About Justice Partners Journal

A reference journal on demanding fields of United States law, built from primary sources and published without bylines.

Justice Partners Journal covers demanding fields of United States law that the general legal press treats as specialist and therefore covers badly. Each of the ten has its own statute book, its own regulator and a procedure that has to be followed exactly or lost. The register here is that of a professional journal: plain, exact, unhurried, and willing to say when a question has no clean answer.

The fields

Each one is a recognized field of law rather than an industry sector or a life situation. That distinction decides what gets written. A subject belongs here because a practitioner would place it inside a field, not because a search phrase exists for it.

• Immigration and naturalization procedure — admission, status, documents, vetting and administrative review.
• International trade and customs law — classification, origin, valuation, drawback and trade remedies.
• Tribal and Indian law — sovereignty, jurisdiction, trust land and the federal trust relationship.
• Military justice and veterans appeals — the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the benefits appeal chain.
• Mining and mineral rights law — split estates, location and patent, royalties and reclamation.
• Space and satellite law — launch licensing, spectrum, remote sensing and treaty liability.
• Antitrust and competition law — merger review, per se rules and private enforcement.
• Franchise and distribution law — disclosure documents, termination and relationship statutes.
• Art and cultural property law — provenance, import restriction, repatriation and artist rights.
• Legal ethics and professional responsibility — conflicts, trust accounting, unauthorized practice and discipline.

What this publication is not

It is not a law firm. Nothing here is sold, no matter is taken on, no document is reviewed and no client exists. There is no intake process to enter and no consultation to book, because neither has ever been offered. Reading an article, or writing to the editorial address, forms no attorney-client relationship with anybody.

Nothing published here is legal advice. An article can state what a rule says; it cannot know the facts of a particular matter, and in several of these fields the facts decide the whole question. Should any page here start to read as an offer of help with a specific case, that is a defect, and the editorial address exists partly so it can be reported.

Published without bylines

Articles carry the publication's name and nothing else. No author names, no photographs of people, no credentials, no reviewer credits, and no suggestion that any page has been signed off by a licensed attorney. Inventing all of that would be easier than earning it, which is exactly the reason none of it is invented.

Citations do the work instead. Every article rests on five to seven primary sources — the statute, the regulation, the agency's own instruction, the court's own site — printed at the foot of the page so a reader can go around the article entirely and read the law itself.

Reading an article

Articles sit in the journal and are grouped by field. The line under a headline names the field, the jurisdiction and the reading time. It carries no date, and that is a deliberate decision explained in full on the editorial standards page.

Each article states the rule first, then the exception, then what the two together mean for someone who has to act. Where the circuits disagree, where an agency's guidance is the only statement available, or where a treaty obligation has never been tested, the article says so instead of picking a side for the sake of a tidier sentence.

How any one article is put together is set out in how we work. An error in an article goes to corrections, and everything else to contact.