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Published under the Aegis of the Constitutional Law Club, National Law University Delhi
All manuscripts must be submitted exclusively through the JCLT Author Portal. Submissions made through any other mode shall not be considered. Submissions must be original, unpublished, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
All submissions shall conform to the following requirements:
Non-compliance with formatting or citation requirements may result in rejection without review.
Each submission shall be accompanied by an abstract not exceeding 300 words and 4–6 keywords.
Submissions shall be anonymised in accordance with the Journal’s double-blind review process. Manuscripts shall not contain any information capable of identifying the author(s), including names, institutional affiliations, acknowledgements, or self-identifying references in the text, footnotes, or file metadata.
The details of all the Authors shall be submitted in a separate document titled “Title Page” with the following information:
All submissions are subject to plagiarism screening through iThenticate (Turnitin), at any stage of the review process. Manuscripts found to be plagiarised or have an unacceptable similarity rate shall be rejected.
The Journal endeavours to complete the editorial and peer review process within six months of receipt of the manuscript. This timeline is indicative and not binding on the Journal.
The Editorial Board reserves the right to reject any submission at any stage of the review process and to require revisions as a condition of publication. The final decision regarding publication rests solely with the Editorial Board.
All submissions to the Journal of Constitutional Law & Theory must be entirely original. Manuscripts shall not have been previously published, nor be under consideration for publication, in whole or in part, by any other journal, edited volume, blog, repository, or online platform at the time of submission.
Submissions that substantially overlap with previously published work, including working papers, conference papers, blog posts, or preprints, must be clearly disclosed at the time of submission. The Editorial Board reserves the right to reject such submissions at its sole discretion.
Authorship shall be limited to individuals who have made a substantial intellectual contribution to the conception, research, and writing of the manuscript. Ghost authorship, honorary authorship, or misrepresentation of contribution is prohibited.
Prohibition on Generative Artificial Intelligence
The Journal maintains a strict prohibition on the use of generative artificial intelligence tools (including but not limited to large language models, text generators, or automated writing assistants) in the drafting, structuring, editing, or substantive revision of manuscripts.
Any use of generative AI in the preparation of a submission shall result in summary disqualification of the manuscript, without review and without an opportunity for revision. The Editorial Board may take further action in cases involving misrepresentation or concealment of such use.
By submitting a manuscript, authors affirm compliance with this policy.
The Journal of Constitutional Law & Theory invites original and unpublished manuscripts engaging with questions of constitutional law, theory, and public law. Submissions may be interdisciplinary where relevant, but must maintain clear legal engagement and analytical rigour. The Journal accepts manuscripts in the following categories:
Articles should present a sustained and comprehensive engagement with a significant legal or theoretical question. Submissions may be doctrinal, theoretical, empirical, or interdisciplinary in method, but must demonstrate depth of research, careful engagement with existing scholarship and jurisprudence, and a clearly reasoned position. Articles are expected to develop a coherent structure, address counter-arguments where relevant, and contribute meaningfully to ongoing constitutional debates.
Essays are shorter analytical interventions that foreground originality and conceptual clarity. They should advance a focused thesis, revisit settled debates from a fresh perspective, or challenge prevailing assumptions in constitutional law. Compared to Articles, Essays should be narrower in scope, sharper in argumentation, and economical in their use of literature and examples while still demonstrating intellectual rigour.
These submissions must critically analyse a recent judicial decision or legislative development, in India or comparatively. Authors should situate the development within its doctrinal lineage, identify key interpretive or structural shifts, and assess broader implications for constitutional practice or theory. Legislative Notes should examine the objectives, design choices, and likely legal consequences of the enactment under discussion.
Book Reviews are ordinarily commissioned by the Journal and through Solicitations only. Authors interested in reviewing a particular work may write to the Journal with a brief proposal outlining the book and the proposed analytical approach.
The Journal also considers shorter submissions that do not fall within the above categories but make a focused and original contribution to constitutional discourse. These may include short responses to previously published works, analytical notes grounded in practical experience in constitutional litigation, judgment-writing or deliberation, legislative drafting, or other reflective pieces that combine experiential insight with legal analysis.
All submissions received by the Journal of Constitutional Law & Theory are subject to the following multi-stage review process:
The Journal endeavours to complete the editorial and peer review process within six months of receipt of the manuscript. This timeline is indicative and not binding on the Journal.
The Journal adheres to a double-blind review standard to ensure fairness, academic integrity, and independence of evaluation. At all stages of review, the identities of the author(s) and reviewers are withheld from one another.
Authors are required to submit manuscripts that are fully anonymised, including the removal of self-identifying references in the text, footnotes, and file metadata. Any submission found to compromise anonymity may be returned for correction or declined.
Reviewers are selected solely on the basis of subject-matter expertise and are required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest. Where a conflict arises, the reviewer is recused from the evaluation.
Any attempt by an author to directly or indirectly contact editors or reviewers regarding a submission will result in immediate disqualification of the manuscript. All communication related to submissions must be addressed exclusively to the official Journal email address.
All editorial decisions are based on the scholarly merit of the submission, assessed independently of the author(s)’ institutional affiliation, academic standing, or prior publications.
The Journal of Constitutional Law & Theory is an open-access journal. All works published in the Journal are made freely and permanently available to the public without subscription, payment, or access restrictions.
Copyright in the published work remains with the author(s). By submitting a manuscript and accepting publication, the author(s) grant the Journal a non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide licence to publish, reproduce, distribute, and archive the work in all formats and media.
All published content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution–Non Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence. This licence permits non-commercial use, reproduction, and adaptation of the work, subject to:
Any commercial use requires prior permission of the copyright holder(s).
Author(s) may deposit the accepted or published version of the manuscript in institutional repositories, personal webpages, or non-commercial academic platforms. All self-archived versions must carry full citation details and reference the Journal as the original publisher.