CALL FOR ARTICLES TO THE INAUGURAL EDITION OF THE RIARA LAW JOURNAL
The Intersection between Law, Technology and Innovation.
Introduction:
The surge of technological and other innovations in the last few decades has had major impacts on our society in an unprecedented manner. There are ongoing transformational shifts in education, health, media, business, agriculture and several other examples. In Africa, several startups have blossomed seeking to provide innovative solutions to match the needs of Africa’s people in diverse areas such as education, food production, transport, healthcare and mobile money. Governments have also taken up the use of technology and embraced e-government in service delivery through diverse platforms.
Inasmuch as we have come to see the disruptions caused by these innovations, their rapidly evolving nature presents an interesting challenge and opportunity for lawyers and legal scholars to critically consider the intersection between these innovations and the current legal environment-what are the impacts of these technological and other innovations on the current legal frameworks, and, what are the potential novel areas of legal innovation to respond to the challenges of this rapidly evolving technological and innovational environment/ context?
Established in 2012, the Riara Law School has carved a niche as one of the leading Law Schools in Kenya focusing on providing high quality and innovative legal education to prepare lawyers to anticipate and tackle these challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century.
The Riara Law Journal is envisaged as a leading a peer-reviewed publication of the Riara Law School, devoted to provide a platform for lawyers, academics, practitioners and legal scholars to research and publish on topics related to legal innovation in diverse topics pertinent and relevant to the promotion of legal scholarship in Africa.
The Riara Law School makes this call for articles to be published in the inaugural edition of the Riara Law Journal focusing on the broad area of the intersection between the law, technology and innovation. Articles are invited on topics including but not limited to:
- The legal framework for commercialisation of innovations
- Intellectual Property Protection
- Data Privacy and Data Protection
- The intersection between technology, human rights and democratic governance.
- E-government-challenges and opportunities for the 21st Century
Guidelines for Submission of Manuscripts
The Editorial Board welcomes and encourages submission of articles that comply with the following broad framework:
- Articles should be sent as a word document, to the editor on the following email address: lawjournal@riarauniversity.ac.ke . Articles should ideally be around 3,500 – 5,000 words (inclusive of footnotes), although special articles of up to a maximum of 7,500 words could be considered.
- Articles should be sent to the editor to reach not later than 30 October 2021. Articles received after this date may not be considered for publication in this issue.
- The submitted manuscript must be the author’s original work. Authors must include a declaration that the manuscript has not already been submitted for publication or published elsewhere. Only those that have not already been submitted for publication or published elsewhere will be considered.
- If manuscripts are submitted by co-authors, each must clearly indicate that they have significantly contributed to the research.
- Manuscripts must follow the Riara University Style Guidelines for contributors. Footnotes must be numbered consecutively. Footnote numbers should be in superscript without any surrounding brackets.
- All articles are to be submitted and published in UK English.
- Authors of manuscripts must indicate their university degrees, professional qualifications and professional or academic status.
- Authors should supply a summary of their contributions of not more than 300 words, setting out the main findings and contribution to scholarship.
- The Riara Law Journal does not charge article processing fees of any kind.
- All articles shall undergo a process of anonymous peer review and authors shall be required to provide corrections of mistakes when so required by the editors.
- All articles selected for publication through the process of anonymous peer-review will be made freely available online upon publication.
- The copyright of articles are retained by the author/s who also retain publishing rights.
- All submitted articles shall be screened for plagiarism and any manuscripts that display plagiarism may be rejected solely on this ground.
- Manuscripts shall be subjected to anonymous double blind peer review by at least two experts in the relevant field, for their views on whether the submitted manuscript is publishable.
- Manuscripts that have successfully passed through the peer-review process may be modified by the Editorial team to among others, bring them in conformity with the house style, to improve accuracy, to eliminate mistakes and ambiguity, and to bring the manuscript in line with the tenets of plain legal language.