About

Focus and Scope

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 focussed 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 the Journal include the ways in which the Law intersects with, or the regulatory frameworks that exists within, the following industries:

  • Music
  • Sport
  • Cinema/Film
  • Theatre/Literature
  • Internet (both creation and distribution)
  • Social Media
  • Gaming
  • The night time economy
  • Art
  • Gambling

This list should not be seen as exhaustive, but as indicative of the potential areas of interest embracing different theoretical approaches and/or empirical work.  In short the journal's wide range of subject matter naturally encompasses different perspectives and innovative approaches to the material are warmly encouraged.

The broadest aim of the journal is to provide an environment for considered discourse of this growing field of study. Whilst such discourse will generally be from an academic perspective, we also welcome material that stresses the practice dimension to the area and the interaction between theory and practice. We encourage submissions from across the world that embrace ground-breaking methods to dissemination and the Editors will be happy to discuss ideas for submission outside of the traditional article. 

We are particularly interested in work that adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the area as we believe that these areas of entertainment are particularly fruitful vehicles for this approach.


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 making content publicly 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

This journal 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.

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.


Publication Fees

There are no author facing charges for those wishing to publish in the Enterntainment and Sports Law Journal.  It is funded by the University of Westminster.


Archiving Policy

The journal’s publisher, University of Westminster Press, focuses on making content discoverable and accessible through indexing services. Content is also archived around the world to ensure long-term availability.

The Entertainment and Sports Law Journal is listed in EBSCO host, Directory of Open Access Journals, SHERPA RoMEO and Chronos, and catalogued in Hein Online and affiliated with sportslawjournals.com.

In addition, all of our article metadata is openly available for harvesting by indexing services via OAI-PMH.

To ensure permanency of all publications, this journal also utilises CLOCKSS, and LOCKSS archiving systems to create permanent archives for the purposes of preservation and restoration.


History

ESLJ was originally published as Entertainment Law in hard copy by Frank Cass Journals from Spring 2002 (Volume 1 Number 1) to Autumn 2003 (Volume 2 Number 3).

Subsequently it was published electronically via the University of Warwick's Electronic Law Journals service before transferring to University of Westminster Press in early 2016.