ERPL
1. Submissions
Articles should not normally exceed 12,000 words including footnotes. They should begin with an indented and italicised abstract of around 150 words which sets out the main arguments and conclusions of the article.
The ERPL is committed to linguistic diversity by accepting submissions in seven languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, German and Italian. If the article is written in a language other than English, then an abstract and title in English should be submitted as well. 3-4 keywords in English for indexing purposes should accompany the paper. Authors’ names and affiliations as well as Bibliographical References should be in Roman script (or also in Roman script) in case of papers written in non-Roman script.
Shorter articles dealing with developments in recent legislation and case-law within the European institutions for the on-line edition of the European Review of Public Law should usually be in the vicinity of 1,500-3,000 words.
Book reviews should normally be of 1,000-2,000 words in length. Expressions of interest for specific book reviews or suggestions of books to be reviewed should be communicated in advance to the Book Review editor. Reviews are also considered from the review books sent to us by publishers. Contributions and proposals regarding literature of non-English publications are particularly encouraged. In order to ensure the widest possible readership of the review information about these publications, submissions for book reviews are accepted in English or French only.
Authors are requested to use the house style and formatting guidelines.
2. ERPL Formatting Styles
- Bolds or underlining are not used according to the ERPL formatting styles. If the author wishes to emphasize, he/she should use italics.
- Italics should be used for the following (italics are not used for the following cases when the relevant words or phrases are part of a wider sentence in italics):
- The names of cases (e.g. affaire Dubreuil, Kherouaa case etc.)
- Short phrases or individual words using another language than the one in which the article is written (e.g. Conseil d’Etat when the article is not written in French but in one of the other official languages of the ERPL)
- Common Latin abbreviations or words (e.g., i.e., cf., ad hoc, per se, ibid., etc.)
- Special emphasis should be given to the formatting of the footnotes:
- The names of the authors mentioned in the footnotes should not be written in capital letters (All Caps). According to the ERPL formatting standards, the author names are presented in Small Caps. However, if this is not possible, please use regular letters (e.g. or Aster Veldkamp). In case there are two or more authors, please separate their names with a slash (/). In case there are more than three authors, the name of the first author can be used followed by: et al.
- The titles of books are italicised.
- The titles of articles are regular and they should not be between inverted commas.
- The titles of periodicals are italicised (even their abbreviated titles).
- Abbreviated Law Reports are not italicised.
- If a reference is made to an article in a book, this should be made as follows: author, title of the article, in: editor, book title, etc.
- The footnote numbers should be placed before the punctuation mark. Endnotes should not be used.
- Footnoting should not be excessive.
- Hyphens used as a punctuation device should be short, with a space either side.
- It is advisable that when acronyms or abbreviations are used, items are spelt out in full when first appearing (e.g. European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) or (hereafter ECHR)).
- Website addresses should not be bold or underlined.