30th Anniversary of the International Journal of Discrimination and the Law
The International Journal of Discrimination and the Law celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. Founded in 1995 by Susan Easton, who edited it for its first 24 years out of Brunel University, it was then edited by Professor Nicole Busby (University of Glasgow) who was joined by Professor Grace James (University of Reading), all of whom remain on the International Editorial Board, and has for the last few years has been edited by a team of three Co-Editors from Stockholm and Portsmouth.
The anniversary is being marked through a Virtual Special Issue, which the publishers are making available on a free access basis until the end of 2026, and through a special 100th issue later in the year. In the introductory piece for the 100th issue, Prof Easton notes that from the start ‘[t]he focus of the journal was to explore the limits and potential of law in achieving equality and addressing the complexities of discrimination and to broaden the scope from the UK to consider how these problems were addressed in other jurisdictions’ (Easton, 2025). It is thus closely aligned with the AEGIS mission to generate sustained world-leading research on equality, with a focus on disciplines that will have a transformative societal impact, influencing the creation, interpretation, and amelioration of legal and social norms on equality and non-discrimination worldwide.
The Virtual Special Issue published this summer contains 15 pieces, previously behind a paywall,
which highlight the range of topics covered across the years. These were drawn from the around
360 substantive articles published before 2025 (around 60 of which were already available on an
open or free access basis). The issue covers topics such as:
- Age discrimination a 2021 piece on whether removing default retirement ages benefits individuals in the context of a comparative empirical case study of the university sector, and a 2000 piece exploring possibilities ahead of the legislative prohibitions.
- Algorithmic discrimination the role of European equality bodies in addressing it.
- Affirmative/positive action, positive discrimination, and the Public Sector Equality Duty
- Caste whether the British Equality Act should be extended to cover it.
- Disability domesticating it in Australia in 1997, and the difficult distinctions between disfigurement, appearance, and disability in 2020.
- Intersectional discrimination in the European legal systems from 2014.
- Race the symbolic value of the EU Race Directive.
- Sexual orientation a survey of selected African continental practices and experiences from 2012.
- Sexual harassment in Ireland, the subject of the very first article in the journal.
The range of legal questions examined in the articles included in the Virtual Special Issue is, of course, indicative of the scope and reach of the IJDL. At the same time, however, it serves as a reminder of how much equality and anti-discrimination law has achieved over the last three decades across different jurisdictions and of how long the road ahead still is. As Prof Carlson, one of the current Co-Editors in Chief of the IJDL, states in her accompanying commentary in the virtual special issue ‘[a] greater societal awareness of sexual harassment, not just in the context of women, has arguably been achieved, however many of those challenges as identified by Flynn in the first issue of the Journal still remain three decades later’ (Carlson 2025).
The virtual special issue is available via this link.
