Thursday, April 26, 2012

Call for Papers: Teaching Legal History in U.S. Law Schools

[We have the following call for papers from the Advisory Board of the American Journal of Legal History.]

The American Journal of Legal History will publish a symposium issue on teaching legal history in its October 2013 issue. If you are teaching a legal history course in a United States law school, you are invited to contribute a piece by May 1, 2013. Here's what you need to know:

1) Essays cannot exceed 1,500 words and should describe how you teach the course and why you teach it as you do. The word length will be strictly enforced and footnotes, if any, should be kept to a minimum.

2) While we're open to a wide variety of styles and approaches, we really want practical (as opposed to theoretical) pieces. In other words, we want to know what people are really doing in their classrooms when they teach legal history.

3) Although we appreciate that many folks include a lot of legal history in their non-legal history courses (particularly if they teach, for example, constitutional law), this symposium is limited to actual legal history courses.

4) We've come up with a sample paper that shows what we're looking for. Please e-mail Bob Jarvis, the Journal's Advisory Board chair, for a copy by contacting him at jarvisb@nsu.law.nova.edu.

5) While we don't know the exact number of papers that we are going to publish, we are shooting for around 30 pieces, so if you contribute a piece there's a very good chance it will be accepted.

6) Lastly, the symposium will lead off with a piece that traces the evolution of legal history courses in U.S. law schools.