Information for Authors

We welcome blog post proposals! If you’re interested in contributing, please email us at : [email protected] with your idea and short bio and let us know when you could submit the full post. If you have any personal involvement in the case or topic (e.g. as a lawyer or advisor), please mention that too.We’ll get back to you as soon as possible to let you know if we’re interested. Please note that we do not accept proposals from undergraduate students unless the post is written under academic supervision. We do not charge any fees at any stage of the publication process and we do not pay authors for their contributions.

Topics we are interested in

We welcome clear, well-crafted analysis and commentary on any law and governance issue from a public law perspective in South-East Europe—whether it’s a new court ruling, a legislative change, constitutional debate, or broader policy development. If you spot a noteworthy development in your research, we’d love to see your blog post proposal.

The main idea of the blog is to provide lawyers, policy makers, academics and civically engaged citizens with practical insights into concrete legal and legal policy issues. The articles should therefore deal with very specific current legal problems. Review and general articles that do not focus on a limited and concrete topic and/or country would most likely not fulfil these criteria.

Style and content of  blog articles

To keep readers engaged, start with what’s interesting and why it matters, ideally in the first sentence of your first paragraph. Open with a brief, real-world vignette or statistic to draw readers in, then guide them through clear subheadings (for example, “Why Primary Law Matters” or “Turning Analysis into Action”) that signal what comes next without jargon. Your writing should remain crisp and approachable. Favor active constructions—“the court ruled” rather than “it was ruled”—and define any specialist term the first time it appears.

If you incorporate visuals—charts, tables or figures—label each one (for instance, “Figure 1. Comparative Governance Scores, 2024”), supply a short caption highlighting its insight, and include alt-text so the post remains accessible. Embed links in meaningful anchor text rather than displaying raw URLs, and refrain from overloading the narrative with too many visual elements.

We recommend that the blog post should contain between 1500-2000 words.

Please have your post checked for spelling and grammar before submitting it.

Sources and Citations

Authors should  ground their articles in primary materials (sources)—treaties, statutes, court decisions, official reports—linking directly to the source whenever possible. When you rely on secondary sources, choose only peer-reviewed journal articles, monographs from respected academic presses, or reports by well-established, nonpartisan institutes; avoid unverified blogs or news summaries. Always confirm an author’s credentials and check that your sources are current and widely cited in the field.

Within the text, use a footnote system of referencing academic papers, court decisions and statutes. A footnote reference should include the author’s name, the work’s title, the publication or source (e.g. journal, publisher, institution), the year of publication, and—for online materials—a DOI or stable URL with the date accessed. For all other sources that are available online, use a hyperlink in the text.

Quality Control and Originality

All submissions go through editorial and peer- review and must be original work owned by the author.

Please let us know if your piece has been published before, is under review elsewhere, or is
already contracted for future publication. Always credit your sources—for text, ideas, or images.

If we discover plagiarism during review, we’ll reject the submission. If plagiarism comes to light only after it’s published on our blog, we’ll either issue a correction or remove the post.

Copyright and Open Access

All posts on our blog are published under a CC BY SA 4.0 license. By submitting a post to our
blog, you agree to that.

All content is freely accessible to everyone—there are no charges for readers, authors, or their
institutions. You’re welcome to read, download, copy, share, print, search, or link to the full text of any post, or use it for any other lawful purpose, as long as proper credit is given. No prior permission is needed.