Author Guidelines

The Bayero Law Review publishes original legal scholarship across all fields of law. Before preparing a submission, please read our Aims & Scope statement in full: it lists the subject areas we cover, the methods we accept and, importantly, the kinds of manuscript that fall outside our remit. It is the same statement our editors apply when deciding whether to send a manuscript out for review.

We accept four types of manuscript:

Word limits are inclusive of footnotes and exclusive of the title page and abstract. Manuscripts that exceed the limit are returned before review.

All manuscripts must be written in English, must be original and unpublished, and must not be under consideration by any other journal. The law must be stated as at the date of submission, and authors are responsible for checking that the legislation they rely on has not been repealed, amended or superseded.

Manuscripts that do not meet these requirements are returned to the author before review, which delays publication. Please check each point before submitting.

Files to submit

Submit two separate files in Microsoft Word format (.doc or .docx). PDF is not accepted at submission, because it cannot be edited or anonymised.

1. A title page containing: the title of the manuscript; the full name of each author; each author's rank, department and institution; the email address and telephone number of the corresponding author; each author's ORCID iD where available; and any acknowledgements or funding declarations.
2. An anonymised manuscript containing the title, abstract, keywords and the full text, with every identifying reference removed. This is the file the referees see — see "Preparing for blind review" below.

Structure

• Title — concise and informative, and it should indicate the legal question addressed rather than merely name a subject.
• Abstract — not more than 250 words, in a single paragraph, stating the problem, the method, the argument and the conclusion. Do not use footnotes or citations in the abstract.
• Keywords — between four and six, separated by commas.
• Introduction — the problem, why it matters, the argument the paper will make, and how the paper proceeds.
• Body — divided under numbered headings in decimal form (1., 1.1, 1.1.1). Do not go deeper than three levels.
• Conclusion — the findings, and any recommendations that follow from them. A conclusion should not introduce new authority.

Formatting

• A4 page size, margins of 2.54 cm (1 inch) on all sides.
• Body text in Times New Roman 12 point, double-spaced.
• Footnotes in Times New Roman 10 point, single-spaced.
• All pages numbered.
• British English spelling used consistently throughout.
• Tables and figures numbered, titled, and placed where they belong in the text.

Preparing for blind review

Because review is double-blind, the anonymised manuscript must not allow a referee to identify the author. Remove your name and affiliation from the text and from the document's file properties, and replace self-identifying citations — "as I argued in…", "see my earlier work" — with a neutral third-person form, or with [Author's own work] in the footnote. Acknowledgements and funding statements belong on the title page only, never in the anonymised file.

The Review uses OSCOLA (Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities), 4th edition, adapted for Nigerian materials. Citation is by footnote only. Endnotes and in-text author–date citation — (Okonkwo, 2019) — are not accepted, and manuscripts using them are returned before review.

Please note that OSCOLA differs from the NALT Citation Guide used by several other Nigerian law journals. If your manuscript is prepared in NALT style, it must be converted before submission.

The essentials

• Footnote markers go after the punctuation, and each footnote ends with a full stop.
• There is no bibliography or reference list — the footnotes carry everything.
• Use ibid for the immediately preceding footnote, and a cross-reference — Adeyemi (n 12) 45 — for anything earlier. Do not use op cit, loc cit or supra.
• Pinpoint to the page or paragraph. A citation to a whole case or book, where a specific proposition is being supported, is not enough.

Examples

Transliterated Arabic terms should be italicised on first use and used consistently thereafter. Where a Qur'anic verse or hadith is cited as legal authority, give the surah and verse number, or the collection, book and hadith number, as the case may be.

All submissions are made through this website. We do not accept manuscripts by email, because email submissions cannot be tracked and are easily lost.

1. Create an author account. Use the Submit Manuscript link, or register directly, with the name and institutional email you want associated with your published work.
2. Upload your two files — the title page and the anonymised manuscript — and enter the title, abstract and keywords in the submission form.
3. Enter every co-author with their full name, affiliation, email address and ORCID iD where available, in the order in which they should appear on the published article, and mark the corresponding author. This information becomes the article's permanent metadata and is what indexers and citation databases read, so please enter it carefully.
4. Pay the assessment fee of ₦5,000 through the payment page in your account. Assessment begins once payment is confirmed.
5. Track progress from your account, which shows the status of your manuscript at every stage and carries all correspondence with the editorial office.

Please keep all correspondence about a manuscript under consideration inside the portal rather than by private email, so that it stays attached to the record and remains visible to whichever editor is handling your paper.

The Review operates double-blind peer review: referees are not told who the authors are, and authors are not told who the referees are.

How a manuscript moves through review

1. Editorial screening. The editorial office checks the manuscript against our scope, our formatting and citation requirements, and our originality requirements, and runs a similarity check. Manuscripts that are out of scope, or that do not meet the guidelines, are returned at this stage without being sent to referees. This normally takes about two weeks.
2. Referee assessment. Manuscripts that pass screening go to at least two independent referees with expertise in the field, who assess originality, the soundness of the argument, the accuracy and currency of the authority relied on, the contribution to the field, and the clarity of the writing.
3. Decision. Referees recommend; the Editor-in-Chief decides. The decision will be to accept, to accept subject to minor revision, to require major revision and resubmission, or to reject. Where two referees substantially disagree, a third is appointed before any decision is taken.
4. Revision. Authors asked to revise receive the referees' comments in full, with a deadline. A revised manuscript must be accompanied by a response setting out, point by point, what was changed and where — or, where the author disagrees, the reasons for not making the change. Revised manuscripts are normally returned to the original referees.

We aim to return a first decision within eight weeks of a manuscript clearing editorial screening. Where a manuscript requires a third referee, or falls in a period when referees are hard to secure, this may take longer, and we will tell you if it does.

The decision of the Editor-in-Chief is final, subject only to the appeal procedure below. Acceptance is never automatic and is never a consequence of having paid the assessment fee.

The Review is open access: readers pay nothing, and there is no subscription or paywall. Publication is funded by author charges, levied in two stages.

Two points to be clear about:

• The assessment fee is not refundable, whatever the outcome. It pays for the assessment itself, which is carried out whether the manuscript is accepted or rejected.
• The assessment fee does not purchase publication. Paying it entitles a manuscript to be considered, not to be accepted. Manuscripts are rejected on their merits regardless of payment, and no editor or referee is told what a manuscript's payment status is.

The publication fee falls due only after a manuscript has been accepted. An accepted manuscript is published in the next available issue once the fee is confirmed. There are no additional charges — no page charges, no colour charges and no submission charge beyond the assessment fee.

Both payments are made through the payment page in your author account, which issues a receipt. Please do not pay any individual directly, and treat any request to do so as fraudulent and report it to the editorial office.

The Review follows the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Submitting a manuscript is taken as an undertaking to observe what follows.

Authors

• Submit only original work that is unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere.
• Acknowledge every source relied on, and obtain permission for any substantial quotation or reproduction that requires it.
• Name as authors only those who made a genuine intellectual contribution to the work, and name all of them. Gift authorship, ghost authorship and the addition or removal of authors after submission without the written agreement of all parties are all misconduct.
• Disclose any funding, employment, consultancy, or personal or financial interest that a reader might reasonably think could have influenced the work.
• Report empirical work honestly, stating the population, sample and instrument, and obtain ethical clearance where the research involved human participants.
• Tell the editorial office promptly if you discover a significant error in your own published work, and cooperate in correcting it.

Referees

• Judge manuscripts on their merits, without regard to the nationality, institution, religion, gender or seniority of the authors.
• Treat every manuscript as confidential, and neither cite nor use unpublished material from it.
• Decline any assignment where there is a conflict of interest, or where you cannot review competently or in time.
• Give reasoned, specific and courteous comments that the author can act on.

Editors

• Decide on academic merit alone, free of commercial or institutional influence, and without knowledge of payment status.
• Preserve the anonymity of authors and referees, and the confidentiality of every submission.
• Stand aside from handling any manuscript in which they have an interest, including their own and those of close colleagues.
• Act on credible allegations of misconduct, whenever they arise and however long after publication.

When something goes wrong

Credible allegations of plagiarism, data fabrication, undisclosed conflicts, duplicate submission or disputed authorship are investigated. The author is given a full opportunity to respond. Where an allegation is substantiated, the consequence is rejection before publication, or after publication a correction, an expression of concern or a retraction — published, linked permanently to the original article, and stating what was wrong and who was responsible. In serious cases the author's institution is informed.

Every manuscript is screened with similarity-detection software before it is sent to referees. Screening is repeated after acceptance for manuscripts that have been substantially revised.

What we are looking for is not a percentage but appropriation: text, argument, structure or data taken from another source and presented as the author's own. A high similarity score that consists entirely of correctly attributed and properly formatted quotations, statutory text and case names is not plagiarism. A low score can still conceal it — a paraphrased argument lifted from an unacknowledged source is plagiarism at any score.

The following are all treated as misconduct:

• Reproducing another author's words without quotation marks and a citation.
• Paraphrasing another author's argument or structure without acknowledgement.
• Reusing your own previously published work without disclosing it — self-plagiarism — including submitting substantially the same paper to two journals at once.
• Citing sources you have not read, or citing a source that does not support the proposition it is attached to.
• Presenting text generated by an artificial intelligence tool as your own writing. AI tools may be used for language editing, and their use must be disclosed on the title page; they may not be listed as an author, and the author remains fully responsible for every proposition and every citation in the manuscript. Fabricated citations — a recurring consequence of these tools in legal writing — are treated as a serious breach.

Manuscripts found to contain plagiarism are rejected, and the corresponding author is informed of the finding. Where plagiarism is discovered after publication, the article is retracted.

Authors retain the copyright in their articles. By submitting, you grant the Bayero Law Review a non-exclusive, irrevocable licence to publish the article, to distribute it in print and electronic form, to deposit it with indexing and abstracting services, and to archive it permanently.

Articles are published open access and may be read, downloaded, copied and distributed for teaching, research, and other non-commercial purposes, provided that the author and the Review are properly credited and the article is not altered. Authors are free to deposit the published version in their institutional repository, on a personal or departmental website, or in a subject repository, and are encouraged to do so, with a link back to the version on this site.

Authors are responsible for obtaining written permission for any third-party material reproduced in their article — long quotations, tables, figures or images — where the copyright holder requires it, and for supplying that permission to the editorial office on request.

The Review keeps the definitive version of every article on this site, and articles remain available whether or not the journal continues to publish. Published articles are not withdrawn or removed on request: the published record is permanent, and errors are dealt with by correction or retraction rather than deletion.

Once your manuscript is accepted:

1. Publication fee. The ₦35,000 publication fee falls due, and is paid through your author account.
2. Copy-editing and proofs. The article is copy-edited and typeset, and a proof is sent to the corresponding author. Proofs are for correcting typographical and factual errors and updating the law where it has changed since acceptance — not for rewriting, adding argument or adding new authority. Please return corrections within seven days; after that we may publish as set.
3. Publication. The article appears in the next available issue and is freely accessible from the moment it is published.

Withdrawing a manuscript

You may withdraw a manuscript at any point before acceptance by writing to the editorial office through the portal. The assessment fee is not refunded. Withdrawing a manuscript after acceptance, or after it has been scheduled for an issue, is a serious matter: referees and editors have by then given the paper substantial unpaid time, and repeated withdrawals may be taken into account in considering future submissions from the same author.

Corrections after publication

If a significant error is found in a published article, tell the editorial office. Minor errors are dealt with by a correction notice linked to the article; errors that undermine the article's findings or conclusions lead to a retraction. In both cases the original article remains available, marked with the correction or retraction, so that the published record stays complete.

Appealing a decision. If you believe your manuscript was rejected on a misunderstanding, or that a referee made a material error of law or fact, you may appeal once. Write to the Editor-in-Chief through the submission portal within 21 days of the decision, identifying the specific point you say is wrong and why. An appeal is not an opportunity to re-argue the merits or to submit a revised paper. The Editor-in-Chief may seek a fresh referee's opinion. The outcome of the appeal is final.

Complaints. Complaints about the handling of a manuscript, the conduct of a referee, or the conduct of the editorial office should be sent to the Editor-in-Chief through the portal. Complaints about the Editor-in-Chief should be addressed to the Dean, Faculty of Law, Bayero University Kano. Every complaint is acknowledged and investigated, and you will be told the outcome.

Reporting misconduct. Allegations of plagiarism, fabrication, duplicate publication or disputed authorship in a submitted or published article may be reported to the editorial office at any time, and will be investigated under our publication ethics policy. Please include the specific article and the evidence relied on.

Contact. For anything relating to a manuscript under consideration, use the submission portal, which keeps correspondence attached to the record. For general enquiries, use the Contact page. Our postal address is: The Editor, Bayero Law Review, Faculty of Law, Bayero University Kano, Kano, Nigeria.