The Journal of Law Economics and Organization

About The Journal of Law Economics and Organization

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization — Full Profile

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, usually shortened to JLEO, is an English-language, peer-reviewed academic journal published by Oxford University Press. It was established in 1985 and it occupies a distinctive place in social science publishing: it was created not as a conventional law review and not as a conventional economics journal, but as a shared home for work that explains legal rules, firms, markets, courts, legislatures and bureaucracies together, using the tools of economics and organisation theory. The record on this site lists the journal with print ISSN 8756-6222 and online ISSN 1465-7341, and those identifiers match the identifiers shown in bibliographic records for the Oxford title. Publisher country is the United Kingdom, through Oxford University Press, while the journal's intellectual home and support are closely tied to Yale Law School in the United States, a connection explained in its history below.

This profile is written from official and bibliographic sources consulted in October 2026, principally the journal pages on Oxford Academic, together with long-standing bibliographic descriptions of the title. Where a fact changes often — an editor's term, a metric for a single year, or a submission-system detail — the year or the source context is given, so that a reader can check the current position on the journal's own site before acting on it. Nothing in this profile should be treated as a substitute for the journal's current author instructions at the moment of submission.

At a Glance

History and Founding Idea

The journal began in 1985. Its founding editors were Oliver E. Williamson, the economist whose work on transaction costs and governance structures reshaped the study of firms, and Jerry L. Mashaw, a Yale law scholar whose work addressed administrative law and public institutions. That pairing matters for understanding everything the journal has published since. Williamson brought a question from economics: why are some activities organised inside a firm, some through contracts in a market, and some through hybrid arrangements that sit between the two? Mashaw brought a question from law: how do public institutions actually make decisions, and how should legal design respond to the way bureaucracies, courts and legislatures behave in practice? JLEO was built at the crossing point of those two questions.

The journal is supported by the Olin Center for Studies in Law, Economics, and Public Policy at Yale Law School, and Oxford's own article pages carry the line that the journal is published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Yale University. That arrangement helps explain the journal's character. It is a university-linked journal with a commercial academic publisher's production, distribution and platform behind it. Authors therefore encounter two things at once: a scholarly community centred on law, economics and public policy, and the Oxford Academic platform, with its standard production workflows, licensing options, archiving and discoverability services.

The timing of the founding also matters. The mid-1980s were a period when the economic analysis of law was expanding well beyond its earlier focus on antitrust and common-law efficiency. Contract theory was developing rapidly, the theory of the firm was being rebuilt around incomplete contracts and governance, and political scientists were formalising the study of legislatures, committees and delegation. A journal that required a paper to speak to lawyers and economists at the same time, and that treated organisation as a subject in its own right rather than as background, filled a real gap. Over four decades the gap has not closed; if anything, the study of platforms, regulators, courts, corporate governance and state capacity has made the journal's original three-way conversation more central.

Readers who browse the back catalogue will see the field develop in the journal's pages. Early volumes are rich in work on governance structures, contracts and legal institutions. Later volumes add more formal political economy, more experimental and empirical work, and more work on the internal life of organisations — incentives, culture, hierarchy, and the way information moves, or fails to move, inside firms and public agencies. The journal has never been a general economics journal and it has never been a doctrinal law journal. Its continuity lies in a method and a set of questions, not in a single topic.

Aims and Scope, in the Journal's Own Terms

Oxford describes the journal as an interdisciplinary exercise. In paraphrase, it aims to improve understanding of complex phenomena by looking at them from a combined perspective of law, economics and organisation, or from a pairing of two of those three. The word organisation is used broadly. Work drawing on political science, psychology and sociology is explicitly within the conversation, provided it speaks to the journal's core concerns. The study of institutions — above all economic, legal and political institutions — is treated as especially important and as needing careful analytic study.

That short scope statement rewards close reading, because it tells prospective authors three practical things. First, a paper does not need to cover all three words in the title. A two-way combination is enough: a law-and-economics paper, an economics-of-organisation paper, or a paper on legal organisation can each fit, provided the contribution is clear. Second, the unit of interest is usually an institution or a governance arrangement, not only a price or a doctrine. Papers that ask how a rule, a contract, a court structure, a committee system or a firm's internal design shapes behaviour are speaking the journal's language. Third, analytic care is prized. The journal welcomes formal theory, empirical work and carefully argued institutional analysis, but in each case the mechanism needs to be stated plainly enough that a reader from a neighbouring discipline can follow it and judge it.

In practice, the scope includes, among other subjects: contracts and contract design; the boundaries and internal organisation of firms; corporate governance and corporate finance where the question is institutional or organisational; property rights and their enforcement; courts, judging and litigation; criminal justice institutions analysed economically; legislatures, voting and delegation; bureaucracy and administrative organisation; regulation and regulatory design; corruption and state capacity; and the political economy of legal and economic institutions. Work on experimental and behavioural approaches also appears where it illuminates an institutional question, for example how a formal property-rights reform changes behaviour toward strangers even in the absence of strict enforcement, a question addressed in a recent article highlighted in the journal's issue lists.

What the Journal Publishes, and What It Does Not

JLEO publishes research articles that make an original contribution to the understanding of law, economics and organisation. The strongest submissions usually share a recognisable shape: a puzzling institutional fact or a contested governance arrangement; a clear mechanism that explains it; evidence, a model, or a disciplined comparative argument that tests or develops the mechanism; and a conclusion that tells readers something general about how institutions work, beyond the single case studied. A paper that reports an interesting case without extracting that general lesson will struggle, however well executed the case study is. A paper that develops a model without connecting it to a legal or organisational question that readers recognise will also struggle.

Equally, authors should understand what sits outside the usual fit. Pure price theory with no institutional content belongs in a general or field economics journal. Pure doctrinal exposition with no analytic or empirical claim about how a rule works belongs in a law review. Management research that does not engage law, economics or political institutions may fit an organisation-science journal better. This is not a judgement about quality; it is a judgement about audience. JLEO's readers arrive expecting a conversation across law, economics and organisation, and the editors select for that conversation.

The journal also maintains an annual article prize, the Oliver E. Williamson Prize for Best Article, named for its founding editor. Oxford's prize page states that the prize awards 1,500 US dollars to the author of the most original and innovative paper accepted for publication in the journal during the year preceding the award, that all contributors are eligible with preference given to younger scholars, and that the sitting editor, co-editors and editorial board members cannot be considered. The existence of the prize is a useful signal about values: originality and innovation are named explicitly, rather than technical display alone.

Publisher, Ownership and the Yale Connection

Oxford University Press is the publisher. It provides the Oxford Academic platform, production, subscriptions and licensing, marketing, and the journal's presence in the major discovery services. The journal's disclaimer on Oxford Academic names the Journal, Yale University and Oxford University Press together, and states that views in articles are those of the authors. That wording reflects the dual character described above: editorial identity rooted in a university scholarly community, publishing services provided by Oxford.

For librarians and bibliographers, the practical identifiers are the two ISSNs in the table above, the Oxford journal code jleo used in its web addresses, and DOI registration through Oxford for individual articles, with article DOIs in the form used across Oxford journals. Article copyright lines in recent issues follow the pattern of authors' copyright with publication by Oxford University Press on behalf of Yale University, subject to the licence the author has chosen.

Authors considering an open-access route should read Oxford's current licensing and charges pages for this journal at the time of acceptance, because charges and licence options are set by the publisher and can change. This profile does not state a current article processing charge, because no stable figure for this journal was confirmed in the official pages summarised here, and inventing one would mislead authors about cost. The safe practice is simple: check the journal's charges page before submission if cost will decide where you submit, and check again at acceptance, when the actual licence choice is made.

Editorial Leadership and Board

The editor-in-chief named in the bibliographic and journal sources consulted for this profile is Andrea Prat of Columbia University. Prat is an organisational and political economist whose own research on incentives, communication and institutions sits squarely in the journal's tradition, which is typical of the journal's leadership pattern: editors are usually scholars whose work itself crosses the law, economics and organisation boundary. Oxford also highlights an Editor's Choice collection selected by the editor-in-chief, a small but telling feature: the editor actively curates which published work new readers should start with.

Beneath the editor-in-chief sits a team of co-editors and an editorial board drawn from law schools, economics departments and business schools. Board composition changes over time and the authoritative list is the current board page on Oxford Academic. Rather than reproduce a list here that could go stale and could misattribute a role to someone who has rotated off, this profile directs readers to that page and notes the pattern to look for: breadth across law, economics, political science and organisation studies, and a strong presence of scholars working on contracts, governance and political institutions. If you are choosing between journals partly on the basis of who will handle your paper, the current board page, not any secondary profile, is the source to trust.

Editorial handling follows the publisher's ethics framework. The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics and subscribes to its principles, as Oxford states on the journal pages. Oxford's policies also govern conflicts of interest, so an editor with a conflict in relation to a submission should not handle it. Authors should disclose their own conflicts and funding in the manner the submission system requires, and should not submit a manuscript that is under consideration elsewhere at the same time.

Peer Review and the Submission Process

Oxford states on its reasons-to-publish page for this journal that submissions go through a rigorous, double-anonymised peer review process. Double-anonymised means that reviewers are not told the authors' identities and authors are not told the reviewers' identities, so manuscripts should be prepared with identifying material removed from the main file in the way the submission system instructs. That single fact shapes practical preparation: remove self-identifying acknowledgements from the anonymised file, write self-citations in the third person where the instructions require it, and check document properties for names before uploading.

Submissions are made through Editorial Express for JLEO, according to the submission information summarised from journal sources. Authors should use the portal link from the Oxford journal site rather than a bookmarked or third-party address, because portal addresses are exactly the kind of detail that can change and that a fraudulent look-alike could imitate. Inside the system, expect to supply the manuscript, an abstract, keywords and classification information, and declarations the publisher requires. Read the journal's general instructions page in full before uploading; length expectations, data and code expectations, and file-format requirements are stated there and are not repeated here, precisely because they are the details most likely to be updated.

On data and replication, authors of empirical work should assume that a serious institutional-economics journal will care about whether results can be checked. Prepare data and code as you write, not after acceptance, keep a record of data licences and permissions, and be ready to explain any restriction on sharing, for example where data are confidential or were supplied under a use agreement. Where a restriction exists, saying so clearly and early is far better than discovering the problem at the production stage.

Oxford has in the past publicised a comparatively quick first-decision performance for this journal, citing an average turnaround for new submissions of 47 days in 2021 on its reasons-to-publish page. That is a historical figure for one year, quoted here with its year attached; it is not a promise for any individual manuscript, and a paper that goes to several reviewers, or that arrives in a busy period, can take longer. Authors planning around a tenure, funding or job-market deadline should build in generous margin rather than plan around an average.

Indexing, Abstracting and Discoverability

Oxford's About page lists a long set of abstracting and indexing services for this journal. In summary, the list includes Scopus; the Social Sciences Citation Index and related Clarivate services including Current Contents for the social and behavioural sciences, Social SciSearch and Journal Citation Reports for the social sciences; EconLit and the Journal of Economic Literature; the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences; Criminal Justice Abstracts; legal indexes including the Index to Legal Periodicals and Books, the Current Law Index, the Legal Journals Index and Legal Trac; LexisNexis; a set of ProQuest databases including ABI/INFORM collections, ProQuest Central and the ProQuest Research Library; the Social Science Research Network; Periodicals Index Online; Infotrac; the International Political Science Abstracts; and the Standard Periodical Directory. That breadth is itself informative: the journal is indexed as a law journal, as an economics journal and as a social-science journal at the same time, which is exactly the interdisciplinary position its scope claims.

For authors, the practical consequence is discoverability across audiences who search in different places. A legal scholar searching a legal index, an economist searching EconLit, and a political scientist searching a social-science index can each encounter the same article. For evaluators, the presence of the journal in the Social Sciences Citation Index and in Scopus means citation-based indicators exist for it in both major citation systems, although the values differ between systems and between years, as the next section explains.

Metrics, Read with Their Years Attached

Oxford's About page, consulted for this profile, reports the following journal-level figures, each labelled 2025 by the publisher: Impact Factor 1.3; five-year Impact Factor 1.7; a rank by Impact Factor of 105 out of 444 in Law and 332 out of 620 in Economics; cited half-life 21.1 years; immediacy index 0.3; Eigenfactor score 0.00152; Article Influence score 1.309. On the Scopus side, the same page reports a 2025 CiteScore of 3.3, with CiteScore ranks of 197 out of 1,162 in Law, 316 out of 755 in Economics and Econometrics, and 128 out of 254 in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, and a Source Normalized Impact per Paper of 1.232. The page also reports full-text usage of 76,759 for 2025.

Three cautions will help readers use those numbers well. First, every figure above is a single-year figure from the publisher's page; next year's page will show different numbers, and a profile or a departmental document that quotes a figure without its year is already misleading. Second, the long cited half-life — more than two decades in the 2025 figures — is characteristic of this journal and its field: articles here continue to be cited for a long time, so a two-year indicator understates the journal's eventual influence more than it would for a fast-moving laboratory science. Third, ranking positions depend on the size of the category: 105th in a Law category of 444 journals and 332nd in an Economics category of 620 journals describe the same journal seen through two different category lenses, and neither number alone captures its standing in the specific law-and-economics community, where its reputation is considerably stronger than a raw cross-category rank suggests. In the IDEAS and RePEc aggregate journal rankings, Oxford notes, the journal was ranked 63rd out of 3,168 journals, a figure the publisher publicised on its reasons-to-publish page.

Separately, the SCImago journal record for this title, which is based on Scopus data, has placed the journal in the first quartile in its subject categories including Economics and Econometrics, Law, and Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management. Quartile and rank vary by year and by category, so the current SCImago page should be consulted for the current year rather than relying on any summary, including this one.

Reading the Journal: Who Should Follow It

Regular readers tend to fall into four groups. Law-and-economics scholars read it as a core journal of their field. Economists working on contracts, organisations and political economy read it for theory and empirics that general journals sometimes judge too institutional and field journals sometimes judge too general. Political scientists working on legislatures, bureaucracies and delegation read it because its political-economy work is written to be read across disciplines. And empirically minded legal scholars read it because its articles usually state a mechanism and evidence in a form that a non-economist can evaluate. Doctoral students in any of those areas will find that working through recent volumes is an efficient way to learn what a law-economics-organisation contribution looks like when it succeeds: the question, the mechanism and the evidence are all visible, and the introduction usually explains the institutional stakes without assuming the reader already shares them.

Recent issue lists on Oxford Academic, including volume 42 in 2026, show the mix in action: work on clan culture and collective action in China, on institutional formalism and criminal sentencing on a historical frontier, on diversity and a taste for power inside organisations, on whether law can change attitudes and behaviour without strict enforcement, studied through a child-marriage reform, on legal constraint achieved through political means, on the common determinants of legislative and regulatory complexity, and on motivational investments and financial incentives. Read as a set, those titles show the journal's range better than any scope paragraph: history and development, courts and legislatures, firms and incentives, all treated as questions about how institutions and organisations shape behaviour.

Practical Guidance for Prospective Authors

Start with fit, and be honest about it. Write one paragraph, for yourself, that names the institution or governance arrangement your paper explains, the mechanism you propose, and the community in this journal's readership whose mind your evidence could change. If that paragraph is hard to write, the paper may belong elsewhere, and discovering that before submission saves a full review cycle. If it is easy to write, use it: versions of it belong in your introduction and in your cover communication to the editors.

Write for the neighbouring discipline. Define legal terms that economists may not know and economic terms that lawyers may not use the same way; the journal's scope explicitly invites readers from political science, psychology and sociology as well, so unexplained field jargon is a real cost, not a stylistic choice. State identification assumptions, model assumptions or interpretive choices in plain language at the point where a sceptical reader would ask about them. Keep the institutional detail that makes the setting credible — rules, timelines, who decides what — because in this journal that detail is evidence, not decoration.

Prepare the submission package carefully. Follow the current general instructions for file format, anonymisation and declarations; use the submission portal reached from the Oxford site; disclose conflicts and funding; confirm the manuscript is not under consideration elsewhere; and make sure any co-author has approved submission. Where the work uses human participants, administrative data or confidential records, be ready to document permissions and ethics review in the form the publisher requests. Finally, decide in advance how your team will handle a revise-and-resubmit: who owns the response letter, who owns additional analysis, and how disagreements about framing will be settled. Journals with this journal's review standards often improve papers substantially through revision, and a well-organised response — point by point, respectful, and explicit about what changed and where — is part of the scholarly work, not an administrative afterthought.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the same journal as the Journal of Law and Economics? No. The titles are similar and the fields overlap, but they are different journals with different publishers, histories and ISSNs. This profile concerns the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, published by Oxford University Press with ISSNs 8756-6222 and 1465-7341.

Does a paper have to be about all three of law, economics and organisation? No. The journal's own scope accepts a two-way combination, provided the work speaks to its institutional concerns and can be read across disciplines.

Is peer review anonymised? Oxford describes the process for this journal as double-anonymised. Prepare the manuscript accordingly and follow the current instructions for separating identifying material.

Where do I submit? Through the journal's submission system, Editorial Express for JLEO, reached from the Oxford Academic journal pages. Use the link on the official site rather than an address copied from a third-party page.

What is the journal's impact factor? Oxford's page consulted for this profile reported a 2025 Impact Factor of 1.3 and a 2025 CiteScore of 3.3. Those are year-specific figures; check the journal's metrics page for the current year before quoting a number in a formal document.

Does the journal give an article prize? Yes. The Oliver E. Williamson Prize for Best Article is described by Oxford as an annual prize of 1,500 US dollars for the most original and innovative paper accepted in the preceding year, with preference given to younger scholars and with sitting editors and board members excluded.

Verification Notes for This Profile

The identity of this record was confirmed against the live record on this site, which names Oxford University Press as publisher and lists ISSNs 14657341 and 87566222, matching the Oxford title. Founding date, founding editors, Yale support, scope wording, indexing list, metrics, review model and prize details are drawn from Oxford Academic journal pages and standard bibliographic descriptions of the title, paraphrased and summarised here rather than reproduced. Editorial leadership is time-sensitive; the editor-in-chief named above is the person named in the sources consulted in October 2026, and the current board page on Oxford Academic is authoritative. No article processing charge is stated in this profile because a stable official figure was not confirmed in the pages summarised; the publisher's current charges page should be checked directly.

Sources consulted: Oxford Academic — journal home, About page, and reasons-to-publish page for the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization; Oxford's Williamson Prize page; SCImago journal record for the title; standard bibliographic descriptions including the journal's encyclopaedia entry for founding and frequency information.