The Boğaziçi Law Review

The main objective of the Boğaziçi Law Review is to contribute to national and international legal literature by publishing high quality articles in law. 

The Boğaziçi Law Review is a publication of Boğaziçi University, Faculty of Law. The Boğaziçi Law Review is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal which is published twice a year (in June and December). This journal aims at publishing articles, case notes and book reviews. The journal is bilingual (papers are accepted in both English and Turkish) but the Turkish articles are required to include an extended English abstract. There are no article processing, submission or publication fees.

1. Manuscripts submitted to the BLR must not have been published or sent for publication elsewhere. Authors will be asked to confirm this prior to publication.
2. Manuscripts must be submitted via DergiPark in Microsoft Word format, and in accordance with these guidelines.
3. The author's full name and title must be placed below the title of the article and right-aligned on the first page of the manuscript. The e-mail address and institutional affiliation of the author must be provided in an asterisked footnote. Authors must also include their correspondence address and telephone number in the e-mail.
4. The BLR accepts manuscripts in English and Turkish. Each manuscript should contain an abstract of 300 words, as well as 5 to 10 keywords in either English or Turkish (according to the language of the paper). Turkish articles should also have an extended abstract in English of 600 to 1000 words. Manuscripts submitted for publication as a research article must not be longer than 12,000 words, including footnotes, but excluding the abstract and keywords.
5. All manuscripts should be in Times New Roman. The body text should be in 12 font size with 1.5 line spacing, and footnotes should be in 10 font size with single line spacing.
6. Quotations should be placed in inverted commas (quotation marks) and italicised. Quotations exceeding 4 lines should be begin on a new line.
7. The method below should be followed in titling the manuscript in terms of capitalization and list bullets:
    "1. FIRST DEGREE SUB-DIVISION
    1.1. SECOND DEGREE SUB-DIVISION
    1.1.1. Third Degree Subdivision
    1.1.1.1 Fourth Degree Subdivision”
8. Citations and explanations should be provided in the footnotes. The Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities ('OSCOLA') should be used for citations. Linguistic conventions used in citations should be selected according to the language of the article. For example, when displaying the access date of online resources, "Erişim Tarihi" should be used for Turkish articles and "accessed" for English ones. Non-compliant manuscripts shall be sent back to the author for correction.
9. At the end of the manuscript, there should be a bibliography in which sources cited are listed in alphabetical order, by last name of the author of the respective source. The bibliography should also comply with OSCOLA norms.
10. The authors of the manuscripts accepted for publication are deemed to transfer their right to reproduction, their right to create derivative works (including translations), their right to distribute, and their right to communicate to the public in any manner to Boğaziçi University indefinitely and without any compensation in accordance with Turkish Intellectual and Artistic Works Law No. 5846.
11. Manuscripts submitted for publication in BLR shall be subjected to a preliminary examination in terms of compliance with these guidelines before being sent to referees. Manuscripts that contravene the ethical principles or the publication policy of the BLR, which contain unacceptable errors of language or inappropriate style, or lack sufficient academic contribution shall be rejected without being sent to the referees.
12. Manuscripts submitted for publication will be subjected to similarity test through online plagiarism tools (Turnitin and iThenticate) before the appointment of the referees. Any manuscript exceeding the similarity score of [20%] will be subjected to a further originality review by the journal board. The journal board rejects the manuscript or requests revision from the author where the submission’s degree of originality is insufficient. If plagiarism is detected at any stage of the review, the manuscript will be rejected and a revised or similar work from the author will not be accepted.
13. Those manuscripts accepted in the initial sift shall be anonymised and be sent to referees for substantive peer-review of the content. The authors shall not be informed of the identity of the referees. The decision as to whether a manuscript is accepted for publication shall be made according to the reports and feedback received from the referees. There is no defined time-limit for the peer-review period.
14. The Editor-in-Chief will take the final decision as to whether a manuscript will be published and the timing of the latter. Authors should be aware that a single negative referee report may be sufficient for the article to be rejected.

1. The BLR adheres to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scientific Publishing, as jointly determined by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME). (For policies see https://publicationethics.org/files/principles-transparency-best-practice-scholarly-publishing.pdf )
2. All manuscripts submitted for publication in the BLR must be original, unpublished, and not submitted for evaluation elsewhere. Each manuscript submitted will first undergo an editorial review for compliance with the Guidelines for Authors, Ethical Principles, and the BLR Publication Policy. Manuscripts that satisfy the editorial review shall be sent to two referees for blind review.
3. If unethical conduct is detected in the manuscripts submitted for publication in the BLR, the flow charts prepared by COPE shall be followed. Unethical conduct includes plagiarism, fake authorship, artificial research and data production, concealment of conflicts of interest, cases where the author did not personally prepare the submitted manuscript, unfair use of other works and the efforts of third parties, and cases where the names of the authors are not specified correctly.
4. All natural persons involved in the research and preparation of manuscripts submitted for publishing in the BLR should be notified of the impacts and risks of involvement, the nature of the data to be collected and used, and their intended purpose.
5. If the manuscripts to be submitted for publication in the BLR involve experimental studies, the required ethics committee approvals should be obtained for these experiments. The written consent of natural person participants should be obtained in accordance with the relevant laws, in particular Turkish data protection legislation (Law No. 6698).
6. If submitted manuscripts are prepared in cooperation with or funded by an institution or organisation, or within the scope of a project, the authors must make full disclosure of the same at the time the manuscript is submitted.
7. It is the responsibility of the authors to comply with the Guidelines for Authors, Ethical Principles, and the BLR Publication Policy, and applicable law, including, but not limited to, the rules on intellectual property and data protection.
8. Persons nominated as authors in submitted manuscripts must have direct academic and/or scientific contributions within the respective manuscript. Providing funding or access to resources such as books and articles for the preparation of manuscripts are not in themselves considered such contributions.
9. If there are multiple authors, the order of the authors should be determined by them.
10. The names of those who contributed to submitted manuscripts in a manner that is not considered sufficient for authorship, for example, by providing funds, resources, or technical support, should be listed under acknowledgements.
11. All conflicts of interest that have the potential to affect the results of manuscript submissions must be disclosed by the authors.
12. If an error or inaccuracy is detected by an author of a manuscript, an editor should be contacted directly and immediately to request a retraction or to make appropriate corrections.
13. The initial review of submitted manuscripts by editors shall be independent of and not be affected by the authors' gender, ethnic origin, religious belief, political views, or any other similar irrelevant personal factors.
14. Editors shall be responsible for the publication quality of the content published in BLR. They will ensure corrections are made and errata published when necessary.
15. Editors shall avoid conflicts of interest when sending submitted manuscripts to the referees. Referees should not have a conflict of interest with the authors or the financial sponsors of the respective manuscript or the research that is the subject thereof. The Editor-in-Chief has full and final authority over appointment of referees and is the final arbiter over publication of any manuscript.
16. Referees shall be appointed according to their expertise on the subject matter of a given manuscript. If a referee to whom a manuscript is sent does not consider themselves to be an expert, they should notify the editor who provided the manuscript. If a referee is not able to prepare the report on a manuscript that they had accepted for review, the editor who sent the article should be notified as soon as possible.
17. Editors shall take the necessary precautions to keep the identity of the authors confidential from the referees.
18. The referees act with the awareness that the rights on manuscripts sent to them belong to the authors of those manuscripts. The referees should not and cannot use the manuscripts sent to them in any way or purpose other than for peer-review, and should not discuss the content of the manuscripts with third parties.

No processing or submission fee is charged for articles submitted to the journal or accepted for publication.