Legal History and the Junior Faculty Forum

An upcoming Junior Faculty Forum, workshopping papers by "young scholars" will be held at Harvard Law School in June 2012.  Note the topics of interest:  they include legal history and law and the humanities, and the conveners include legal historian Adriaan Lanni.  So this is for you!  ("Young" is not defined by chronological age but by years in the profession.)  Here's the call for submissions:

Junior Faculty Forum
Request for Submissions
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Stanford, Yale, and Harvard Law Schools announce the Junior Faculty Forum (the successor to the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum that has convened for the past twelve years) to be held at Harvard Law School on June 1-2, 2012, and seek submissions for this meeting.

The Forum's objective is to encourage the work of young scholars by providing experience in the pursuit of scholarship and the nature of the scholarly exchange. Meetings are held each spring, alternating between Yale, Stanford, and Harvard.

Approximately twelve junior scholars (with one to seven years of teaching and who are not yet tenured) will be chosen on a blind basis from among those submitting papers to present. One or more senior scholars, not necessarily from one of the host institutions, will comment on each paper. The audience will include the invited young scholars, faculty from the host institutions, and invited guests. The goal is discourse on both the merits of particular papers and on appropriate methodologies for doing work in that genre. We hope that comment and discussion will communicate what counts as good work among successful senior scholars and will also challenge and improve the standards that now obtain. The Forum also hopes to increase the sense of community among legal scholars generally, particularly among new and veteran professors.

Each year the Forum invites submissions on selected topics in public and private law, legal philosophy, and law and humanities -- alternating loosely between public law and humanities subjects in one year, and private and dispute resolution law in the next. The focus of this year’s session will be public law and the humanities. The topics to be addressed are:

Administrative Law
Constitutional Law
Criminal Law
Employment Law, Social Welfare Policy, and Anti-Discrimination Law
Environmental Law
Family Law
Jurisprudence and Philosophy
Law and Humanities (including Law and Literature, Critical Legal Studies, and Gender Studies)
Legal History
Public International Law

There is no publication commitment associated with the Forum, nor is published work eligible. The host institution will pay presenters' travel expenses and provide accommodation; presenters will be required to attend the entire Forum schedule. Paper submissions for the Forum should be sent to Ms. Kaitlin Burroughs at Harvard Law School (1525 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138). Electronic submissions should be sent to kburroughs@law.harvard.edu. The deadline for submission is February 15, 2012. Please note on the cover letter which topic your paper falls under.

Inquiries concerning the Forum should be sent to Adriaan Lanni (adlanni@law.harvard.edu) or Gabriella Blum (gblum@law.harvard.edu) at Harvard Law School, Joseph Bankman at Stanford Law School (jbankman@stanford.edu), or Ian Ayres at Yale Law School (ian.ayres@yale.edu). We very much hope that young scholars will submit work. If the strong commitment of the host schools can make it so, participation at the Forum will benefit presenters and the profession.