The Entertainment and Sports Law Journal (ESLJ) is an open access, refereed journal published by University of Westminster Press (UWP). It has an extremely wide reach, with articles from the journal having been downloaded more than 1,000,000 times and is abstracted via EBSCO and in Hein Online. The editors are keen to receive new submissions and are happy to discuss with interested prospective authors.  

The journal was first published more than 20 years ago with Frank Cass Publishers, and was originally known as the Entertainment Law Journal, the ESLJ eventually found its home at UWP after a period at the Warwick online journals project – we were early adopters of the open access model. The founding editors wanted to build on momentum in the area, both in terms of  the increasing breadth of research in the area, and the emergence of more and more taught degrees – the University of Westminster for example, in many ways the home of the ESLJ, ran the first Entertainment Law option on an LLB in UK in 1992, and created the first postgraduate LLM Entertainment Law degree in 1999. Sport was added to the journal title largely as a reflection of the amount of sport related papers we were receiving at that time, but the journal’s coverage has in fact always been eclectic as our original about section notes:

The Entertainment and Sports Law Journal is a refereed, online, open access journal. It is located within a dynamic and rapidly expanding area of legal theory and practice. Whilst focused within legal study, the areas it encompasses are necessarily interdisciplinary. Entertainment Law, Media Law, Sports Law, IP Law, Licensing Law – these are all subjects that are taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level at increasing numbers of Law Schools in the UK and beyond. Areas that are of interest to ESLJ include the ways in which the law and regulatory frameworks operate in the following industries: music, sport, film, theatre and literature, art, gaming, the night time economy and the Internet and social media. 

The very first volume, for example, included David Miers on gambling, Lee Marshall on the napster wars, Raymond Schneider on celebrity photographs and copyright, Paul Chatterton on governing nightlife, Tom Lewis on art and human rights and Lindsay Gregg on blasphemy in music contracts. We’ve had special issues on themes such as Celebrity Big Brother, and have a series of special collections that draw together articles from across issues and volumes on related themes. In addition to longer articles we also have Interventions (which are shorter, often policy related, although they could also be case note form etc) and have published interviews and are open to other creative ideas.

The current editorial team are Steve Greenfield (Westminster), Mark James (MMU), Ashley Lowerson (Northumbria) and Guy Osborn (Westminster). We would love to have more submissions from socio-legal scholars and are happy to talk to interested authors, contact details here. If you have a piece ready you would like to be consider for inclusion please see our author guidelines here.  

Guy Osborn G.Osborn@westminster.ac.uk 

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