Legal History Journals: A Curated Directory
The history of law, legal institutions, and legal ideas — a field bridging the law school and the history department.
The Flagship Legal History Journals
Legal history journals cover the development of legal doctrine, constitutional and institutional history, and the history of the legal profession, often with a strong archival and peer-reviewed tradition.
Leading titles include Law and History Review, the flagship of the American Society for Legal History, and the American Journal of Legal History.
Directory (A–Z)
Our verified journal directory does not yet include dedicated legal history titles with confirmed official links, so we name the field’s leading journals above rather than pointing you at unverified URLs. The most reliable way to reach any of them is to search the title in HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library or in Google Scholar, both of which host the great majority of legal scholarship.
Impact Factors and Rankings
Legal journals are ranked mainly by citation counts rather than the impact-factor system used in the sciences. The Washington & Lee Law Journal Rankings let you filter journals by subject — including legal history — and sort by how often each is cited in other journals and in court opinions. Peer-reviewed journals in this field may also carry a traditional journal impact factor. We describe these methods and link to the source rather than reproducing ranked tables.
Where to Read Them Free
Most of these journals are free to read. Individual titles post issues on their own sites; older volumes are collected in HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library, which many public and academic libraries provide at no charge to cardholders. Google Scholar and SSRN host a large share of the same scholarship for free.
Submitting Your Work
If you want to publish in this field, the process mirrors law-review submission generally: build a target list weighted toward legal history journals, submit within the reading windows, and use expedite requests once you have an offer. Our how to get published in a law review guide walks through each step.
See every kind of legal periodical in our legal journals directory, or explore the Washington & Lee rankings.
We are not affiliated with any journal named here, and journal titles named without a link are identified for reference only. This is a research aid, not legal advice.