Focus and Scope

The Caribbean Law Review has a long history. Launched in the 90s to cultivate Caribbean legal scholarship, it is the quintessential journal for those looking to understand law, policy, and sociolegal studies. Previously behind a paywall, in 2021 we shifted to an open-access model to support the circulation and development of scholarship that is vital to region’s development.

The CLR is an essential legal journal. Despite its strategic and historic importance, publishing research on the Caribbean is not easy with journals in the Global North often insisting on a comparative angle that negates the validity of Cari-centric scholarship. The CLR seeks to support the region by providing legal scholars and practitioners a platform where they can deliberate topics of regional importance. The CLR’s objective is two-fold:

To provide a space that cultivates insightful legal analysis, with the aim of expanding legal thought as situated within a Caribbean Civilisation; and

To enhance scholarly capacity as an under-serviced region is supported in the dissemination of their reflections about law and scholarship.

We commit to publishing research quickly, to aid scholars disseminate their work and to achieve high-impact among the communities we service. We accept submissions from all fields of law though insist that these have relevance to the Caribbean, Latin America, or the Global Souths more widely. We welcome your contributions and look forward to working with prospective authors.

Publication Frequency

The journal is published online as a continuous volume and issue throughout the year. Articles are made available as soon as they are ready to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in getting content publically available.

Special collections of articles are welcomed and will be published as part of the normal issue, but also within a separate collection page.

Open Access Policy

The CLR provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. There is no embargo on the journal’s publications. Submission and acceptance dates, along with publication dates, are made available on the PDF format for each paper.

Authors of articles published remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons license agreement.

Authors are encouraged to publish their data in recommended repositories. For a list of generic and subject-specific repositories that meet our peer review criteria, visit the Open Access Directory or datacite.org.

Journal Archiving

The journal’s publisher focuses on making content discoverable and accessible through indexing services. This journal is indexed by Google Scholar and content is LOCKSS enabled.

Journal History

As the Cave Hill Faculty of Law celebrates its 50th anniversary, its flagship publication, the Caribbean Law Review (CLR), is at a critical juncture. Nurturing the region’s legal intellect since 1991, it is recognised as an iconic Caribbean legal artefact, promoting doctrinal and critical scholarship alike, as well as practical legal analysis. Regrettably, the journal has suffered convulsions since 2009, though we are pleased to have recently digitised all back issues.

In honour of our anniversary, we are re-launching the CLR. In contrast to many other legal publications, the CLR possesses a civilisational quality, helping to problematise the relation between law and post-coloniality as the Caribbean continues to trudge through the post-colonial.

Our journal therefore belongs to the Caribbean people and should be accessible to students, thinkers, practitioners, and visionaries in the region and beyond. We are thus moving forward with an open-access journal model. Through strong partnerships, we aspire to establish the CLR as an online presence marked by rich and robust discussions, creating a platform of intellectual engagement and practice.

Serendipitously, the journal’s abbreviation mirrors the name of Caribbean hero, CLR James. “We, there in the Caribbean, are a very peculiar people”. We believe that the CLR must nurture this peculiarity through our legal imagination. This character emphasises the scope of the journal: focused on the Caribbean yet situating the Caribbean in the world. What should the Caribbean’s future look like? How will we achieve it? Critically, how will our future cohere with that of others? The CLR will nurture a forum for deliberations about these existential questions as seen through the prism of law.