Zeitschrift fur Rechtssoziologie

About Zeitschrift fur Rechtssoziologie

Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie — At a Glance

The Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie, presented in English as The German Journal of Law and Society and shortened to ZfRSoz, is Germany's specialist journal for the sociology of law: the academic analysis of law in its societal context, and of the relationship between law and society. Its publisher page on the De Gruyter Brill site, fetched in full for this profile, states that the journal was established in 1980, that it is published twice a year, and that it interprets the notion of society broadly, publishing contributions from all disciplines as long as the relationship between law and society can be identified as a core theme. Theoretical papers and empirically based analyses are equally welcome; essays that do not follow the typical format of a journal article are welcome too, provided their argument and reasoning are of academic standard; and a book review section discusses recent sociology of law texts published in Germany and in other countries. Submissions may be written in German or English.

The journal is published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg, with Walter de Gruyter GmbH of Berlin named as the manufacturer on the publisher page — the Journals World stored record's numeric publisher string is garbled and is corrected here. The print ISSN is 0174-0202 and the electronic ISSN is 2366-0392, exactly as given in the journal information on the publisher page and as carried on the Journals World record. Those two numbers, checked against the publisher's own page, anchor the identity of post 34217 beyond dispute — which matters, because sociology of law has several similarly titled journals and yearbooks in German and in English, and only the ISSN pair and the De Gruyter masthead pick out this title.

Origins: The Journal of a Discipline That Organised Itself

German sociology of law organised itself before it had a journal, and the sequence explains the journal's character. The German Sociological Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, DGS) portrait of its Sociology of Law Section, consulted for this profile, records that many lawyers were among the founders of German sociology, that sociology of law therefore emerged early as a special field, that it developed slowly in the Federal Republic after the Second World War while socio-legal inquiry was strictly prohibited in East Germany, and that in West Germany the sociologists Wolfgang Kaupen and Fritz Sack, together with the lawyer-and-sociologist Rüdiger Lautmann, founded the DGS Section for the Sociology of Law in 1972. It was that organised community — a section, its meetings, its circular — that created the readership and the referee pool a journal would need.

The journal itself followed in 1980. The DGS portrait records that in 1980 a group of socio-legal scholars, among them notably Niklas Luhmann and led by Erhard Blankenburg, founded the German journal for the sociology of law, the Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie; that the peer-reviewed journal quickly gained a reputation for outstanding contributions and debate; and that from 2000 the journal was published by Lucius & Lucius in Stuttgart — the publisher whose stewardship preceded the journal's present home at De Gruyter. A Cambridge-published history of German sociology of law, consulted in search results for this profile, adds the texture around the founding: the first issue in 1980 had been prepared by a grey-literature circular, the Informationsbrief für Rechtssoziologie, edited by the DGS Section and Wolfgang Kaupen, which had already been publishing quality articles. The journal thus formalised an existing conversation rather than inventing one — a pattern it shares with many strong specialist journals, and one reason its identity, as a forum, a crystallisation point and a communication arena for German-speaking sociology of law, was described in those terms by Michelle Cottier in the retrospective the publisher page itself recommends to readers who want the journal's development in detail.

Founding names of Luhmann's stature also set an intellectual expectation that still shapes the title. German sociology of law has always contained a strong theoretical wing — systems theory, legal theory, the sociology of constitutions — alongside empirical studies of courts, police, professions and legal consciousness. The publisher's scope statement, by welcoming theoretical and empirical work in the same sentence and by keeping an essay form open beside the conventional article, preserves that founding balance in the journal's present rules. Authors who know the journal only through its recent themed issues — on media and new technologies and law, on collective land rights and capitalist economy across the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, on society's constitutions, on the conceptual roots of the modern welfare state in France and Germany — will recognise the same balance operating today: special and thematic issues focused on important and emerging topics, held, as the publisher page states, to the same review standards as regular manuscripts.

Scope: Law and Society, Broadly Read — With One Core Test

The scope rule on the publisher page is short enough to quote in substance and strict enough to govern real editorial decisions: contributions from all disciplines are publishable as long as the relationship between law and society can be identified as a core theme. That single test does a great deal of work. A doctrinal legal paper that never leaves the internal logic of the law fails it, however excellent. A general sociology paper in which law appears only as background scenery fails it too. A paper passes when law — its making, its institutions, its professions, its effects, its legitimacy, its everyday presence or conspicuous absence — is in an argued relationship with social life. Within that test, the field is wide: courts and judging; legislatures and regulation; legal professions and legal education; policing and punishment; rights mobilisation and legal consciousness; family, migration, labour and welfare law in action; law and media; law and technology; comparative and historical socio-legal studies; and theory of law in society, including the systems-theoretical tradition the journal's founders helped to create.

The OpenAlex topic map for the journal, from source S4210199995 resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint for both of the journal's ISSNs in this session, shows how that scope has accumulated in practice. Its largest topics are Legal and Social Philosophy, with 162 works; Judicial and Constitutional Studies, with 145 works; and German Social Sciences and History, with 100 works. Those are OpenAlex assignments rather than editorial categories, but they correspond recognisably to the journal's three great strands: theory and philosophy of law in society; the empirical and institutional study of courts and constitutions; and the historically deep German socio-legal tradition, in which the development of law and of German society are studied together. The book review section, covering recent sociology of law texts from Germany and other countries, extends the same service to the field's literature: for German-reading scholars it is a map of what the international field is publishing, and for international scholars it is evidence of a journal that reads outward, not only inward.

Language policy deserves its own paragraph, because it decides who can use this journal. Submissions may be written in German or English, according to the publisher page, although the page's journal-information panel lists the journal's language as German — a fair reflection of its centre of gravity. The practical reading is this: the journal is the German-language field's own journal, which also opens its pages to English. An English-language author with a genuinely socio-legal paper — especially one engaging German or comparative material, or addressed to the German debate — has a legitimate route in. An author whose paper is in English and whose conversation is entirely elsewhere should ask whether the German field's journal is the audience they actually seek, because the journal's readers, referees and review section are formed by that field.

Editors, Review and the Publishing Programme

The publisher page fetched for this profile names the journal's current editors, and this profile reproduces that masthead because it is a primary source read in this session: Alfons Bora (Universität Bielefeld); Christian Boulanger (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main), named as an editor with editorial-office responsibility; Marta Bucholz (University of Warsaw); Michelle Cottier (University of Geneva); Walter Fuchs (Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Recht Berlin), named as the responsible editor; Pierre Guibentif (ISCTE, University Institute of Lisbon); Vagias Karavas (University of Lucerne); Andrea Kretschmann (Leuphana University Lüneburg); Stefan Machura (Bangor University); Doris Schweitzer (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main); and Henning de Vries (University of Marburg). An advisory board of Brun-Otto Bryde, Susanne Karstedt and Wolfgang Ludwig-Mayerhofer is also named. Two features of that masthead are worth noticing. Geographically, it is a German-language field edited internationally — Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Portugal and the United Kingdom are all represented — which matches the journal's claim to be the German journal of law and society rather than a purely national one. Institutionally, it spans universities, a Max Planck Institute and a university of applied sciences, reflecting socio-legal studies' home in both law faculties and social science faculties — the very spread the DGS section was founded to serve. Mastheads rotate, so authors should confirm the current list on the publisher page at submission time; the list above is the page as fetched for this profile.

Peer review is specified with unusual precision on the publisher page: contributions are subject to a double blind peer review process, where necessary more than once, involving at least two external referees before the editors take a decision. The submission route is the journal's submission platform — the publisher page directs authors to submit through submissions.zfrsoz.info, including an anonymised version that does not allow conclusions about the authors — and the Journals World stored record carries the same submission domain. Frequency is two issues per year. The abstracting position stated on the publisher page is inclusion in Sociological Abstracts and in SOLIS, the German social science literature information system; the fuller coverage list on the same page is extensive and includes Scopus, SCImago, Dimensions, EBSCO databases and Discovery Service, Google Scholar, the International Bibliography of Periodical Literature (IBZ) and its reviews companion (IBR), J-Gate, CNKI Scholar, Baidu Scholar, Naver Academic, Primo Central, Summon, Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, WorldCat (OCLC) and others. Authors should treat that list as the publisher's coverage statement and verify any single service that their institution requires, in that service, at submission time.

The Subscribe to Open Turn: Access Model from 2025

The most important recent fact about this journal's publishing model is on the publisher page, and authors who last checked the journal some years ago need to absorb it. Starting in 2025, the journal transfers to Gold Open Access on a year-by-year basis through Subscribe to Open: all articles will thus appear immediately under a Creative Commons licence, and there will be no publication costs for authors. The current volume is open access via Subscribe to Open, with all accepted articles published under a Creative Commons licence at no cost to authors — the page's licence panel shows CC BY 4.0. The model depends, as the publisher page explains, on subscriptions being continued to the same extent as before: libraries keep subscribing, and in return the year's content is open to everyone. The editors and the publisher thank subscribers for making the transformation possible — a sentence that accurately locates this journal's economics in its library community rather than in author payments.

For authors, the consequences are concrete. There is no article processing charge to budget under this model, per the publisher page — a striking position for a De Gruyter journal, and one that removes the common barrier for scholars without grant funding. Work published in an open year is free for any reader anywhere to read under CC BY terms, which maximises the reach of German socio-legal scholarship that historically circulated mainly inside subscribing institutions. The year-by-year structure is the one caution: because the transformation is renewed annually on the strength of subscriptions, authors should check the publisher page for the current year's status rather than assuming a past year's arrangement persists. Separately, a search of the DOAJ search API for both of the journal's ISSNs, run for this profile, returned no DOAJ listing — so this profile does not describe the journal as DOAJ-listed, and authors whose funder specifically requires a DOAJ-listed venue should note that result and verify it again at submission time, since listings change.

Metrics, Attributed — and a Warning About Two Different H-Indexes

The publisher page carries a metrics table, fetched for this profile, giving CiteScore 0.4 (2024, Scopus), SCImago Journal Rank 0.147 (2024) and Source Normalized Impact per Paper 0.447 (2024, CWTS Journal Indicators, from Scopus data). The Journals World stored record gives an H-index of 6, consistent with a Scopus-narrow view of a German-language specialist journal. OpenAlex, by contrast — source S4210199995, resolved in this session and not the unrelated phantom record distrusted in earlier Journals World work — reports 982 works, 2,954 citations, an H-index of 22, an i10-index of 71, and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.28, with first publication year 1980 matching the founding. The gap between an H-index of 6 and an H-index of 22 for the same journal is not an error to be averaged away; it is a lesson in database coverage. OpenAlex casts a wider net across the journal's four decades, including material and citing sources that narrower curated indexes hold only partly. Each figure in this profile is therefore nailed to its source, and any author quoting one of them should quote the source and year with it.

What do the figures mean for a submission decision? By the Scopus-based measures, ZfRSoz is a small specialist journal whose citation rates resemble those of other national-language socio-legal titles — modest in global tables, because its natural citing community is the German-reading socio-legal field, not the whole of world sociology or law. By the OpenAlex measures, its accumulated corpus is substantial and durably cited over forty-five years. Both pictures are true, and together they describe the journal's actual bargain: it offers the field's own audience, its founding tradition, its rigorous double-blind process, and now open access without author charges — in exchange for citation metrics that will never rival a large English-language generalist journal. For a socio-legal scholar, that is usually the right bargain. For an author whose career arithmetic requires a specific quartile in a specific index, the attributed figures above are the ones to take to that calculation, verified fresh in the index concerned.

Who Should Publish Here

ZfRSoz is a strong venue for socio-legal scholars working on law in society in any discipline — sociology, law, political science, criminology, anthropology, history — who can meet its one core test; for German-reading scholars who want their field's journal, with its debate culture and its review section, as their audience; for English-language socio-legal scholars engaging German, comparative or theoretical debates the journal owns; for authors of essays and interventions that need a journal willing to publish beyond the standard article format without lowering its standard of argument; and for authors who need open access without an article charge, under the Subscribe to Open arrangement described above. Its themed and special issues — run, the publisher states, through the same rigorous review process as regular manuscripts — are additional doors for work that matches an announced theme.

It is a weaker venue for doctrinal legal analysis with no societal dimension; for general sociology in which law is incidental; for authors who cannot write in German or English; and for authors whose institutional requirements turn on a single global metric rather than on field standing — a category of requirement this profile cannot settle, and which the author must check against the current figures. Legal scholars unused to socio-legal writing should also note the anonymised-submission discipline the journal requires: manuscripts go to the platform with an anonymised version, and self-identifying material must be managed accordingly, because the double-blind process with at least two external referees is the journal's stated standard, applied, where necessary, through more than one round.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the journal's ISSNs?
Print ISSN 0174-0202 and electronic ISSN 2366-0392, per the publisher's journal information.

Who publishes it?
De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin, Germany. The numeric string in the older short record was garbled.

When was it founded, and by whom?
In 1980, by a group of socio-legal scholars led by Erhard Blankenburg and including Niklas Luhmann, per the DGS Sociology of Law Section portrait; the publisher page gives first publication on 20 May 1980. Since 2000 it was published by Lucius & Lucius in Stuttgart before its present De Gruyter home.

What does it publish?
Theoretical and empirical work, essays and book reviews, from any discipline, where the relationship between law and society is a core theme — in German or English, twice a year.

How is it reviewed?
Double blind peer review, with at least two external referees, possibly over more than one round, before the editors decide — per the publisher page.

Is it open access? Does it charge authors?
From 2025 it transfers year by year to Gold Open Access through Subscribe to Open, under a Creative Commons licence shown as CC BY, with no publication costs for authors, per the publisher page. A DOAJ search for its ISSNs in this session returned no listing, so DOAJ listing is not claimed.

What are its metrics?
Publisher page: CiteScore 0.4, SJR 0.147, SNIP 0.447, all 2024. Journals World stored record: H-index 6. OpenAlex (S4210199995): 982 works, 2,954 citations, H-index 22, i10-index 71. Quote each with its source.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile rests principally on the journal's De Gruyter Brill publisher page, fetched in full for this profile — scope, review, frequency, editors, coverage, metrics table, Subscribe to Open terms and journal information all come from that page — together with the DGS Sociology of Law Section portrait for the founding history, the OpenAlex source record resolved through its ISSN endpoint, and foreground DOAJ search API queries for both ISSNs. Where sources diverge, notably on H-index, both figures are reported with attribution and neither is presented as the single official value.