Legal Medicine Journals: A Curated Directory
The intersection of law and medicine — forensic pathology, health law, medical evidence, and the medico-legal questions courts confront.
The Flagship Legal Medicine Journals
Legal medicine (or forensic and legal medicine) sits between the medical and legal literatures, covering forensic pathology, medical evidence, and health law. Its journals are peer reviewed and indexed alongside medical literature.
Leading peer-reviewed titles include the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, the International Journal of Legal Medicine, and the Journal of Legal Medicine.
Directory (A–Z)
Our verified journal directory does not yet include dedicated legal medicine 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 medicine — 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 medicine 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.