American Journal of International Law

For Authors

Submit Manuscript

How to Submit:

The American Journal of International Law (AJIL) welcomes submissions throughout the year.

Interested authors may submit Articles, Essays, and Current Developments on international law and U.S. foreign relations law. To ensure timely processing of your manuscript, please ensure that your submission is properly formatted according to the following guidelines. If you have any questions regarding your submission, please email admin_ajil@columbia.edu

Whether or not submitted for Board review, a manuscript that has been rejected, even if revised,
should not be resubmitted to AJIL.

By submitting your manuscript to AJIL, you are confirming that this is an piece of original work, meaning it has not been published in any form prior to this submission, including in other publications or blogs.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tools
We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in research and writing processes. In this section we explain how to declare the use of AI tools in an accountable and transparent way, in accordance with the Cambridge University Press Research Publishing Ethics Guidelines.

Authorship
We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT should not be listed as authors on any submitted content.

Credit and citation
All use of AI-generated content must comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgement.

You must not present ideas, words, data, or other material originally produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission.

Transparency: declaration and description
We outline below the forms of AI use that must be declared and described to readers, as well as where and how to do this within your manuscript.

What to declare
You should always declare and describe your use of an AI tool if you have used it to generate text or images (this includes the translation of sources or of your own work) or to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials.

Minimal and non-generative uses of AI tools in manuscript preparation do not require declaration. For instance, basic spelling or language checking, incorporation of single words or brief phrases, or minor formatting tasks such as converting section headers to bold type. It is important to note that accountability for the use of AI tools, including minimal and non-generative ones, rests with the author. Caution should be used in all cases and it is important to check your article thoroughly for unintended consequences, particularly in relation to the references.

If you are unsure about whether a particular use of an AI tool requires declaration, please contact the journal’s editorial office.

Where to declare
Use of AI tools should be declared in your manuscript in the same way that you would declare your use of other tools and assistance.

If you have used AI tools to generate text within your manuscript, this should be declared in the same way you would declare your use of other language-editing services, for example in a separate acknowledgments section or in a footnote.

If you have used AI tools to collect or analyse data, the way you have done this should be described in your methods section or general description of your methodology, in the same way you would describe your use of other software or analysis processes.

If you have used AI tools to generate visual content that appears in your manuscript, this should be declared in the captions of any figures that you have generated or modified using AI tools.

This ensures your declarations appear where readers, editors, and reviewers naturally expect to find information about tools and processes used in your work.

How to declare
Descriptions of your use of AI tools should include:

  • the name and version of the tool you used
  • the date(s) you used the tool for the purpose(s) described, to the extent reasonably possible
  • how the tool can be accessed or used by others, to the extent reasonably possible
  • a full description of how you used the tool
  • appropriate citations to any third-party text, datasets or other material used or included in the tool’s output.

Additionally, as appropriate, descriptions should include:

  • any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool
  • any ways in which you modified the version of the tool that you used (such as training it on your own data)
  • any competing interests or potential bias that should be considered as a consequence of the tool’s use, including as a result of its ownership or development.

Conflict of Interest
All authors must include a competing interest declaration on their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.

Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.

If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting the manuscript must include competing interst declarations relevant to all contributin authors.

Example wording for a declearation is as follows: “Competing interests: Author A is employed at organisation B. Author C is on the Board of company E and is a member of organisation F. Author G has received grants from company H.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state: “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none.”

AJIL normally will not publish manuscripts that have substantial discussion of a case in which an author has had direct involvement—for example, as a party, representative of a party, judge, or arbitrator. Other connections to a case, such as participation in an amicus curiae brief, will be evaluated on an individual basis, and any such connections will need to be disclosed in the first footnote of the paper.

Accessibility requirements
All articles published by Cambridge are required to meet the accessibility standards outlined in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA. To ensure that material published in Cambridge journals is accessible to and understandable by all, authors should carefully consider elements such as colour use, contrast, and text clarity when preparing images and tables. For detailed guidance on image and multimedia file preparation and preferred formats, please see the Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide.

Image, table, and multimedia descriptions: Accessibility materials must be made available for all figures, tables, and multimedia content to be published within the article, including the provision of image descriptions or “alt-text” for all figures. Authors have the opportunity to prepare their own alt-text and video/audio descriptions for all of their relevant materials and submit this to Cambridge as part of the Accessibility Descriptions Submission Form.

As the subject expert, authors are encouraged to provide their own accessibility materials. For detailed instructions on their preparation, please see our guide to Preparing Accessible Materials. If accessibility materials are required for the publication of your article and not provided with the accepted manuscript files, these will be machine generated for you and made available to review at proof stage. The accuracy of accessibility materials is the responsibility of the author; please ensure these are checked carefully.

Labelling: All illustrative materials should be referred to in your manuscript text as “Figures”. Tables and figures must be cited in the text, must be numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals, and captions must be provided in all cases. Diagrams, graphs, maps, boxes, displayed equations, and code snippets must also be labelled and numbered. For further information, please see Preparing Accessible Materials.

Pre-Submission Inquiries
AJIL is not able to address pre-submission inquiries. AJIL invites the submission of manuscripts on international law subjects as well as closely related issues of global governance, transnational law, and foreign relations law.  It generally does not publish manuscripts focused on purely private or commercial law or on comparative or foreign law.  If your manuscript fits within AJIL’s scope and you would like to submit, please read the complete Instructions for Authors here.

Submission Format:

Please submit all material in .doc or .docx format. Please do not submit manuscripts in .PDF format.

Lead Article: research article of no more than 25,000 words (including footnotes), but will consider manuscripts up to 30,000 words in exceptional cases.

Essay: shorter article of up to 11,000 words, with less extensive footnotes.

Current Development: comments on recent developments in the field of up to 11,000 words; many will be shorter, e.g., 5000 words.

Abstract: Articles and Essays require an Abstract of no more than 150 words. The Abstract must be a brief summary of the manuscript and should not introduce new ideas that are not mentioned in the main body of the manuscript.

Title page: Please include a separate title page that lists the manuscript’s title, author’s contact, and affiliation information.

Cover letter: Please provide a brief cover letter that states whether or not the manuscript has been submitted exclusively to AJIL (see additional information below). In addition, at the bottom of the cover letter, please identify which category from the list below best describes your manuscript:

  • African/Asia-Pacific/Latin American/East European Perspectives
  • Customary International Law
  • Cyber and High-Tech
  • Foreign Relations Law
  • International Courts and Dispute Resolution
  • International Criminal Law
  • International Economic Law
  • International Environmental Law
  • International Human Rights Law
  • International Investment Law
  • International Legal History
  • International Legal Theory
  • International Organizations
  • International Relations and Global Governance
  • International Trade Law
  • Law of Armed Conflict/Laws of War
  • Law of Culture/Gender/Development
  • Law of Sea, Air, Space
  • Migration/Asylum/Citizenship
  • Private International Law
  • Security, Arms, and Conflict Management
  • Treaties and International Agreements
  • Other [please identify the category]

Manuscripts should be double-spaced in 12-point, Times New Roman font, including all text, footnotes, and block quotations, and formatted flush left. No extra spaces should be inserted between paragraphs or footnotes. Each new paragraph should begin with a single tab indentation.

Please ensure that the manuscript does not contain any author-identifying information to keep the review process properly anonymized. This information should be included on the title page.

Please note that CVs are not required and should not be included as part of your submission.

Manuscripts should be submitted with footnotes, not endnotes, adhering to The Bluebook (20th Edition) citation style. All footnotes should be automatically numbered by use of Arabic numbers.

For more information and the AJIL Style guide, please download the full author instructions here.

Submission Policies

Exclusive Submissions: AJIL does not require exclusive submissions. Priority consideration will, however, be accorded to manuscripts for which the author states in their cover letter that the submission is exclusive for a period of fourteen (14) days, during which time the author will not submit the manuscript to any other journals. We will treat the manuscript as not exclusively submitted to AJIL unless specifically stated otherwise in the author’s cover letter.

Authors of manuscripts not submitted on an exclusive basis should bear in mind that, as a peer reviewed journal, AJIL may have difficulty responding to requests for expedited review within the time limits typically fixed by American law reviews that have made offers of publication.

Simultaneous Submissions and Withdrawal of Manuscripts: Should the author receive and accept an offer of publication while the manuscript is still under review by AJIL, it is the author’s responsibility to alert AJIL’s editorial office immediately and withdraw the manuscript from consideration.

Review Process

AJIL typically receives several hundred submissions each year for Articles, Essays, and Current Developments from scholars and practitioners around the world. All such submissions are considered by the Co-Editors-in-Chief as soon as feasible upon receipt, with expedited attention paid to exclusive submissions and to manuscripts, including candidates for Essays and Current Developments, that are less than 11,000 words.