Author Guidelines

These guidelines tell you what the Journal of Constitutional Change expects, and why. Authors who would like an opinion on fit before investing in a submission are welcome to send a title and a paragraph to the editorial office.

1. Before you submit

Confirm that your manuscript answers the three questions in the Focus and Scope statement: does it explain a change or a resistance to change in constitutional text, meaning or authority; would a reader in another jurisdiction learn something usable; and can your central claim be stated as a proposition about constitutional change rather than only about one country's constitutional law? Most desk rejections at JCC follow from the second and third questions, not the first.

2. Submit in your own format

JCC operates format-free submission. For an initial submission, the Journal asks only that your manuscript be in Word (.docx) or rich text, in a legible font, with continuous line numbering, footnotes rather than endnotes, and a consistent citation style — any recognised style will do. You are not asked to reformat your work to the Journal's house style unless and until it is accepted. Editors and reviewers assess arguments, and asking authors to spend a weekend re-punctuating footnotes for a manuscript that may be declined is a waste of scholarly time.

On acceptance, you will be asked to conform the manuscript to the JCC citation style described in section 7, with editorial assistance where needed.

3. Article types and length

Word limits are inclusive of footnotes and exclusive of the abstract and the table of authorities. Manuscripts significantly over the limit are returned before review; if your argument genuinely requires more space, write to the editors before submitting rather than after.

Type	Length	Structure
Article	8,000–12,000 words	Abstract (200–250 words), keywords, jurisdictional statement, numbered sections, conclusion. A table of authorities is added on acceptance.
Comparative Note	4,000–6,000 words	Abstract (200–250 words), keywords, jurisdictional statement, short sections, conclusion. A Note identifies a development, explains its significance, and places it beside comparable developments elsewhere.
Amendment Watch	3,000–5,000 words	Abstract (100–150 words) and keywords. Follows the published Amendment Watch template: instrument or proposal; procedure used; actors; contestation; judicial treatment; outcome and assessment; comparative observation.
Review Essay	2,500–5,000 words	Abstract (100–150 words) and keywords, together with a headnote listing the works reviewed with full bibliographic details, publisher, year, pages and ISBN.
Reply	2,000–3,000 words	Abstract (100–150 words). Identifies the article replied to in the first footnote; addresses argument, not the author.
Symposium contribution	By arrangement with the editors	Ordinarily the length of an Article or a Comparative Note. Guest-edited; every contribution is peer reviewed and decided by the standing editorial team under the Peer Review Process.

4. Title, abstract and keywords

Title — no more than fifteen words. Where a manuscript concerns particular jurisdictions, name them in the title or the subtitle. A reader searching for work on Thailand should be able to find yours.

Abstract — 200–250 words, unstructured in form but containing five elements: (i) the problem; (ii) the jurisdictions examined; (iii) the method and materials; (iv) the argument advanced; and (v) what the article adds to the literature on constitutional change. Do not write "this article examines"; write what you found. The abstract is the part of your work most people will read, and for many it will be all they can read. Amendment Watch reports, Review Essays and Replies carry a shorter abstract of 100–150 words: every peer-reviewed item in the Journal has an English title, abstract and keywords, without exception.

Keywords — five to eight, including at least one jurisdiction and at least one conceptual term drawn from the scope list (for example: "unamendability", "constitutional identity", "constituent power"). Consistent conceptual keywords are what will one day let readers trace a debate across this journal and others.

5. The jurisdictional statement

Every Article and Comparative Note carries a jurisdictional statement of no more than seventy-five words, placed after the keywords, answering three questions: which jurisdictions does the manuscript examine; why those; and what work does the comparison do? This is a JCC requirement and is unusual, so an example is given.

Jurisdictional statement. This article examines Indonesia and Colombia. Both are presidential systems whose constitutional courts have asserted a power to review constitutional amendments without an express textual mandate, but they diverge in how that power was justified. The comparison isolates the role of judicial self-justification, rather than constitutional text, in the emergence of substantive limits on amendment.

The statement is not a summary of the article; it is an account of the choice of cases. Its purpose is to require authors to think about case selection deliberately, and to allow reviewers and readers to evaluate that choice.

6. Primary legal materials

This is the requirement on which JCC is least flexible, because it is the one that determines whether comparative constitutional scholarship can be relied upon.

Quote constitutional provisions, judgments, drafting records and legislation from the original-language source, and give a translation. Supply the original text in the footnote where the wording is contested or the argument turns on it.
Identify every translation: "official translation", "translation by [name]", "author's translation", or the published source relied upon. An unattributed translation is not a citation.
Cite judgments to the paragraph or page, not to the decision as a whole, whenever a proposition is attributed to a court.
Do not rely on a secondary source for the content of a primary one. If you cannot obtain the decision, say so in the footnote and attribute the account to the scholar who reported it.
Where you rely on an unofficial database or a constitution-comparison project, name it and give the date of access; such sources are valuable but are not the instrument.

Reviewers are asked specifically to flag propositions of law they cannot verify. This is the most common reason manuscripts are returned for major revision at JCC.

7. Citation style (on acceptance)

JCC uses footnotes, numbered continuously, in a style derived from OSCOLA and adapted for non-Anglophone jurisdictions, together with a Table of Authorities at the end of the manuscript divided into: Constitutional Instruments; Legislation; Cases; and Secondary Sources. Footnotes carry the argument; the table makes the article machine-readable and its sources traceable. Do not use author–date citation in the body of the text.

Give the full citation at first mention and a short form thereafter. Examples:

Source	Form
Constitution	Undang-Undang Dasar Negara Republik Indonesia Tahun 1945 [Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia 1945] art 24C(1).
Amendment instrument	Perubahan Ketiga Undang-Undang Dasar Negara Republik Indonesia Tahun 1945 [Third Amendment to the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia] (2001) art 1(2).
Constitution (translated)	Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand BE 2560 (2017) s 256, translated in [source of translation]; author's translation where no official English text exists.
Decision (Indonesia)	Constitutional Court of the Republic of Indonesia, Decision No 90/PUU-XXI/2023 (16 October 2023) [3.17].
Decision (India)	Kesavananda Bharati v State of Kerala (1973) 4 SCC 225 [292] (Sikri CJ). Cite the paragraph of the report, not the page of a parallel citation in another series.
Decision (Germany)	BVerfG, Judgment of the Second Senate of 30 June 2009, 2 BvE 2/08 and others (Lisbon), BVerfGE 123, 267 [216].
Decision (Colombia)	Corte Constitucional [Constitutional Court of Colombia], Sentencia C-141/10 (26 February 2010) s 6.3.
Journal article	Yaniv Roznai, 'Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments—The Migration and Success of a Constitutional Idea' (2013) 61 American Journal of Comparative Law 657, 662. Reproduce the title's own punctuation.
Book	Richard Albert, Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking, and Changing Constitutions (Oxford University Press 2019) 74–78.
Chapter	Author, 'Chapter Title' in Editor (ed), Book Title (Publisher 2024) 112, 118.
Online source	Author, 'Title' (Blog or Site, 12 March 2026) <https://...> accessed 4 June 2026.
Drafting record	Risalah Sidang Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat [Minutes of the People's Consultative Assembly], Sidang Tahunan 2001, 7 November 2001, 233 (statement of [speaker]).
Short form	Roznai (n 12) 665; Albert (n 8) 80.

Cite works in languages other than English in the original where the language uses Roman script, with an English translation of the title in square brackets. Do not translate the names of courts, statutes or institutions into an English equivalent that does not exist; give the original and gloss it once.

Non-Roman scripts. Sources in Arabic, Thai, Khmer, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Devanagari, Cyrillic or any other non-Roman script must be given in romanised transliteration, followed by the English translation in square brackets, and may additionally carry the original script. This is required so that citations remain legible and machine-matchable to readers and indexing services worldwide — for example: Ratthathammanun haeng Ratcha-anachak Thai [Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand] BE 2560 (2017) s 256. Use a recognised transliteration system consistently and name it in a first-reference footnote where more than one is in common use.

8. Empirical and interview-based work

Manuscripts using quantitative data must state the source, the unit of observation, the coding rules and the period covered, and must submit data and code with the manuscript for review. Manuscripts using interviews must state how participants were selected, how many were interviewed, in what period, and under what conditions of confidentiality, and must confirm informed consent and, where applicable, ethics approval with the name of the approving body and the reference number. See the Publication Ethics statement.

9. Preparing the manuscript for anonymous review

Remove your name, affiliation, acknowledgements and funding details from the manuscript file and enter them only in the submission system. Cite your own work in the third person and in full — "as Okafor has argued" — rather than using "as I have argued elsewhere (reference removed)", which tells a reviewer less than nothing. Clear identifying information from the file properties. Manuscripts that identify their authors will be returned for correction before review.

10. Statements required at submission

The submission system asks for each of the following. A manuscript missing any of them is returned without review.

Full author details for every author: name as it should be published, department, institution, city and country, and an email address for the corresponding author, institutional where one exists. Affiliations are published and deposited with the article metadata; an author with no current institutional affiliation gives "Independent scholar" and a city and country.
ORCID for every author, except where the Editor-in-Chief has approved an exception under the author-safety provision of the Publication Ethics statement.
Author contributions in CRediT terms, for multi-author manuscripts.
AI Use Statement, identifying the tier of use under the AI Tool Policy. Required even where no tools were used.
Constitutional Engagement Disclosure, declaring any advisory, drafting, litigation, adjudicative, political or advocacy role in the constitutional change analysed, within the last five years, or stating that there is none.
Funding statement, with grant numbers, and confirmation that no funder holds a right of review.
Competing interests statement.
Prior publication and preprint disclosure, including any earlier version in another language.
Data availability statement, for empirical work.
Ethics approval, where human participants were involved.

11. Language

The Journal publishes in English and provides copy-editing for accepted manuscripts at no charge, with substantive language assistance where editorial capacity allows. Write plainly; the subject is difficult enough. Where a constitutional concept has no English equivalent — Verfassungsidentität, pouvoir constituant, kedaulatan rakyat, basic structure — use the original term, gloss it once, and keep using it rather than an approximation that will mislead. The Journal does not require, recommend or accept certificates from commercial language-editing services.

12. Submission

Submit through the Journal's online system at [URL OJS]. Upload the anonymised manuscript as one file; any data, code or appendices as separate files; and complete the statements listed above. You will normally receive an acknowledgement within three days and a screening decision within fourteen; the outer limits are seven and twenty-one days, as set out in the Peer Review Process. If you have heard nothing after twenty-one days, please write to the editorial office — it means something has gone wrong, and we would rather hear from you than have you wait.

13. After acceptance

Accepted manuscripts are copy-edited and typeset, and authors receive proofs for approval. Proof corrections are limited to errors of fact, law, citation and typography; substantive rewriting at proof stage is not possible. Articles are published online with a registered DOI and are assigned to the next issue. No charge arises at any point.

14. Withdrawal

An author may withdraw a manuscript at any time before acceptance, at no cost and without giving reasons. After acceptance, withdrawal requires the agreement of the editors and a written explanation, because at that stage reviewers and editors have committed substantial unpaid work. Withdrawal after acceptance in order to publish elsewhere is regarded as a breach of good faith.

15. Contact

Editorial office: jcc@profesionallegal.com. Questions about scope, method, sources or process are welcome at any stage and will be answered by an editor rather than a template.