Thank you for your interest in submitting a post to the European Law Blog.

Submission procedure

To ensure that your post is online as quickly as possible, we advise you to take the following steps:

1. Read the submission guidelines below or download them here.

2. Contact the editorial assistants by sending an email to [email protected] to express your interest in submitting a post. This serves two purposes: first, to avoid multiple posts on the same topic, and second, to assess at a preliminary stage whether the subject of the proposed post would be fitting material for the readers of the European Law Blog.

3. Submit your post by using the submission system on the website. Once the first round of reviews is done, you will receive your review in a Word document via email.

   Alternatively, you can email your submission as a Word document to [email protected]. If you email your post in Word format, please remove all author information in the Word document. Please also include a 280 character description of your post that can be featured on the site. This will facilitate editing and allow us to give you feedback and comments.

4. After a successful review process, we will publish your post on the blog. More information about the review process can be found here.

Submission Guidelines

What we publish

Our blog aims to deliver ‘bite-sized’ analyses of current developments in EU law that are short and ‘light’ enough to be read and digested during a coffee break. To achieve this goal, all blog posts should meet three criteria:

1. they must be interesting to readers of europeanlawblog.eu;

2. they must be well-written; and

3. they must be well-researched.

‘Interesting’ means timely, relevant, and contextual. We strive to inform our readers about interesting current developments in the field of EU law. This extends to topics including (but not limited to) Court of Justice and General Court cases, European legislation, international treaties involving the EU, European law scholarship, and EU politics. In particular, we aim to contextualize ‘micro-level’ developments in EU law and scholarship within the framework of ‘macro-level’ issues in EU legal studies, such as proportionality, federalism, the rule of law, institutional integrity, etc. By doing so, we hope to make our posts relevant and comprehensible to the broadest possible audience and avoid posts that focus too narrowly on issues that are of interest only to a minority of lawyers or legal scholars.

‘Well-written’ means, of course, that posts must be syntactically and grammatically correct. But it also means that they should strive to be easy to read, accessible, fun, and to the point. To the extent possible, posts should avoid opaque legal language and should attempt to be evocative as well as informative. This means that we encourage opinionated posts that will inspire our readers to comment and debate, though we will not tolerate mean-spirited or offensive material.

Also, remember that blog posts are not case notes: the ideal post for our blog will be between 1500 and 2500 words (although they may be longer for particularly interesting cases, or shorter for brief points of interest). We know that some authors (particularly those from the academic world!) may find it difficult to keep to these limits. As mentioned above, a post should be short and light enough to read and digest during a coffee break. If a case or piece of legislation is so interesting that it cannot possibly be described in less than 3,000 words, then it might merit separate posts or a submission to a law journal.

‘Well-researched’ means that we require our posts to be factually accurate. Posts should include links to relevant sources, be precise in their discussion of legal material, and demonstrate that the author has a command of the debates in the relevant field. Because we aim to emphasize connections to ‘macro-level’ context, authors should strive to link frequently and broadly.

Contributors should also be aware of several additional rules:

• posts may not include marketing-related links or be entirely self-promoting;

• in case of any potential conflicts of interest, please review our conflicts of interest policy under ‘Submissions’;

• posts must be original and must not have already been published elsewhere;

• we ask you to not submit your post elsewhere while the review process is underway. Please be mindful that reviewers are volunteers and spend time reviewing your work.

• we do not, as a rule, publish anonymous posts. If, however, you can make a good argument for why your name should be withheld, we will consider your request.

All posts and comments submitted to the blog will be reviewed before publication through a double-blind peer-review process. For more information, please consult our review process policy under ‘Submissions’.   

Specific editorial guidelines

In an attempt to standardize some often encountered phenomena, in addition to the above, please observe the following specific editorial guidelines:

• Please use hyperlinks as much as possible for your references. If you do choose to use (limited) footnotes, please be advised that the site currently supports Chicago-style referencing.

• Include in parentheses the relevant paragraph numbers of the judgment you are referring to (e.g. ‘Opinion 2/15 (para. 292)’).

• Choose the most relevant topic or topics for your post and list them at the bottom or top of the Word file or in your submission. Please consult with the editors if you believe a new topic is appropriate for your post.

• The title of your post should be relatively short.

• We ask you to include a short description of your post (max. 280 characters) that will be featured on the site and at the top of your post.

• Give short names or abbreviations where appropriate (e.g., ‘…the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA)…’)

• We prefer active over passive voice: e.g., ‘The Court held’ instead of ‘It was held by the Court that’.

• Try to create a ‘flow’ in your post by using words like ‘therefore’, ‘hence’, ‘notwithstanding’, ‘nevertheless’, ‘also’, ‘however’, ‘in addition’, which connect the various sections and make it much easier to read.

• Be advised that writing in another language might involve translating legal terminology. Be as clear as you can about what a legal term means according to national law (e.g. ‘Under Dutch law, a “bezwaarprocedure” involves …’).

• References and abbreviations should be as follows:

  • ‘CJEU’ refers to the Institution ‘Court of Justice of the European Union’; the ‘ECJ’ or ‘the Court’ refers to the Court of Justice as the principal court of the CJEU;

  • When citing European legislation, please use the short title and insert a hyperlink to the full text (e.g., ‘Regulation (EC) No 44/2001’ and ‘Directive 2004/48/EC’);

  • Spell Article as ‘Article’ (so, not: ‘article’, ‘art.’, ‘Art.’);

  • Cite the various parts of an Article reference in descending order in parentheses and not separated by commas or spaces (e.g. Article 5(3)(c) of Regulation);

  • Unnumbered parts of a reference are written out in full and usually precede the numbered part (e.g. Article 2 and the second paragraph of Article 3 provide that...)

The Editors