IISJ - Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law

The International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on the Sociology of Law and the Government of the Basque Country established the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati, Gipuzkoa, Spain in 1988. From the outset, the Institute created academic links and collaborative relations with various European and non-European universities by providing facilities for seminars, workshops, visiting scholars and library research. The Institute has as a result grown into an important base for the global network of scholars who work on law and social science issues.

The Institute’s socio-legal Library contains major collections in English and Spanish and significant materials in French, German and Italian. It hosts the potentially best collection of socio-legal resources in the world, with more than 21.000 catalogued books, together with a valuable journals collection, included the complete collections of sociolegal journals. The Library catalogues not only books but also individual chapters and articles in the socio-legal area, and the Catalogue is openly accessible via the Internet. The Institute welcomes visitors at every level, from doctoral and post-doctoral to experienced researchers, and offers residence scholarships especially for doctoral students.

The Institute provides an important site for publication of innovative law and society research, being the publishers of:

• two double-blind peer-reviewed online journals: Oñati Socio-legal Series (included in the Web of Science ESCI and Elsevier Scopus indices), which includes individual submissions, as well as articles resulting from our workshop programme, and Sortuz: Oñati Journal of Emergent Socio-Legal Studies, devoted to strengthening the emerging community around the relations between law and society through the publication of quality research.
• two book series: one in English, Oñati International Series in Law and Society, which is published by Bloomsbury-Hart, and the other in Spanish, Colección Oñati: Derecho y Sociedad, published by Dykinson.

Our workshops also offer a very good basis for developing high quality publications.