A Brief Note from the Editors

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12127
• Date: 01 March 2015
• Published date: 01 March 2015

A Brief Note from the Editors

Issue 1 of Volume 49 constitutes the beginning of the second vol-

ume to appear under our editorship.

A year ago, when “our” first issue (Vol. 48, No. 1) appeared,

we introduced ourselves. We are still the same, except for those

changes that the advancing of life by another year and the pleas-

ures and challenges of editing a journal produced. Our greatest

editorial pleasure has been witnessing, up close, how excellent

papers became yet better and then a bit better again until they

finally appeared in the journal. This pleasure is closely linked

with a second experience: the dedication of the many reviewers

who take their task, the papers under review, and the authors

seriously, as they provide helpful critiques and productive sugges-

tions. We are more grateful to these reviewers than we can

express. This includes, especially, members of the editorial board,

among them many junior scholars with an already impressive

scholarly standing and dedication to the journal. Finally, we

thank the authors for submitting their work to the LSR. Authors

understand how selective we have to be. Our invitations to revise

and resubmit make clear that a revision is not a guarantee of

publication. In some cases papers that received feedback and

improved substantially in the revision process were still not

accepted. Nonetheless, the likelihood of revised papers to appear

in the Review increases from below 10% to above 50%. We are

grateful to those authors who graciously accept our decisions

because, while difficult, these decisions are necessary in light of

the limited space available to us.

Looking back at Volume 48 we find that we have stuck to the

guiding principles we laid out a year ago and we will stick to

them as we move ahead with the next volumes. First, we look for

excellence and relevance to the study of law and society. Second,

while conceiving of the Law & Society Review as a social science

journal, we are—within that frame—liberal with regard to sub-

stantive, methodological, and disciplinary orientation. Volume 48

contained research that is based on ethnographic work, interview

methodology, archival analysis, case studies, and advanced

Law & Society Review, Volume 49, Number 1 (2015)

V

C2015 Law and Society Association. All rights reserved.

1