Terms of use.

1. Who we are

FPR, First Precedent Research, is a law journal published by Iura. By using the site you agree to these terms and to the policies and the privacy notice.

2. Reading

Everything FPR publishes is free to read, without an account. You may copy, share and adapt a published piece or a counterpart for non-commercial purposes with credit, under CC BY-NC 4.0. The details are in the copyright policy.

3. Not legal advice

FPR is scholarship written by students, researchers and scholars. Nothing on it is legal advice, and reading it does not make anyone your lawyer. The law changes, and a piece states the law only as its author understood it on the day it was published. Check the judgments and statutes a piece cites before you rely on it.

4. Accounts

• You must be 18 or over to create an account.
• The name, college, programme and year of joining you give must be your own and true. They decide what you may write, and once you are verified only an editor can change them.
• If you are recognised as a scholar, the post and institution you give must be your own and true. We may ask for proof, and we may withdraw recognition.
• An account is for one person. Keep your password to yourself.
• We may suspend or close an account that is used to break these terms.

5. Claiming and submitting

• A claim does not reserve an entry. Other students may write the same one. A claim lapses after 60 days unless you renew it.
• When you submit, you make the declarations in the academic integrity policy and give FPR the licence in the copyright policy. You keep the copyright.
• The editors decide what is published, and when. Submitting a piece does not mean it will be published.
• FPR does not charge authors and does not pay them.
• You may withdraw a piece at any time before it is published. After that it is part of the record and stays.

6. Research lodged for opinion

• Proposals, working papers, thesis work and replies lodged in FP Research are unpublished work. They are not publications of FPR, and lodging one gives FPR no licence to publish it. You keep every right in it.
• When you lodge a text, its fingerprint and the time are recorded in a public register and cannot be changed or removed, by you or by us. You may withdraw the work from view at any time; the fingerprints stay.
• An editor reads a lodged work before it opens, in confidence. You choose who else may read it and how much the public is told.
• If you read someone else’s unpublished work, you do so in confidence. You must not copy, share, quote or publish any part of it, or pass on its ideas, without the author’s written consent, and you must credit the author and the record if you draw on it. You give this undertaking each day you open such a work, and your name and the time are recorded and shown to the author.
• The register proves that a text existed and was lodged by its author at a given time. FPR cannot stop a reader who breaks the undertaking, and does not promise to. If someone has misused your work, tell the editors: we will give you the access record and may withdraw that person’s recognition.

7. Supervision and counterparts

• A supervisor reads a student’s draft in confidence and advises. The piece remains the student’s own work; a supervisor does not write any part of it.
• A counterpart is published under its author’s name, with the declarations in the academic integrity policy and the licence in the copyright policy. It states another country’s law on its author’s authority; FPR’s editors do not check it against that country’s sources.

8. Comments

Comments on published pieces appear under your name once an editor approves them. Comments on research lodged for opinion come only from recognised scholars and verified researchers, and appear at once under their name, post and institution. Keep to the piece and its argument. We do not publish comments that are abusive, defamatory, off the subject, or that advertise something, and we may remove one later. You allow us to display what you post.

9. What you must not do

• Pretend to be someone else, claim a post or a degree you do not hold, or submit work that is not yours.
• Copy, photograph or pass on unpublished work shown to you in confidence.
• Try to get into another person’s account, the editor queue or anything else you have not been given access to.
• Upload a file that is harmful, or use the forms to send advertising.
• Copy the site in bulk in a way that burdens it. The feed and the sitemap are there for automated readers.

10. The name and the design

The name FPR, the mark, the covers and the design of the site belong to Iura and are not covered by the licence on the pieces.

11. Liability

We take care over what we publish, and we correct errors when we find them, but the site is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, Iura, the editors and the authors are not liable for loss that results from relying on anything published here.

12. Changes and governing law

If these terms change, the new version is posted here with its date. These terms are governed by the law of India, wherever you read or write from.

13. Contact

Write to the editors.