Focus and Scope

Focus

Societas Law Review is a peer-reviewed, open-access law journal published by Andalas Borneo Justice Publisher. Its Latin title names the society in which law must ultimately work, and it states the conviction that runs through the journal’s editorial policy: law is found not only in enacted text, but in the practices that are repeated until they bind, and in the change those practices produce in collective life.

Scope

The journal publishes original research and conceptual analysis in the following fields:

Islamic law

Including its contemporary application, Islamic family law and the religious courts, sharia economics, and maqashid-based analysis of legal policy.

Customary (adat) law and legal pluralism

Including the standing of customary law communities, rights over territory and resources, custom-based dispute resolution, and the encounter between state law, customary law, and religious law.

Legal philosophy and legal theory

Including the foundations of legal validity, the relationship between law and morality, and theories of legal change.

Constitutional law and the law of the state

Including judicial review, the exercise of regional autonomy, public administration, and governance.

Comparative law

With particular interest in comparison across Southeast Asian jurisdictions and between civil law, common law, and Islamic legal traditions.

Human rights

Including access to justice, the position of vulnerable groups before the law, and the protection of rights in borderland and resource-frontier settings.

Law, environment, and society

Including natural resource governance, the right to a healthy environment, legal awareness and legal culture, and the effectiveness of law in practice.

The journal welcomes doctrinal, socio-legal, empirical, and comparative work. Doctrinal scholarship is fully welcome, provided the author connects the argument to how the law operates in practice.

Published from North Kalimantan, the journal gives particular attention to legal questions arising in borderlands, archipelagic regions, and areas distant from centres of government, where the distance between norm and reality is most readily observed. It welcomes contributions addressing Indonesia and the wider Southeast Asian region.

Authors are asked to identify one or two Sustainable Development Goals addressed by their work, stated at the end of the abstract and included among the keywords.

The journal publishes two issues per year, covering the periods January–June and July–December.

Limits of scope

Criminal law and criminal procedure, including restorative justice, narcotics offences, corruption, and the criminal dimensions of cross-border crime, are directed instead to Iustitia Criminal Science, the criminal law journal issued by the same publisher. The journal does not publish summaries of legislation without analysis, activity reports, or opinion pieces unsupported by literature and data.