University of Coimbra Institute for Legal Research (UCILeR) is organizing the II Legal SciComm Conference: Research and Practices. This is a conference on the communication of legal research, as part of the Communication of Legal Research (Legal SciComm) project, to be held on 12 November 2024, at the Colégio da Trindade (Faculty of Law, University of Coimbra), Portugal

Legal SciComm Conference: Research and Practices aims to bring together researchers and law practitioners to share their knowledge and experiences on legal/law communication.

The conference will be hybrid to allow participation by researchers who are unable to travel.

The working languages of the conference are English, Portuguese and Spanish but all speakers are kindly invited to provide slides in English.

We look forward to welcoming you to Coimbra, a city with history and tradition, to discuss theories and practices that we can use to improve the communication of law with society.

The call for abstracts is open to students (undergraduate, master's, doctoral, post-doctoral, post-graduate) and researchers to share their knowledge and experience on communication of legal research to non-specialist audiences, such as society, the private sector, policy-makers and other lay audiences.

We also invite legal practitioners (lawyers, magistrates, and others) to submit proposals for sharing practical experiences in simplifying legal language.

Possible topics include techniques, ways/tools, participatory and/or performative forms of construction and critical reflection (e.g. visual law and legal design, legislative theatre, etc.); communication through podcasts, social networks, videos, comics, and press releases, among others.

Each author is limited to a maximum of two submissions as an author or co-author.

Abstracts in Portuguese or English with up to 250 words should be submitted by 10 October 2024 to legalscicomm@ij.uc.pt, indicating if a scientific work or an experience report.

The information on selected proposals will be done until 25 October 2024.

Authors are invited to submit a full paper until 31 December 2023.

Submissions must be written in English to be considered for peer review. Legal SciComm Conference will not accept research papers that were submitted or accepted for publication in a journal or have already been published.

A maximum length of 7000 words, including the abstract, figures, tables, reference list.

Review Process

Initial Screening: Each submitted paper will first be reviewed by members of the Organising Committee for completeness, formatting, plagiarism, and adherence to the conference's thematic.

Review: the paper will undergo peer review process by two referees.

Paper Acceptance: The authors will receive a review decision within two to four weeks after submission.

Submissions must follow the formatting guidelines and be sent in doc(x) to legalscicomm@ij.uc.pt

Guidelines here and full text template here

Law practitioners (lawyers, magistrates, and others) are invited to submit an experience report by 31 December 2024.

An experience report aims to share practical situations about simplifying legal language and/or legal communication with the general public. This report should be presented in such a way as to promote analysis, reflection, and discussion.

Submissions must be written in English to be considered for publication and comply with the following structure: 1. Contextualisation of the problem/challenge; 2. Explanation of the solution/practice implemented; 3. Critical Analysis/Lessons learnt.

The maximum length is 2000 words.

Review Process

Initial Screening: Each submitted paper will first be reviewed by members of the Organising Committee for formatting and adherence to the conference's thematic.

Review: the paper will undergo peer review process by two referees.

Paper Acceptance: The authors will receive a review decision within two to four weeks after submission.

Submissions must follow the formatting guidelines and be sent in doc(x) to legalscicomm@ij.uc.pt

Full text template here.

The Conference will be hybrid, so you can present your accepted abstract virtually or in-person.

Oral presentation - The presentations are divided into two panels and each presentation will last a maximum of 5 minutes, using a maximum of two slides. The question and answer session will be held at the end of each panel.

Room Equipment – The room will be equipped with a laptop pre-installed with PowerPoint, as well as an LCD projector. Presenters who choose to participate remotely need a computer with an internet connection and speakers/headphones.

Publication

After peer review, accepted full papers will be published in the conference proceeding.

The Conference Proceeding will be published online in a PDF and will be available in open access and at the UCILeR Website. No changes are allowed after this stage. Upon publication, the conference proceeding will receive an eISBN and a DOI number.

Aims & Scope

The Conference Proceeding will be published in open access with eISBN and DOI numbers under the publisher University of Coimbra Institute for Legal Research, Faculty of Law of the University of Coimbra. The Conference Proceeding aims to make a significant contribution, in terms of theory and practice, to the studies related to science communication of Law to non-specialist audiences.

Only manuscripts presented at the conference and received according to publication guidelines and timelines will be published in the Conference Proceeding.

Abstracting & Indexing

Once published, it will be submitted for evaluation and possible coverage in Web of Science Core Collection™ Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Social Sciences & Humanities (CPCI-SSH).

Ethics & Malpractice Statement

The UCILeR Ethics and Good Practices Plan can be consult here.

Peer review policy

The peer review process helps to validate and improve the quality of the research. All submissions for possible publication are subjected to a peer review process. The submitted manuscripts will go through a peer review process managed by the conference’s scientific committee and external reviewers.

Reviewers should ensure manuscripts meet the scope of the conference and satisfy minimum quality criteria, and follow the COPE’s Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers.

Open Access

UCILeR is committed to Open Access (OA) to facilitate the rapid development of research and to make scholarly work available to everyone without financial, legal, or technical constraints.