As of noon today, the Journal of Legal Analysis is up and running, with an initial crop of eight articles to keep legal scholars busy until the early morning hours. For those who don't know, the JLA is a new open-access law journal co-published by HUP and the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard Law School. For the record, this is the first new journal we've published in thirty years, as during the 1970s it was decided that journal publishing didn't fit HUP's mission at the time. But, now, in 2009, we're back.
A couple things make the JLA different than the average law journal. First, it's online. Published articles will be gathered into bound volumes and made available for purchase, but the focus is on the website, where all articles will be posted, for free, as soon as they are ready for publication. In addition, we're hoping the journal fills a gap in the legal publishing landscape by providing a peer-reviewed, faculty-edited journal that covers the entire academy. In the words of Editor-in-Chief Mark Ramseyer: "Until JLA, there has not been a faculty-edited, peer-reviewed journal that covered the whole span of the legal academy. There have been faculty-edited journals for subfields, but not for the entire discipline. With the JLA, we are trying to create a faculty-edited journal that will be the flagship journal for the law school faculty as a whole."
With all work licensed under Creative Commons, sitting on an open-source platform developed specifically to publish open-access journals of this kind, this is about as free as the dissemination of scholarship can get. Thus, we invite you to visit, peruse, and submit away.
