, and that many contributors have relied on it at an early career stage. It suits comparative lawyers whose work pairs an Indian question with another jurisdiction, as its recent issues pair Indian subjects with Bangladeshi, Nigerian, and wider material. And it suits empirical and socio-legal researchers, since the journal expressly accepts empirical investigations and has published work built on judicial data and field evaluation. It is a weaker fit for an author who needs publication within weeks, for an author whose institution counts only a Clarivate impact factor, or for highly technical work aimed at a specialist international audience in a field such as international commercial arbitration theory, where a dedicated specialist title would carry the argument further. Fit, in short, is about audience and credential structure, not about prestige in the abstract.

Submission Guidance and Verification Checklist

Prospective authors should work from the journal's official site rather than from any directory, including this one. Confirm the current call and any theme for the forthcoming issue, the manuscript categories the journal is accepting, its formatting and citation expectations, and the submission channel, because the editorials indicate a transition toward online submission and arrangements may have changed since any secondary page was written. Prepare the manuscript for double-blind review, keep the argument grounded in primary legal materials — constitutional text, statute, and case law — where the topic demands it, and make the contribution explicit: editors of general law reviews see many competent summaries, and the manuscripts that stand out state early what they add to the existing discussion. Before submitting, verify four facts independently: that the journal's Scopus status is current in the Scopus source list; that its UGC CARE listing is current; that the ISSN on the call for papers is 0976-3570; and that correspondence comes from the University of North Bengal's Department of Law. That last check matters because Indian law publishing attracts imitation journals with similar names; the genuine journal is the one published from the university department, on the university's domain, with the archive described in this profile.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Indian Journal of Law and Justice a real, peer-reviewed journal? Yes. It is published by the Department of Law, University of North Bengal, university documents describe it as double-blind peer reviewed and refereed, and its archive runs continuously from 2010 to Volume 17 in 2026.

What is its ISSN? 0976-3570. No separate electronic ISSN was stated on the official sources consulted for this profile.

How often does it appear? Twice a year, in March and September, as a biannual journal.

Is it indexed in Scopus? The publisher states that it is, in its own editorials and in university publications, and secondary SCImago-sourced reporting is consistent with Scopus coverage beginning around 2019. Verify the live source list before relying on that status for a formal requirement.

Is it in DOAJ? No listing was returned by the DOAJ search API for its ISSN when checked for this profile, and no DOAJ listing is claimed.

What subjects fit best? Constitutional law, criminal law and justice, human rights, gender and law, environmental law, governance, and comparative or empirical legal studies, judging by both its stated scope and its recent tables of contents.

What does its h-index of 3 mean? That three of its articles have each been cited at least three times in the database behind the figure. It reflects a modest, developing citation record over a relatively short indexed history, in a field where citations accumulate slowly.

Summary Assessment

The Indian Journal of Law and Justice is a durable university law review: seventeen volumes from a public university's law department, a clear biannual rhythm, double-blind review, publisher-claimed UGC CARE, Scopus, HeinOnline, and EBSCO status, and recent issues that engage seriously with India's new criminal codes, constitutional rights, gender justice, environmental governance, and the legal questions raised by artificial intelligence. Its citation metrics are small and should be reported without inflation, its stored directory record contains a garbled numeric publisher field and a quartile label where a subject should be, and its founding date of 2010 should not be confused with the later start of its database coverage. Corrected on those points, the record describes a genuine and useful venue — particularly for Indian and South Asian legal scholarship — and authors who verify its current indexing and follow its own submission instructions can approach it with confidence.