anels on legal history. In recent years it has been an especially vibrant meeting for transnational and comparative legal history. Well-known legal history luminaries always appear on the program, but newer scholars should take note: this is a great place to submit your first paper or panel proposal. Many legal historians, including yours truly, presented their first conference papers at LSA. The Society's policy on openness and inclusiveness means that the Program Committee will bend over backwards to find a place for you. And...I'm on the Program Committee, with responsibility for submissions in legal history.
What follows is the Call for Papers, with more details about how to submit a legal history proposal.
Due Date: December 8, 2008
The 2009 Annual Meeting of Law and Society Association
Thursday, May 28 through Sunday, May 31, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Denver, Colorado
Theme: Law, Power, and Inequality in the 21st Century
Urbanization, race relations, poverty, and crime were central concerns of sociolegal scholars at the Association's founding in the 1960s. After 45 years, fundamental structures of inequality remain substantially unaffected by a variety of efforts of legal reform and reconstruction. New forms of inequality and resistance have emerged as globalization links people, economies, and states in new ways. The theme of this year’s Annual Meeting returns to the Law and Society Association’s historic questioning of the relationships between law, power, and inequality.
The current historical moment presents challenges to achieving equality that pose relevant and probing questions for the Law and Society community to address both globally and locally. New questions about persistent problems of poverty, health care, and opportunities for mobility by oppressed groups must be raised and addressed. Old questions need to be reconsidered, as new forms of inequality demand our attention.
Has the use of law advanced or inhibited individual and group rights? Have new understandings of the intersection of social statuses changed our understanding of the role of law in producing or reducing inequality? What has been the role of new, non-state forms of governance in the production of inequality? Should law and social science provide the expertise to stimulate and inform the impending social agenda? Should social scientists and lawyers become allies to address these pressing problems and if so, how should they collaborate?
LSA invites you to take stock of scholarship on law, power, and inequality and to develop agendas for addressing these continuing challenges to the construction of a just social order.
Proposals for individual papers or fully formed panels will be considered. As with every Annual Meeting, panels need not be centered on the conference theme. Submissions on any law and society topic are welcome.
When submitting a proposal, you need to select two "keywords." Keywords are most important for individual paper proposals. If you select "legal history" as your first keyword, the proposal will go to me, and I will try to put your paper together with other papers to form a legal history panel.
My other keywords are "Justice" and "Security and Terrorism." A full list of keywords and corresponding committee members is here.
Other details about submitting a proposal are here.
