The authors, the Editor and the reviewers are required to comply with the editorial ethical principles of LESIJ.

I. Authors

All authors who intend to publish in LESIJ are required to abide by the ethical standards provided by LESIJ and outlined below. The manuscript submitted for publication must comply with the requirements for writing under the GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSION. The LESIJ team is exempted from any liability regarding the author’s points of view included in the scientific papers submitted for publication.

Authorship
LESIJ does not allow any violation of its publication ethics. Thus, LESIJ does not permit any person who intends to publish an article to skirt the authorship requirements stipulated by the editorial policy. LESIJ does not permit for a person who meets these requirements not to be published.
By sending an article for submission to LESIJ, the author warrants that the manuscript is his/her original work and that it has neither been published previously nor is currently being considered for publication elsewhere. The author also warrants that the sources of any ideas and/or words in the manuscript that are not his/her own have been properly attributed through appropriate bibliographical references and using quotes. In case of breach of copyright law/plagiarism, the entire responsibility rests with the author of the article, LESIJ not assuming any responsibility in this respect.

Plagiarism
Any person who intends to publish in LESIJ must present an original work and avoid plagiarism. According to the Cambridge on-line dictionary (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/plagiarize?q=plagiarism), “to plagiarize” is “to use another person’s ideas or work and pretend that it is your own”.

Duplicate manuscripts
LESIJ does not accept duplicate manuscripts, i.e. articles whose content is identical to another publication to a large extent, without making clear reference to that publication.
LESIJ publishes authors whose papers have not been submitted for evaluation to another publication, no matter if the same paper is written in different languages.

Fabrication and falsification of data
LESIJ does not allow the fabrication, manipulation or falsification of data, which would contravene the publication ethics of our journal.

Citations manipulation
Authors are strongly advised to only include references and citations that bring coherence to their papers. Authors must not include references or citations that are irrelevant for the content of their papers.
Self-citation is unethical if it aims at increasing the instances one is cited, not only for authors, but also for the journals that are cited.

II. Editor

The Editor has the ultimate responsibility to decide whether a manuscript will be accepted or not, guided by the evaluations carried out by the reviewer, by the provisions of this Publication Ethics document and by the copyright law. The Editor may consult with the members of the Scientific Board and of the Editorial Review Board, in making publication decisions. Under no circumstances must the Editor use information from manuscripts in its research work unless he has asked for permission from the author.

III. Reviewers

Manuscripts that are to be reviewed must be regarded as confidential documents. Reviews must be objective. The manuscripts received for publication will be revised using the peer review system, respecting international standards of scientific journals. Thus, any article submitted for publication will be reviewed by a specialist with a national or international reputation in legal sciences.
If necessary, the authors will receive recommendations and observations to improve the quality of their paper’s content. Recommendations made by the reviewers should be expressed in a polite manner and accompanied by explanations for the review process is meant to enhance the quality of the manuscripts, whenever possible. It is possible to refuse publication of the article to the proposal made by reviewer. If a reviewer considers that he/she is not qualified to review a manuscript, he/she must inform the Editor and ask to be replaced. Any original ideas that are learned during the peer review process must not be revealed or used in the reviewer’s personal interest.