To download a pdf file of the following guidelines on how to submit and prepare a manuscript, please click here.
Rg is a forum for contributions from all branches of legal history, including all historical periods, fields of law and regions.
Please send manuscripts and questions to rg@lhlt.mpg.de.
When submitting a manuscript, please include a declaration stating
Rg endorses and follows the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
The submission deadline is 1 April in the year of the respective volume, which will then appear in the following September. Please consult the Rg website for current updates.
Generally speaking, the journal publishes contributions in German, English, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Those wanting to publish a piece in another language should contact us before submitting.
Every manuscript undergoes a pre-check regarding its general suitability. Those that make it into the following evaluation round will be submitted for anonymous peer review. Authors will usually be informed of the result (accepted, rejected, revise and resubmit) within two months. More information on the peer-review process is available on our page »Peer Review«.
The author retains the copyright and publication rights for all pieces s/he publishes in Rg.
All Rg articles are published under a Creative Commons license. Further details on the respective license are available on our page »Open Access«.
Rg collects neither ASCs (article submission charges) nor APCs (article processing charges). Authors incur no fees for the submission or processing of their work.
The German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek) stores the digital data of all articles published in Rg and ensures their long-term availability.
We accept only contributions that are ready for publication. All submissions accepted for publication undergo our editing process. The editors reserve the right to amend the language and the content of the work, in consultation with the author when appropriate. The author will receive a galley proof of the piece as a PDF file prior to publication, at which point only minor changes can still be integrated. No major changes will be possible once the text has been initially typeset.
Please send all manuscripts in MSWord (.docx) or rich text (.rtf) format to rg@lhlt.mpg.de.
Generally speaking, quality is the decisive factor when considering to accepted or rejected a contribution. The following character limits for contributions to the respective Rg sections are meant to serve as reference points. Characters limits include spaces. A short explanation of the individual sections is provided on our page »About Rg«: Research: ca. 100,000, Focus: 38,000-45,000, Forum/Debate: ca. 8,000, Reviews for Critique: 6,000-9,000.
Contributions to the Research and Focus sections must include an abstract in English not exceeding 1700 characters (including spaces).
Please include no more than 5 keywords for contributions to the Research and Focus sections.
Subtitles are welcome. Any contributions not already in English must include a translation of the title (and subtitle, where applicable) in English.
Longer pieces (over 10 000 characters, including spaces) should include (sub)headings. For numbered headings, either of the following numbering methods is admissible: I., A., 1., a); or 1, 1.1, 1.1.1, 1.1.1.1. Subheadings up to the fourth order are admissible.
The journal uses »Danish« quotation marks for primary quotations (»...« – Unicode 00BB and 00AB) and secondary quotations (i.e. quotations within quotations ›…‹ – Unicode 203A and 2039).
Shorter quotations are indicated with quotation marks. Longer quotations (over 3 lines) are indicated with quotation marks and a separate paragraph.
Please emphasise any words, phrases or sentences with italics, not bold or underlined type.
For longer contributions, not more than about one quarter of the page should be devoted to footnotes. Contributions to the Forum and Debate sections should use footnotes only sparingly, if at all. Book reviews should not include footnotes at all. Please insert footnotes after the punctuation, where applicable. The journal does not print endnotes.
Please submit images as separate files in one of the following formats: .tiff, .eps, .jpg, .png. The manuscript should contain clear indications where figures and images are to be inserted. The files must also have sufficient resolution for print (at least 300 dpi). Rg prints images in monochrome. If you wish to use more than 5 images in your contribution, please contact the editorial office. Obtaining printing rights for third-party images is the responsibility of the author. Please note that the rights holder must approve the images’ use in both the print and online editions. As obtaining rights can be a time-intensive process, please secure the rights in a timely fashion. No images will be printed in Rg unless the rights have been secured before the journal goes to print.
We welcome clear, lucid and critical reviews, and we discourage merely recapitulating the book’s content. If possible, the review should be written in a language other than that of the book under review. The publication date of the book under review should be within the last two years. Please include the complete bibliographical information of the book under review, including the number of pages and the ISBN. Please also include a pithy title for your review (i.e. not simply »Review of Author’s Name, Book title«). Please refrain from inserting footnotes into your review.
Contributions to the Research, Focus and Forum sections must close with a bibliography including all cited literature and sources, listed bibliographically by author. Footnotes include merely shortened references. Page numbers are indicated without »p« or »pp«.
Cite monographs as follows:
Gruzinski, Serge (2002), The Mestizo Mind. The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization, New York
Start with the author’s or editor’s name in Smallcaps, Last Name First, followed by the publication date in brackets, the title and the place of publication, all separated by commas. Entries in the bibliography do not take periods.
The shortened references in the footnotes include the author’s last name (also in Smallcaps), the publication date and the page number(s) (if applicable), without commas but with a period at the end, as follows:
Gruzinski (2002) 47.
Separate multiple authors with commas, and all authors but the first are listed first name first:
Gruzinski, Serge, Peter Zumbansen (2010), Rough Consensus and Running Code. A Theory of Transnational Private Law, Oxford
Separate multiple authors’ last names in the short footnote references with forward slashes:
Gruzinski/Zumbansen (2010) 78.
Multiple publications by the same author from the same year are designated with lower-case letters after the publication date:
Stolleis, Michael (2011a), … Stolleis, Michael (2011b), …
In cases of multiple places of publication, please include only the first.
Please omit the publisher unless it is necessary to identify the book, in which case it follows the place of publication and a colon:
Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio
Please indicate the edition only when citing an edition after the first:
Geertz, Clifford (1994), Dichte Beschreibung. Beiträge zum Verstehen kultureller Systeme, 3rd ed. Frankfurt am Main
For edited volumes and anthologies, please indicate editorship with the appropriate abbreviation in brackets after the editor’s name:
Peterson, Claes (Hg.) (2011), Rechtswissenschaft als juristische Doktrin, Stockholm
In case of two editors, the second is listed first name first:
Kadelbach, Stefan, Klaus Günther (Hg.) (2011a), Recht ohne Staat? Zur Normativität nichtstaatlicher Rechtsetzung, Frankfurt am Main
In case of three or more editors, name only the first and indicate the others with »et al.«:
Foblets, Marie-Claire et al. (eds.) (2010), Cultural Diversity and the Law. State Responses from Around the World, Bruxelles
To cite only a chapter in an edited volume, please follow this pattern:
Kaiser, Wolfram, Klaus Dittrich (2009), Political Communication at the World Exhibitions: Transnational Negotiation of Social and Educational Policy, 1889–1904, in: Albert, Mathias et al. (eds.), Transnational Political Spaces: Agents–Structures–Encounters, Frankfurt, 162–184
The short reference in the footnote would then read:
Kaiser/Dittrich (2009) 166.
Should two or more chapters from an edited volume be cited, then the entire volume is to be included in the bibliography. The same applies when a reference to the entire volume is desired:
Albert, Mathias et al. (eds.) (2009), Transnational Political Spaces: Agents–Structures–Encounters, Frankfurt
For journal articles, start with the author’s name, then the year in brackets and title of the article, then the journal title and volume, with the page numbers at the end after a comma:
Kennedy, David (1996), International Law and the Nineteenth Century: History of an Illusion, in: Nordic Journal of International Law 65, 385–420
The short reference in the footnotes would appear as follows:
Kennedy (1996) 399.
To indicate the issue number, add it after the volume number with a comma but no space:
Sachsenamier, Dominic (2010a), Conceptions of Space in Global History. A Brief Outlook on Research in China, in: Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 20,6, 80–92