German Law Journal Celebrates 25 Years Founded by W&L Law professor Russell Miller, the Journal is one of the world’s leading forums for legal scholarship from a transnational and comparative perspective.
Russell Miller, second from left, and the other “founding-era” editors, spoke on a panel at the anniversary event to talk about the experience of building the journal from scratch in the late 1990s and early 2000s.The German Law Journal celebrated its 25th anniversary this fall at a ceremony in Berlin, Germany. The Journal was founded by W&L Law Professor Russell Miller and his colleague, McGill Law Professor Peer Zumbansen.
In 1999, the two were interns at the German Federal Constitutional Court, where they collaborated to establish a bi-weekly, English-language newsletter that published scholarship and commentary on developments in German, European, and International Law. Since then, the Journal has grown into one of the world’s leading forums for legal scholarship from a transnational and comparative perspective. The Journal’s success can, in part, be illustrated by the numbers. It sits atop Google’s journal rankings in the subject-areas of European and international law. In fact, the Google journal rankings place the GLJ among the world’s top-10 law journals, alongside the respected law reviews based at Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and Stanford.
Part of the GLJ’s success can be attributed to the fact that it pioneered online and open-access publishing, which has emerged as the standard for legal scholarship. Five years ago, the Journal partnered with Cambridge University Press to secure its long-term success and further professionalize its operations. Miller said that the GLJ is the most impactful law journal in the publisher’s catalog and among CUP’s top journals in all disciplines.
“The most important factor in the GLJ’s success, however, has been the significant contribution of generations of W&L law students who serve on the Journal’s student editorial board,” said Professor Miller. “The W&L students have front-line responsibility for editing and formatting the Journal’s content. They also play a key role in managing the Journal.”
Yardley Borten ’25L, current Executive Editor of the Journal’s student editorial board, addressed the public, including leading politicians and scholars, about the role of the student editors in the Journal’s production and management.The Journal anchors a number of international and comparative law programs at W&L, including the annual Global Teaching Fellowship, the annual Rule of Law Academy based in Berlin, an annual Faculty-Student scholarly workshop, and an annual symposium. W&L students are intensively involved in all of this, providing them with a singular opportunity to gain insight into and competence with foreign legal systems.
Professor Miller complements his long-standing responsibility for the Journal with major scholarly work, including the recent publication of the book “An Introduction to German Law and Legal Culture” (Cambridge University Press 2024). He is also the author of “The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany” (with Donald Kommers).
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