The American Journal of Comparative Law

About The American Journal of Comparative Law

The American Journal of Comparative Law: The United States' Flagship Journal for Comparative and Transnational Legal Studies

The American Journal of Comparative Law (AJCL) is a quarterly, peer-reviewed law journal founded in 1952 and published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society of Comparative Law (ASCL). It is recorded in this directory under print ISSN 0002-919X and electronic ISSN 2326-9197, and it is widely described — by its publisher, by the Society, and by law schools that host its editors — as the leading English-language journal in comparative law. That standing is not a slogan attached to a young title. The journal has appeared continuously for more than seven decades, it has been edited from some of the strongest comparative-law centres in North America, and its pages have carried work by scholars from, in Oxford University Press's own summary, all continents, regions and legal cultures of the world.

The abbreviated title used in citations is Am. J. Comp. Law. Readers who meet the journal through a citation database should note the exact title: the definite article is part of the name as the publisher presents it, The American Journal of Comparative Law, even though many catalogues shorten it by dropping "The". The journal's home on the Oxford Academic platform is under the code "ajcl", and the Society that owns it, the American Society of Comparative Law, presents the same history and scope on its own site — a useful cross-check, because the Society and the publisher describe the journal in matching terms.

Identity at a Glance

The essential bibliographic identity is as follows. Title: The American Journal of Comparative Law. Founded: 1952. Sponsoring body: the American Society of Comparative Law, for which it is the official journal. Publisher since January 2017: Oxford University Press, which took over from the Society's previous in-house publishing arrangement. Frequency: four issues a year in a normal publishing year. Language: English, with American spelling required by the author guidelines, although quotations from sources in other languages are welcomed when translated for readers. Subject field: law, specifically comparative and transnational legal studies. Print ISSN 0002-919X; online ISSN 2326-9197.

The journal is a subscription title with an optional open access route, not a fully open access journal. Its peer review is double-anonymised, according to Oxford University Press: manuscripts are stripped of identifying information, reviewers do not learn the author's identity, and the guidelines go to unusual lengths — instructing authors to use Word's Document Inspector to remove personal information from file properties, and to take a draft down from a repository or SSRN if its presence there would compromise blind review. Those details matter because they distinguish the AJCL from the student-edited American law reviews with which it is sometimes confused. Oxford states the point plainly in the guidelines: "We are not a student-run journal and do not have a large staff to edit your article. Editing remains the primary responsibility of the author." This is a faculty-edited, society-owned scholarly journal that happens to sit inside the American legal academy.

A History That Begins With the Society Itself

The journal cannot be separated from the history of its Society. The American Society of Comparative Law elected its first officers in 1951 — President Phanor J. Eder of the American Foreign Law Association, Vice President Hessel E. Yntema of the University of Michigan, Secretary Alexis C. Coudert of Columbia's Parker School, and Treasurer David F. Cavers of Harvard — and, in the Society's own historical account, "within one year they had established The American Journal of Comparative Law, with Hessel Yntema as its Editor-in-Chief." The founding board was a roll-call of the scholars who built comparative law in the United States: Joseph Dainow, Walter Derenberg, Albert Ehrenzweig, Jerome Hall, John Hazard, Heinrich Kronstein, Myres McDougal, Kurt Nadelmann, Max Rheinstein, Rudolf Schlesinger, David Stern and Arthur von Mehren.

The first issue carried a programmatic statement from Roscoe Pound, dean emeritus of Harvard Law School, on the role comparative law had played in the development of American law. Pound argued, in words the Society still quotes, that comparing "the authoritative techniques received in different bodies of law and the modes of applying them" would yield "a complete, well-rounded comparative method well worthy of a place among the received methods of the science of law", and that such a method was needed "in the economically unifying world of today". Yntema, the founding editor, set out his own vision for the journal in the same founding moment. The timing was deliberate: the early 1950s were years in which American law was being drawn into sustained contact with other legal systems through post-war reconstruction, international trade and new international institutions, and the founders believed the United States needed a serious, dedicated periodical for that encounter rather than occasional comparative excursions inside domestic journals.

Hessel E. Yntema edited the journal from 1952 to 1966, an unusually long founding editorship that gave the title its character. The succession that followed reads as a history of the discipline: B. J. George (1966–1968), Alfred F. Conard (1968–1970), John G. Fleming (1971–1987), Richard M. Buxbaum (1987–2003), George Bermann (2003–2006), James Gordley (2003–2008), Mathias W. Reimann (2003–2013) and James V. Feinerman (2014–2015). In 2014 Helge Dedek of McGill University and Franz Werro of Georgetown University became co-editors-in-chief, a pairing that expressed the journal's transatlantic and bilingual ambitions — Dedek directing McGill's Institute of Comparative Law, Werro holding chairs at Georgetown and at Fribourg in Switzerland. By the Society's October 2025 board meeting, the editors-in-chief reporting to the Board of Editors were Vivian Curran and Jacques deLisle, so readers checking the masthead should expect the leadership to have moved on from the Dedek–Werro pairing that many older secondary sources still list.

The journal's institutional home has moved with its editors. Oxford and the Society both record past hosts including the University of Michigan Law School — its birthplace — the UC Berkeley School of Law and Columbia Law School, with the Georgetown University Law Center and the McGill University Faculty of Law jointly serving as host in the period described on the publisher's current About page. A Boston College Law School account from 2015, when its professor Richard Albert joined as a book reviews editor, noted that the journal then had subscribers in more than 80 countries — a concrete indication that, despite "American" in its title, its circulation and authorship were already thoroughly international.

The Move to Oxford University Press

For most of its life the Society published the journal in-house, taking responsibility, as its then president David Gerber put it, "for all aspects of publication". That changed with an agreement announced for January 2017, under which Oxford University Press became the publisher. Gerber explained the reasoning at the time: the Society was convinced that Oxford's standing as a global publisher, its distribution network and its production team would develop the journal and make it "increasingly accessible to readers everywhere". Rhodri Jackson, Oxford's editorial director for the humanities, social sciences and law, welcomed the AJCL as "another world-leading publication" joining a comparative-law list spanning books, journals and online products.

The practical consequences of the move are still visible. The journal sits on the Oxford Academic platform alongside Oxford's other law titles, with advance-access publication of individual articles as they are ready, digital object identifiers assigned at the final-version stage, and journal-level metrics displayed and updated by the publisher. Submissions, however, run through Scholastica rather than through Oxford's own manuscript system — a reminder that the editorial office remains an academic operation anchored in the Society and its host law schools, while production, hosting, sales and archiving are a university press's business.

Scope: What "Comparative and Transnational" Covers Here

Oxford's statement of scope is precise, and it is worth quoting in substance because authors routinely misjudge it. The journal "is devoted to comparative and transnational legal studies – including, among other subjects, comparative law, comparative and transnational legal history and theory, private international law and conflict of laws, and the study of legal systems, cultures, and traditions other than those of the US." Two implications follow. First, a purely domestic American law article, however strong, is outside the remit unless it is placed in genuine comparative or transnational conversation. Second, the journal is not confined to private law: its own submission categories, published in the author guidelines, run across Comparative/Transnational Law; Comparative/Transnational Legal Theory; Comparative/Transnational Legal History; Legal Traditions and Legal Culture; Private International Law and Conflict of Laws; Religious Law; "Foreign" Law — the guidelines give Brazilian and Korean law as examples; International and Supranational Law; and the category the guidelines label with the traditional term for harmonisation projects, rendered here in substance as the unification of law.

The Society's 2025 editors' report illustrates how that scope plays out in practice. The issues published that year carried, between them, 32 articles and 12 book reviews, spanning constitutional law, criminal law and private law, with notable contributions engaging China and Asia, the EU and the United States. Book reviews are a real department of the journal, not an afterthought: it has maintained named book reviews editors — Paul Dubinsky of Wayne State was joined in that role by Richard Albert in 2015 — and the editors accept both commissioned and unsolicited reviews of new books across all fields of comparative law. For scholars, the review section is one of the journal's services to the field, mapping new monographs in many languages and traditions for an English-language readership.

Editorial Process, Selectivity and What Submission Involves

Few law journals state their selectivity as openly as this one. The author guidelines say the journal "receives hundreds of submissions per year and accepts only six to eight percent for publication", and adds a rule that surprises authors used to law reviews: the journal does not ordinarily publish an article by an author who has published in it within the last three years. The Society's 2025 editors' report put that year's acceptance rate at about ten percent with a desk-rejection rate of 83 percent — figures that differ from the guidelines because they describe one particular, catch-up year's flow rather than the standing expectation, and both are reported here with their sources so that readers can weigh them. The same 2025 report records that the journal published five issues that year with a sixth forthcoming, bringing a delayed schedule back on track, that desk decisions were typically issued within about ten days thanks to weekly editorial meetings, and that the average time from submission to publication had improved to around one year.

The standing guidelines give the operational detail. Articles should be between 10,000 and 20,000 words including footnotes and endnotes; the journal rarely publishes work longer or shorter than that band. Submissions must be exclusive — an article under review at another English-language journal must be withdrawn from that journal to receive consideration here — and must be accompanied by a statement that the work has not been published elsewhere and is not under review elsewhere. Manuscripts go through Scholastica, anonymised, with a separate information sheet carrying the author's name, biographical footnote and acknowledgements, contact details, an abstract of no more than 300 words, five to ten keywords, and exactly one category from the journal's list. Authors whose work is not sent out for review are almost always notified within two weeks; for work sent to referees, the journal aims to decide within three months and, in almost all cases, communicates within six months, with the review itself typically taking around ten weeks. Accepted papers have traditionally appeared in an issue within about twelve months, with online publication sooner — although one passage of the guidelines, written for a slower period, warns authors that submission to publication is "generally over eighteen months" and urges them to supply a stable, permanent email address. The honest summary is that timelines have varied by period and the journal itself publishes both a faster recent account and a more cautious standing one.

On acceptance, citation form is the author's responsibility: all citations must be in footnotes and conform to The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (the guidelines cite the 20th edition), with Table T.2 of the Bluebook governing foreign citations — a fitting requirement for a journal whose footnotes routinely move between legal systems. The journal practises double-anonymised review, states its commitment to the publication-ethics standards of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), screens manuscripts for integrity problems, and requires authors to clear permissions for third-party material for print and electronic use, worldwide, for the life of the work.

Publication Model and Costs

The AJCL is a hybrid title. The default route is the standard subscription licence, under which the article is published without an open access charge to the author; authors who wish — or whose funders require — may instead choose an open access licence after acceptance and pay the open access charge set by Oxford University Press, and Oxford's growing set of Read and Publish agreements means that for authors at participating institutions that charge may be covered by their institution. The exact open access charge is set by the publisher and can change; it is not printed in the journal's author guidelines, so this profile does not state a figure — readers should check the journal's page on the Oxford Academic site for the current amount rather than rely on third-party listings. One cost the guidelines do state is for colour: colour figures can be produced in print at 600 US dollars per figure, payable by the author. Authors retain the right to share the original, pre-submission version of their work as a preprint, subject to the journal's self-archiving conditions and to the anonymisation rule during review described above.

Metrics and Indexing, With Their Sources

Oxford University Press displays the journal's current metrics on its About page, and those publisher figures are the ones to cite. For 2025, Oxford lists an Impact Factor of 1.3 and a five-year Impact Factor of 1.6 from Clarivate, a Law ranking by Impact Factor of 119 out of 443 journals, a cited half-life of 16.1 years — exceptionally long for any field, and characteristic of legal scholarship, which keeps citing foundational work for decades — an immediacy index of 0.3, an Eigenfactor score of 0.0005 and an Article Influence score of 0.61. From Scopus, Oxford lists a 2025 CiteScore of 2.1, a Law ranking by CiteScore of 366 out of 1,162, and a Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) of 1.072. Oxford also reports 125,776 full-text usages for 2025, a readership figure that underlines how heavily the journal is now read online rather than in print.

According to Scimago-based journal listings, the journal's h-index stands at 56 and its SCImago Journal Rank at about 0.437, with a best quartile of Q2 in Law and in Social Sciences (miscellaneous); those aggregator figures are attributed here to Scimago because they originate in Scopus data as processed by that service, and they can move between annual updates. Indexing coverage recorded for the journal includes Scopus — with coverage years listed from the 1960s onward, albeit with gaps in the earlier decades (1963, 1974, 1977, 1985–1988, 1990, 1992 and 1995 to the present in one recent listing) — and the Social Sciences Citation Index within the Web of Science, which is the basis of the Clarivate Impact Factor above. The journal's long back run is also held in JSTOR, the archive through which many readers outside law schools encounter its older volumes. None of these numbers should be read as a verdict on an individual article: in comparative law, influence is often exercised through books, translations and court and classroom use that citation indexes capture only partially, which is precisely why the journal pairs its metrics with a serious book-review operation.

Who Reads It, and How to Use This Journal Well

The readership is the international community of comparative lawyers: academics in law faculties, judges and practitioners dealing with cross-border questions, and scholars in adjacent fields — legal history, legal theory, political science and area studies — who need a reliable account of a legal system not their own. Because the journal insists on work that puts systems in conversation, its articles are a good first port of call when a researcher needs to know not merely what the rule in another jurisdiction is, but how that rule functions in its own institutional and cultural setting and what its encounter with other systems reveals. The "Foreign Law" category is particularly useful in this respect: a deep study of one non-United States system, written for outsiders, is squarely within the journal's mission.

For prospective authors, the practical lessons from the journal's own documents are unusually clear. Stay inside the 10,000–20,000 word band. Make the comparative or transnational contribution explicit and structural, not decorative — a domestic analysis with a comparative coda is the classic desk rejection. Respect the exclusivity rule and the three-year rule for recent contributors. Anonymise thoroughly, including file metadata and pre-postings. Put citations in Bluebook footnote form, with foreign citations handled as the Bluebook directs. And choose the single submission category carefully, since the editors use it to route the manuscript. For librarians and readers, the key facts are the two ISSNs above, the Oxford Academic home, the JSTOR archive for older volumes, and the Society's site, which carries the journal's history and the Society news — including editor transitions — that publisher pages sometimes update more slowly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The American Journal of Comparative Law the same journal as the record titled "American Journal of Comparative Law" without "The"? Yes — they are one journal under a shortened form of its title, sharing ISSN 0002-919X and 2326-9197. This directory carries a second, older profile under the shortened title; the two records describe the same Oxford-published, Society-owned journal and are reported together in this profile's notes for consolidation.

Who owns the journal, and who publishes it? The American Society of Comparative Law owns it and it is the Society's official journal; Oxford University Press has published it under agreement with the Society since January 2017, after a long period of in-house Society publishing.

How often does it appear? Four issues a year in a normal year. In 2025 the editors reported publishing five issues with a sixth forthcoming, as a deliberate catch-up that restored the schedule — so a volume count for that year alone should not be read as a change of frequency.

Does it charge authors to publish? Not under the standard subscription route. An optional open access route carries a publisher-set charge after acceptance, which some institutions cover under Read and Publish agreements; the current charge is not stated in the author guidelines and should be checked on the Oxford Academic site. Colour figures in print are charged at 600 US dollars per figure, according to the guidelines.

What are its current impact figures? According to Oxford University Press's own metrics display: a 2025 Impact Factor of 1.3 (five-year 1.6) from Clarivate and a 2025 CiteScore of 2.1 from Scopus. According to Scimago, its h-index is 56 and its best quartile is Q2 in Law.

Where do I submit? Online via Scholastica, following the journal's author guidelines on the Oxford Academic site — not by email to the editors, and not simultaneously to another English-language journal.