Submissions

Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  • The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, or RTF document file format.
  • Where available, URLs for the references have been provided. All URLs included in the text must be active
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.
  • All the signatories have contributed intellectually to the preparation of the article and therefore, are declared its material authors.
  • There have been and are no conflicts of interest in the preparation of the manuscript, and if there could be any due to funding or other support, the authors undertake to declare them in the corresponding section.
  • The submission must contain the following documents: 1. Personal data document, 2. Document of the manuscript without authorship; 3. Document with the figures and/or graphs that accompany the text.

Author Guidelines

LEGAL is an annual digital journal and accepts original submissions in any language that have not been previously published or are not before another journal for consideration. The author is responsible for providing information on the copyright status; authors shall be liable regarding the publication of an article that infringes upon such rights.

SENDING MANUSCRIPTS

Submitting manuscripts presupposes that the authors are aware of and accept these Guidelines. The editorial team and board of the Journal reserves the right to reject any original text that they consider should not be forward for the peer review process for formal, editorial or quality reasons.

Once the manuscript is in the review process by the LEGAL journal, the authors undertake not to submit it for assessment to other journals.

The original texts may be sent by two channels: using the SUBMISSION website and by email to legal@legebiltzarra.eus

LEGAL does not charge fees for the submission of articles or pay for the publication of the authors' articles.

SECTION POLICIES

  • Articles: will cover original research articles linked to parliamentary law, the constitutional and administrative fields, and public law in general, along with any other topic affecting parliamentary life. They will be subject to peer review. Their maximum length must be 10,500 to 12,000 words (approximately 30 pages), including footnotes, references and appendices as applicable. An abstract, key words and a summary are required for this type of text.
  • Comments on Legislation and Jurisprudence: commentaries on the most relevant and groundbreaking laws –whether at European, state or regional level– will be considered, along with the legal rulings of greatest interest in the parliamentary world. The maximum length will be between 3,500 and 4,000 words (approximately 10 pages) including footnotes and bibliography. They will also include an abstract and key words; the summary will be optional.
  • Legal reports: legal reports of relevance in the different legislative chambers will be selected for this section. The text of the report will be submitted together with a commentary and/or even updated by its author. The maximum length of the commentary must be between 1,800 and 2,000 words (approximately 5 pages).
  • Parlamentary papers: they will set out and disseminate the contributions of experts that have appeared in the Basque Parliament. The original document will be accompanied by a presentation that puts it into context. The maximum length of the presentation will be 1,200 words (approximately 2 to 3 pages)
  • Book reviews: this section can include reviews and appraisals of the relevant literature in the thematic areas related to the Parliament that have been published in the 18 months prior to the publication of each issue. The maximum length must be 1,800 words (approximately 5 pages). The title will refer to the reviewed book.
  • Discussion Topics: this section is for articles that address questions that can be analysed from different prisms and can thus contribute to enriching the debate around the themes of interest of the journal.

LANGUAGES OF THE ORIGINAL TEXT

The manuscripts will be written in Basque or Spanish. Articles of legal relevance will also be published in other languages; care must always be taken to ensure the language is to the highest standard, equivalent to the text having been written or reviewed by a native speaker.

FORMAT AND STRUCTURE OF THE TEXT

The original texts must be submitted in Word and in 12-point Times New Roman font and with 1.5 line spacing. The upper and lower margins will be 2.5 cm and the left and right margins 3 cm. All the pages of the article must be numbered on their bottom right margin.

The maximum length of the manuscript will respect the policy of the section in which it is to be published.

Autorship details

The header of the original manuscripts will include the name of the author or authors, academic or institutional affiliation, and, if available, the ORCID identifier.

The authorship details, acknowledgement and information regarding the financing of the research, as applicable, should be sent in a separate document from the text of the article.

Title of the article

It will be markedly informative and faithfully reflect the content of the article. The titles of the original must be in Spanish and/or Basque and their English translation. They will be in upper case, 14-point Times New Roman and centred.

Absytract and keywords

There abstracts will be in English, Spanish (Resumen) and Basque (Laburpena), They should be between 150 and 250 words in length.

The texts must also be accompanied by keywords in English, Spanish (Palabras clave) and/or Basque (Gako-hitzak). Using 5 to 8 words are recommended. The keywords will be in lower case, separated by commas and ending with a full stop.

Summary

The articles for Studies and Commentaries will be preceded by a summary indicating the sections and subsections. Roman numerals and uppercase (12-point Times New Roman) will be used to organise the main headings. The subsections will be in lower case, using the same font and Arabic numerals.

Quotes in the text

Double quotation marks (“ ”) will be used for quotations. If they are longer than five lines in length, they will be centred with double line spacing, in 10-point font, normal style, and without quotation marks. In the notes, quotations will always be between double quotation marks and in normal style.

Single quotation marks (‘) will be used to indicate a quotation within a text cited by the author. If the author omits part of a quotation, that will be indicated by ellipsis in brackets (...). In no case should words be underscored or in bold to highlight them within the text.

Notes

Footnotes must be in 10-point Times New Roman, numbered correlatively in Arabic numerals and superscript. They will only contain additional text; if they include bibliographic references, they will be abbreviated as indicated in these rules, as the full references will be included at the end of the article.

RULES OF CITATION

Bibliografhic citation

Each of the bibliographic citations must have a corresponding entry in the bibliography at the end. Self-citations will be restricted to essential cases. Bibliographic citations in the text will use the Harvard author-year system (author, year: page):
Weber (2014) or (Weber, 2014: 170)

Documents with two authors are cited using their first surnames joined by "&":
(Mirat & Armendáriz, 2007)

If the three or more authors are cited, it is sufficient to cite the first author followed by "et al.":
(Torres-Salinas et al., 2018)

If several articles by an author or group of authors from a single year are cited, a, b, c... must be added after the year:
(Rubio Llorente, 1997a)

When the surname of the cited author is part of the text, the year of the cited work must always be indicated in brackets:
As Häberle (2001) claimed,…

Bibliography

All the cited references will be included at the end of the article, with the authors in alphabetical order. It will only contain references cited in the text and additional references cannot be included. The APA (American Psychological Association), commonly used for Social Sciences and Law, will be followed.

Examples for the most common types of documents are set out below. In the case of the works in electronic format that contain a DOI (digital object identifier), it must be quoted in the bibliography reference.

Scientific journal article

- Printed journal

Jáuregui Bereciartu, G. (2011). Demokrazia eta Eskualdea. Eleria: Euskal Herriko legelarien aldizkaria, 21, 27-32.

García Mahamut, R. y Rallo Lombarte, R. (2013). Neutralidad y pluralismo en los medios de comunicación en las campañas electorales: la reforma de la LOREG de 2011. Revista española de derecho constitucional, 98, 201-240.

- Electronic journal (without DOI)
Fernández, F. J. (2019). Vivienda pública y posguerra en Bilbao. Sancho el Sabio: revista de cultura e investigación vasca, 42, 59-100.  https://revista.sanchoelsabio.eus/index.php/revista/article/view/237

- Electronic review with DOI
Alonso de Antonio, A. L. (2018). Conocimiento por los parlamentarios de las materias clasificadas en virtud de la Ley de secretos oficiales. Foro, 21(2), 19-44. http://dx.doi.org/10.5209/FORO.64016

Monographs

- Printed monograph

Sartori, G. (2008). La democracia en treinta lecciones. Madrid: Taurus.

- Online book
Madinabeitia Ezkurra, A. et al. (2018). La aportación del sistema universitario a la transformación de la sociedad vasca. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. https://addi.ehu.es/handle/10810/30919

- Monograph chapter
Jiménez Asensio, R. (2012). El gobierno del poder judicial en España y el sistema político. In L. Aguiar de Luque (Dir.). El gobierno del poder judicial: una perspectiva comparada (pp. 147-152). Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales.

 Reports
- Institutional authorshipt
International Energy Agency (2020). Sustainable Recovery. Paris: IEA.  https://www.iea.org/reports/sustainable-recovery

- Personal authorship
Larraga Rodríguez de Vera, V. (Coord.). (2019). 2º Informe sobre la Ciencia y la Tecnología en España. Madrid: Fundación Alternativas.

Congress paper or communication
Martínez Elipe, L. (1984). Tipología de los regímenes políticos y del derecho parlamentario. In I Jornadas de Derecho parlamentario (Madrid, 21-23 de marzo de 1984) (pp. 145-170). Madrid: Congreso de los Diputados.

 Doctoral Thesis
- Published
Morales Sequera, S. (2016). La descentralización de la educación universitaria en España: efectos sobre la convergencia regional desde la perspectiva del gasto público [Doctoral Thesis]. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. https://repositorio.uam.es/handle/10486/6106 

- Unpublished
Valle Escolano, R. (2019). La implantación de la transparencia en los municipios españoles [Unpublished doctoral thesis]. Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

 Press news and articles
- With authorship
Bassets, M. (25-6-2015). El Tribunal Supremo respalda la reforma sanitaria de Obama. El País. http://elpais.com/internacional/2015/06/25/actualidad/1435242145_474489.html

- Without authorship
ELNren su-etena Kolonbiako bozetarako. (2022-3-5). Berria.  https://www.berria.eus/mundua/elnren-su-etena-kolonbiako-bozetarako_1310041_102.html

Blogs
Duran Arranz, M. (16-10-2019). El fenómeno millennial. CCCBLab. Investigación e innovación en cultura [Blog]. Taken from https://lab.cccb.org/es/el-fenomeno-millennial

Articles

This section will include cover original research articles linked to parliamentary law, the constitutional and administrative fields, and public law in general, along with any other topic affecting parliamentary life. They will be subject to peer review.
Maximum length: 10,500 to 12,000 words (approximately 30 pages), including footnotes, references and appendices as applicable. An abstract, key words and a summary are required for this type of text.

Commens on Legislation and Jurisprudence

This section will include the commentaries on the legal rulings of greatest interest in the parliament world, together with the most relevant and groundbreaking laws, whether at European, state or regional level.
Maximum length: 3,500 to 4,000 words (approximately 10 pages) including footnotes and bibliography. They will also include an abstract and key words; the summary will be optional.

Book Reviews

This section can include reviews and appraisals of the relevant literature in the thematic areas related to the Parliament that have been published in the 18 months prior to the publication of each issue. Publications in the languages in our vicinity and in which the main articles of the journal are published.
Maximum length: 1,800 words (approximately 5 pages).

Copyright Notice

This journal provides free access to its content from the time of its publication.

If the manuscript is approved for publication, the authors, as holders of the copyright, will authorise the Journal of the Basque Parliament – LEGAL to reproduce, publish, distribute, exhibit and communicate the manuscript in the country and abroad by electronic means.

All the articles of this journal are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Users may reuse the content in accordance with the terms and conditions of this licence.

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.