The Transnational Legal History Group of CUHK LAW’s Centre for Comparative and Transnational Law is organizing the Third Asian Legal History Conference at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong on 20-21 June 2023. The conference is supported by the Asian Legal History Association. Previous Asian Legal History Conferences have been hosted, organized and supported by the Faculty of Law at Hue University, the Faculty of Law at Thammasat University, the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore and CUHK LAW.
The conference aims to bring together a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars, researchers and graduate students to share their research findings on topics relating to legal history in Asia. The conference is open to scholars anywhere in the world working on Asian legal history, broadly understood, and scholars based in Asia working on any legal history-related subjects.
Submissions on any subject, providing it pertains to legal history in Asia, will be considered. General topics may include:
- The historical evolution of common law, civil law, and socialist law traditions in Asia;
- Legal pluralism and jurisdictional clashes;
- The history of a particular area of law (constitutional law, property law, criminal law, etc);
- Theoretical and methodological issues involved in studying Asian legal history Dynastic law;
- Customary law;
- Colonial law;
- Religious law (broadly understood), e.g. Buddhist Law, Confucian Law, Hindu Law, Islamic Law, etc.
The conference organizers are particularly interested in papers addressing the following subjects:
- The history of law and empire;
- Asian approaches to and influences upon the history of international law;
- Explorations of the transnational connections between the manner in which the law has evolved in different Asian countries, and between Asian countries and other countries;
- The history of law, gender and sexuality;
- The history of international and regional organizations in Asia;
- The history of public order law;
- The history of law schools and of the formation of the judiciary and of members of the legal profession.
The conference will be held mixed-mode, including in person and online participants. Applicants should indicate whether they intend to attend in person or online. Applicants will be responsible for their own transportation and accommodation costs.
Proposals may be for individual papers or panels. Panel proposals are particularly welcome, as the field of legal history is wide, and while the organizers will endeavor to cluster like papers together, thematic, geographic and temporal diversity of topics inevitably means panels composed of individually-submitted papers will cover only loosely-related subject matters.
Individual paper proposals should include a 200-300 word abstract and the author’s contact information.
Panel proposals should include a 200-300 word description of the panel, 200-300 word abstracts of three to four individual papers, contact information for each person on the panel and contact information for the chairs of the panel.
Applicants should indicate their current and/or former academic affiliations, as well as current professional affiliations, on their applications by midnight (Hong Kong time) on March 15th, 2023.
Submit proposals here. Visit the conference website for more details.
