Thursday, June 4, 2015

LSA 2015 Report: Law & History Collaborative Research Network

At the recent Law & Society Association conference in Seattle, Washington, the Law & History Collaborative Research Network (CRN 44) made an excellent showing. Although only in its second year, the CRN sponsored and planned 13 panels at LSA—tying for fourth for the most CRN-sponsored panels! Panels included titles such as “Law and Rights in the 20th Century,” “Law, Bodies, and Markets: The Legal Construction of Social Categories in the United States,” “Rethinking Legal Conservatism After Brown,” and “Promising Progress, Producing Difference: Law in Colonial Contexts.”

If you're unfamiliar with the group, the CRN seeks to bring together sociolegal scholars interested in legal history. It welcomes a broad array of scholarly interests and methodological approaches. The Law and Society Movement has long welcomed legal historians and encouraged legal history, and the CRN intends to further foster this relationship. Organizers seek to encourage presentation of historical legal work at the Law and Society’s Association’s annual meeting, and to create opportunities for interdisciplinary and cross-generational conversations. You can find out more about the CRN from last year’s post in Q&A form, here.

At this year’s Law & History CRN business meeting, a small group of faculty and graduate students discussed ways of building on this year’s successes -- including more outreach to non-Americanist legal historians and an expanded web presence.

If you’re interested in joining the CRN, contact Joanna Grisinger (Center for Legal Studies, Northwestern University) or Logan Sawyer (University of Georgia Law School). 

For those who attended, the Legal History Blog welcomes your guest post about any relevant panels. (Examples of the type of coverage we're looking for are here and here.) To sign up for guest post(s), please email us. No technical expertise is required -- we take care of that for you.

And finally, for tweets from the conference, you can search #LSAWA2015.