[Via H-Law, we have the following call for submissions for a preconference at next year's annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History.]
The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) invites paper submissions for its second annual pre-conference workshop, which will be held immediately preceding the ASLH annual meeting in Denver on Nov. 6, 2014. The ASLH Workshop is intended to promote scholarship in areas of legal history that have been traditionally underrepresented at ASLH meetings and in the Law and History Review. This year's workshop topic is Medieval Legal History, with medieval broadly defined as between late antiquity and early modernity. We are particularly interested in papers discussing Byzantine, Canon, Chinese, Islamic, or Jewish law, as well as other legal traditions or systems that operated in wide-ranging parts of the medieval world. The workshop is being sponsored by the ASLH in order to promote innovative approaches to the study of medieval legal history across geographic boundaries and to create a community of legal historians who grapple with medieval legal texts and contexts.
The ASLH Legal History Workshop will bring together authors and noted scholars in the field in order to work collaboratively toward refining scholarly writing. In order to keep the workshop size small, only three to four papers will be selected from among responses to this general call. Each selected paper will be assigned one commentator who will prepare substantive feedback about the structure, organization, methodology, and theoretical approaches of the paper. All papers will be pre-circulated to participants and to commentators in advance of the workshop and must be read prior to the workshop meeting. Authors will not present their papers. At the workshop, each commentator will be given half an hour to discuss his/her assigned paper, followed by an hour of general discussion in the larger group. In this way, each individual author will receive feedback from all the participants of the workshop. ASLH will provide limited funding for travel expenses and accommodations for authors of selected papers. (Participation in the ASLH Legal History Workshop does not preclude individuals from presenting at the ASLH annual meeting.)We invite submissions that engage any aspect of medieval legal history from scholars at any point in their academic careers. Interested authors should submit their work-in-progress papers to aslh.workshop@gmail.com
By participating in the workshop, authors agree to revise their papers thoroughly and to submit them for publication consideration (i.e. blind peer review) with Law & History Review on or before February 1, 2015. (Submissions to Law & History Review should be not more than 12,000 words, including footnotes.) Upon peer review approval, Law & History Review will publish the papers either together (in an issue dedicated to medieval legal history) or separately. Authors participating in the Workshop consent to publishing in Law & History Review, even if publication delays occur. However, participation in the ASLH Workshop is not a guarantee of publication in the Law & History Review. (Also, the ASLH Workshop organizers and the Editor of Law & History Review cannot guarantee a specific publication date.)
