CFP: Constitution and Citizenship Day at SFSU

[We have the following call for papers, presentations, and panels.]

“Rights and Wrongs: A Constitution and Citizenship Day Conference at San Francisco State University,” 16-17 September 2019

 We welcome proposals for papers, presentations, panels, roundtables, teach-ins, and workshops at “Rights and Wrongs: A Constitution and Citizenship Day Conference,” which will take place on Monday and Tuesday, 16-17 September 2019.

Over the last few years, people living in the United States have participated in far-reaching debates and discussions about the U.S. Constitution. Many of these conversations have focused on democratic governance and its relationship to state and federal elections, foreign collusion and domestic conspiracy, political and ethical corruption, voting rights, legislative redistricting, and presidential impeachment. Some have addressed core constitutional principles related to the separation of powers, checks and balances, and federal-state relationships. Others have concerned specific constitutional provisions such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, separation of church and state, privacy rights, rights to bear arms, protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, birthright citizenship, due process rights, and rights of equal protection. Meanwhile, some of the most polarizing national discussions of 2017, 2018, and 2019—about racialized policing, immigration restriction, sanctuary cities, health care, sexual harassment, LGBT rights, hate speech, and gun control—have been framed as matters of constitutional meaning and significance. Just as important and revealing are the constitutional topics that much of the country has not been considering, including the rights of indigenous, colonized, incarcerated, and institutionalized peoples on lands currently claimed by the United States.

What have we thought about the Constitution in the past and what do we think of it today? When, how, and why have we thought about the Constitution? How has the Constitution been used as a legal and cultural touchstone in the past and present? Has the Constitution supported the expansion of citizenship, democracy, and equality or has it produced, preserved, and promoted social hierarchies? What does the Constitution reveal and obscure? Is the United States experiencing constitutional crises? Have the country’s recent political troubles exposed longstanding problems with or new threats to the U.S. constitutional order? Can the history of the U.S. Constitution serve as a resource for people troubled by today’s uses and abuses of U.S. power and politics? For those seeking social change, is the Constitution an opportunity or obstacle? Can and should it be followed, changed, modified, or abandoned? Who makes meaning out of the U.S. Constitution and what meanings are made? What are the implications of our interpretations and transformations of the U.S. Constitution?

Please join us to discuss these and other issues at “Rights and Wrongs.” San Francisco State University has a proud tradition of sponsoring Constitution and Citizenship Day conferences. Last year’s event was sponsored by the College of Liberal and Creative Arts and cosponsored by fourteen other colleges, schools, departments, centers, and campus organizations at SF State. More than 1000 faculty, students, and community members attended the event, which featured two keynote presentations and approximately forty faculty, graduate student, and community-based presenters, representing fourteen colleges, universities, and non-governmental organizations. As was the case last year, the 2019 conference will provide multiple opportunities to reflect critically on the past, present, and future of constitutional rights and freedoms and larger questions about equality, democracy, and justice.

Proposals for papers, presentations, panels, roundtables, teach-ins, and workshops (maximum 250 words) should be submitted by 20 June 2019 to marcs@sfsu.edu. We welcome individual and group submissions. Please submit short vitas/resumes for all participants.

[Lists of recommended topics and the members of Organizing  Committee appear after the jump.]

CFP: Law, Difference, and Healthcare

[We share the following announcement. The deadline for submissions is May 1, 2019.]

The Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies and the Department of History at Princeton University are hosting a conference and workshop on “Law, Difference, and Healthcare: Making Sense of Structural Racism in Medico-Legal History,” organized by George Aumoithe (Davis Center postdoctoral research associate). Our gathering will be 1-1/2 days long to be held from Thursday to Friday afternoon of June 6—7, 2019. Our keynote speakers will be author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology Deirdre Cooper Owens and author of Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care Dayna Bowen Matthew.

Further information after the jump:

A Better Book: The Home Institution

              A choice I did not make that profoundly shaped Almost Citizens was that of USC Gould School of Law to hire me. Here, I lucked out. Writing the book I wanted required time, money, inspiration, guidance, autonomy, infrastructure, and publicity. Fortunately, my home institution was well stocked with all seven. (If your school takes a different approach to these questions or your recipe for success calls for different ingredients, please share in the comments.)

              Time was what I needed most. But it was easy to overinvest in teaching and service. I wanted to serve students and please senior colleagues, and there were so many new, interesting ways to contribute. Gould protected me against myself.  The dean assigned junior professors light service obligations and never asked them to develop new courses beyond their original three (we have a 2-1 load). Senior faculty protested any perceived erosion of the norm. And I got a semester-long sabbatical halfway through.

              I also found that my research, writing, and physical book all benefited from money.  Paid research assistants facilitated broader searches and more thorough reviews. Money for travel bought archival trips and conference presentations. It took funds to hire development editors and improve the book through subventions.  While I couldn’t spend my way to a good book, I could have been starved into a weaker one. Fortunately, I had a dean and institution that invested in scholarship. I never had a prepublication request denied. That support let me put my best foot forward, plan with confidence, and avoid the stress of committing personal funds to professional advancement.

              My book was also shaped by the scholarly cultures and institutionalized intellectuals spaces of the institutions where I researched and wrote. It was while taking part in Gould’s healthy culture of office, hallway, and faculty lounge chats that I had many important epiphanies. I gained key interlocutors and inspiration through my participation in USC’s Center for Law, History and Culture and the multi-institution Law and Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop that the center cosponsors. Gould also gave me the chance to present in an internal workshop each year. And every year the school’s senior faculty read and responded to all my works in progress.  As a result, I received an additional mountain of helpful tips and questions.

One of the  challenges of taking full advantage of opportunities for feedback at Gould was the knowledge that I was inviting criticism from the same people who would vote on my tenure case. Fortunately, engagement with my colleagues turned out to be a way to elevate my work while pleasing my electorate. Gould’s senior faculty stressed that I should ignore any advice that proved unhelpful.  The dean repeatedly insisted that it was the scholar’s job to bring critical judgment to the array of conflicting suggestions received. Never did I hear a complaint that I had ignored someone’s suggestion.

              Gould’s service-oriented library multiplied my research productivity. Its librarians acquired obscure sources, secured high-resolution scans of illustrations, undertook foreign-language correspondence with overseas repositories, and filed Freedom of Information Act requests. Whenever I asked them to compile reading lists, find statistics, create maps, or undertake targeted research, I could trust that it would be done and done well. In fact, Gould’s librarians were often better than me at finding sources and digging up facts. Having such skill on staff was the result of a decision to prioritize personnel above collection size. But Gould’s smaller collection never hampered me. Interlibrary loan, mass digitization, and the school’s willingness to buy otherwise inaccessible materials always did the trick. The end result was that I saved considerable time and mental energy. 

              When I was on the entry-level market, it never occurred to me to evaluate law schools in terms of their public-relations teams.  My mistake! After years of obscurity as a grad student, law clerk, and post-doc, my arrival as a professor brought ready access to the public sphere.  As I soon learned, I could give interviews, discuss topics on background, write op-eds and articles, post to blogs, secure press coverage and book reviews, do public events, send out promotional materials, and much more. (I invite those of you more media-savvy than me to take up the possibilities in the comments.)  I was enthusiastic to raise my profile and spread my ideas. But I worried about PR becoming a time sink, or worse, about making a fool of myself before a large audience.

Gould’s PR team helped me enter the public eye efficiently and on my own terms. They took care of logistics, safeguarded my time, and focused on how I could have an impact. They initially held my hand, practicing with me what I would say and helping me set expectations with reporters. As my confidence grew, my scholarship progressed, and world events unfolded, they had endless ideas about how to give me and my work a broader platform. With their help, I gravitated toward interviews and op-eds (a subject of an upcoming post). I eschewed forums that treated intellectual exchanges as battles, and sought out those favored conversational interactions. They even helped me be heard despite my general absence from most social media (LHB notably excepted!).

              --Sam Erman

CFP: Maritime and Riverine History

[We have the following call for papers.]

CFP: Liberalism

[We have the following call for papers.]

The call for papers for our conference "Liberalism - historical and contemporary variations" is now open! The conference will be held at the University of Helsinki, October 24-25, 2019.

The conference is organized by the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives (EuroStorie). Keynote speakers are Quinn Slobodian (Wellesley), Werner Bonefeld (York), Sonja Amadae (Helsinki).

This conference seeks to bring analytic clarity to the concepts of liberalism by investigating into its historical and contemporary variations. We pay special attention to the various reconfigurations of the liberal doctrine that emerged in the context of interwar and post-WWII Europe (e.g. different forms of neo-liberalism, German ordoliberalism, social liberalism). We invite presentations that discuss particularly the theoretical underpinnings and intellectual transformations of the liberal doctrine in the past 100 years with a focus on the following questions:

• What were the key theoretical and intellectual questions that defined the emergence of different “new” liberalisms (neo-liberalism, ordoliberalism, social liberalism etc.) in the interwar period? What kinds of intellectual and philosophical resources they employed?

• How should we understand the relation between liberalism as a theoretical or moral-philosophical doctrine vs. political movement? What were the main political strategies of different liberalisms?

• How has contemporary liberalism employed the conceptual and theoretical tools of individual sciences such as economics, law, and political science?

Please send your abstracts (max. 400 words) with relevant contact info to the address: liberalism2019@helsinki.fi by May 15, 2019. For practical information, please consult our coordinator Dr. Heta Björklund (heta.bjorklund@helsinki.fi).

2019 British Legal History Conference

The program for the 2019 British Legal History Conference is now posted. You can have a look here. The conference will be take place July 10-13, 2019  at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. 

Here are the plenary sessions: 

Plenary I – 10 July 2019

Caroline Humfress (St Andrews), ‘Some Comparative Legal History: Lazarus and the Lawyers’

Chair: John Hudson (St Andrews)

Plenary II - 11 July 2019

Alice Taylor (KCL), ‘What does Scotland’s earliest legal tractate actually say (and what does it mean)?’

Chair: William Eves (St Andrews)

Plenary III – 12 July 2019

Rebecca Probert (Exeter), ‘What Makes a Marriage? Religion, the State, and the Individual in the Long Nineteenth Century’

Chair: Andrew Cecchinato (St Andrews)

Plenary Panel – 12 July 2019

Lorna Drummond (Sheriff of Tayside and Fife)

Geoff Lindsay (Justice, Supreme Court of New South Wales)

Hector MacQueen (Edinburgh – Formerly Scottish Law Commission)

Plenary IV – 13 July 2019

Ian Williams (UCL), ‘James VI and I, Rex et Iudex: One King as Judge in Two Kingdoms’

Chair: Sarah White (St Andrews)

Further information is available here.

Find a Co-Panelist for ASLH 2019!

[Although we've recently moved up another post on the approaching deadline for ASLH, to facilitate last-minute match-making" we're moving up this one as well.]

The Call for Papers of the Program Committee for the next annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, to be held in Boston on November 21-24, 2019, states in part:

Given the number and high quality of panel and other complete sessions submitted, individual papers are much less likely than full sessions to be accepted.  Would-be individual paper submitters are encouraged to connect with other scholars (through H-Law, etc.) to coordinate the submission of complete session proposals.

We here at Legal History Blog are happy to be such a matching service.  Comments to this post are open any of you with individual papers seeking like-minded presenters for a panel.  Feel free to post your paper topic and/or panel idea in a comment, with an email address or other contact information.  And please feel free to spread the word about the annual meeting.  (The conference hashtag is #ASLH2019.)  The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2019.

CFP: ASLH Pre-Conference Workshop on Law and Empire in Sino-Asian History

We have the following call for proposals:

CFP: ASLH Pre-Conference Workshop on Law and Empire in Sino-Asian History

The American Society for Legal History (ASLH), the International Society for Chinese Law and History (ISCLH), and the Harvard Law School East Asian Legal Studies Program (EALS) jointly invite submissions for a pre-conference workshop in Cambridge, MA on November 21, 2019, directly preceding ASLH's 2019 annual meeting in Boston.  The theme of the workshop is "Law and Empire in Sino-Asian History": it aims to explore the legal and institutional dimensions of empire in early modern and modern Asia, insofar as they are substantially related to China.  Proposals should therefore seriously engage with some aspect of Chinese history, but need not so do exclusively--comparative or transnational papers are most welcome.

We hope, in particular, to present the work of a number of scholars who are new to the ASLH annual meeting--early career scholars and graduate students are therefore especially encouraged to apply.  In this way, we hope to promote scholarship in this area of legal history and to encourage more Asianists and Sinologists to attend the ASLH meeting. 

The event will be composed of three panels of three to four papers each.  One panel, keeping with the traditions of ASLH pre-conference workshops, will exclusively feature early career scholars and graduate students, and we will match each paper on this panel with its own commentator.  The other two panels are open to scholars of all ranks and seniority, and follow the usual ASLH panel format: three to four presenters, followed by one commentator, and then by open discussion with the audience.

Applications to the workshop should include a current curriculum vitae, a title, and a paper abstract of no more than 400 words. Applicants whose proposals are accepted will receive some support towards conference hotel and travel costs.  Please note that submission to the workshop does NOT preclude a separate submission to the main ASLH meeting (see https://aslh.net/conference/2019-annual-meeting/). 

Applications close on April 5, 2019, at 5 pm EST.  Please send queries and applications to Michael Ng (ngmichaelhk@gmail.com) and Shuang Chen (shuang-chen@uiowa.edu), with the subject line "ASLH 2019 Pre-Conference Workshop."  Decisions will be sent out by mid-June.

ASLH Submission Deadline Approaching

[We're moving this up, because the March 15 deadline for submissions for the November 2019 annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History is fast approaching.]

We hear from Daniel Sharfstein, one of the co-chairs of the 2019 annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, which will take place November 21 - 24 in Boston, that the submission portal for panels of various sorts is now operational.  The deadline for submission is March 15.

CFP: African Legal History Symposium

[We have the following call for papers for an African Legal History Symposium, hosted by the American Society for Legal History with support from the African Studies Association.  H/t: Joanna Grisinger.]

Co-conveners: Erin Braatz, Suffolk University Law School; Trina Hogg, Oregon State University; Elizabeth Thornberry, Johns Hopkins University; Charlotte Walker-Said, CUNY-John Jay College

Fortuitously, the 2019 annual meetings of the African Studies Association and the American Society for Legal History will both take place November 21-23 in Boston. In hopes of sparking a more sustained engagement across these two fields, and marking what we see as an inflection point in scholarship on African legal history, we invite paper proposals for an African Legal History preconference symposium, to be held in Boston on November 21, 2019.  The symposium will be hosted by the American Society for Legal History in coordination with the African Studies Association, with sponsorship from the Suffolk University Law School.

We seek papers in the field of African legal history, broadly construed, and are particularly excited about papers that extend the insights of established scholarship, with its focus on customary law, in new directions. We encourage paper and panel proposals on law in Africa in the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods, British, French, Islamic, Lusophone, and indigenous African traditions, and on all types of law (family, criminal, property, constitutional, business, customary, imperial, pluralist, international, etc.) Papers may focus on any region of the continent (including North Africa and the island territories).

Please email abstracts for proposed papers to bmello@suffolk.edu, with “African Legal History Symposium” in the subject line, by 5 April 2019.  Abstracts should be no more than 300 words in length.  Full papers to be presented at the symposium will be due by November 1, 2019, for circulation to all participants. 

Limited funding will be available to assist with the costs of travel.  Funding priority will be given to scholars based on the African continent, graduate students, adjunct instructors, and other scholars who do not have access to research funding through other sources. 

We encourage symposium participants to consider submitting proposals directly to the ASA and ASLH as well, for inclusion in the main program of those conferences.

CFP: Contribution of the Legal Services of the European Institutions to European Law

[We have the following announcement of a Call for Papers for the conference, “The Contribution of the Legal Services of the European Institutions to European Law."]

‘Legal History of the European Union’ is a recently established research field at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History at Frankfurt. The MPIeR attempts to situate the history of European law in a longue durée perspective, emphasizing the comparative dimension and taking into account the broader political and socio-economic context.

Among its activities the research group organizes an annual conference. The first conference in 2017 explored the Treaties of Rome, and the focus of the 2018 conference was on the biographies of key personalities contributing to the legal dimension of European integration.  A follow-up conference, entitled ‘The Contribution of the Legal Services of the European Institutions to European Union Law’, will be held on 18-19 June 2019. It will scrutinize the history of European law with a distinct focus on the contribution of the legal services of the European Institutions to European Union law from its origins until the present day.

A call for papers will be issued on March 1st 2019.  For further information please see the official announcement on our Homepage.

CFP: Law & Environment in the Indian Ocean World

[We share the following announcement. The deadline for submissions is May 15, 2019.]

Call for Papers:

Ordering the Anthropocene: Law & the Environment in the Indian Ocean World

A workshop convened by Debjani Bhattacharyya (Drexel University) and Laurie Wood (Florida State University)

4-5th October 2019

Hosted by Drexel University, with the generous sponsorship of the American Society for Legal History & Drexel University

 What can historians of law achieve from engaging with their colleagues studying environmental changes over time? How have emerging regulatory regimes (imperial, property-oriented, maritime, medical, etc.) joined the domains of science and law in new ways? And how can legal historians retool their methods to study deep histories of landscape transformations and climate? These questions are especially pertinent for the Indian Ocean region, where these concerns have both past and contemporary relevance: e.g. rising sea levels in the Maldives and Andaman Islands; coastal erosion and disputes over new-land formation along the littorals of Bay of Bengal; island-building in Singapore (with sand from Gulf states); disaster relief following the 2004 tsunami and earthquake, which especially affected Indonesia and Malaysia; food security around the Horn of Africa; and some of the world’s busiest shipping routes.

Time shapes the traffic in what constitutes truth in these two broad disciplinary arenas. Legal historians typically analyze cases, each with a specific lifespan of years or decades. Environmental phenomena, by contrast, often span centuries or even geological epochs. We propose a workshop to address the temporality of expertise and evidence which will bring legal historians whose disciplinary focus is bounded by the temporality of a case, together with environmental historians and historians of science who are increasingly doing histories of deep-time. For instance, when legal historians study regulatory regimes of intellectual property to material cultures. It works with an anthropogenic lifespan: copyrights, patents, objects, labor, commodities. Whereas environmental phenomenon, which are increasingly entering regulatory domains, work with long timescales spanning geological, seasonal and solar temporalities. As states are beginning to exert regulatory powers increasingly in legal and scientific regimes, the legal timescale of a case is getting entangled in deep historical timescales.

We invite abstracts for an exploratory workshop, where we will discuss articles/chapters in progress and which have not been submitted for publication. Articles which are in preliminary review stages are welcome, but not those in galley proofs. The purpose of the workshop is to receive comments and feedback on works in progress with the possibility for incorporating the discussions of the workshop. The presenters will be paired with senior discussants who will offer feedback on their articles/chapters and then open it up for discussion. Presenters will be required to submit their articles/chapters of 8000 words and no more than 12,000 words by 30 August 2019. All presenters and discussants will be required to read the articles beforehand which will be made available through a secure dropbox account. The purpose of the workshop is to:

• Bring together senior and junior scholars of law and/or environment who are working in the newly-vibrant field of Indian Ocean World history.
• Generate a methodological conversation between legal historians and historians of environment and science anchored on the category of time and how differing notions shape practices of evidence selection, gathering and testimony in the court and laboratory.

The workshop will consist of 4 panels, with 2 presenters in each panel. We will pair legal historians with historians of environment to explore how common terminology around evidence, witness, reason, expertise is affected by concepts of time that are distinct in each discipline. We welcome papers exploring the following questions broadly:

·         Where does law/do legal regimes collide with the material world?

·         Where/when/how/why do natural phenomena become entangled in ordering regimes?

·         How do these relationships (re)configure the human as social (e.g. relational, hierarchical, vocal) and material (e.g. embodied, constrained by lifespan, etc.)?

Application Instructions

Interested applicants should submit a 300-word abstract and short c.v. to the convenors by 15 May 2019: Debjani Bhattacharyya (db893@drexel.edu) and Laurie Wood (lmwood@fsu.edu ). Article-length papers (8,000-10,000 words) will be due for circulation among participants and invited commentators by 30 August 2019. Domestic airfare, accommodation, and most meals will be provided thanks to support from the American Society for Legal History and Drexel University.

CFP: Poverty in America: Past, Present, and Future

[We have the following CFP.]

Poverty in America: The Past, Present, and Future, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, 10-11 May 2019

2019 marks fifty-five years since President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an "unconditional War on Poverty" in the United States and one year since President Donald J. Trump's Council of Economic Advisers declared the War on Poverty "largely over and a success". While most would agree America's War on Poverty is "over", few - from either side of politics - would agree that it was won. According to the US Census Bureau, 39.7 million Americans, or 12.3% of the total population, currently live in poverty. More than half of America's children qualify as either "poor or low income". Over 40 million Americans rely on food stamps to provide their meals. 

To understand why America is still plagued by the "paradox of poverty amidst plenty" a two-day interdisciplinary conference is being convened at the Rothermere American Institute of the University of Oxford.

We are looking for papers and panels which address America's historical and contemporary relationship with poverty, and why the politics of poverty have proved so intractable. We are particularly interested in papers from the fields of history, politics, and public policy, including practitioners.

Topics may include, but are not limited to reasons for the failure of Johnson's War on Poverty;
how and why poverty disproportionately affects women and people of colour; what new policy approaches could positively impact those living in poverty; the past and future of anti-poverty programs such as Food Stamps, Social Security, and Medicaid; depictions of poverty in the media; whether America's political institutions are capable of effectively reducing poverty; and
why poverty has failed to be a larger issue in American political discourse in recent decades.  The keynote address will be delivered by Professor Alice O'Connor (UC Santa Barbara)

Proposals of no more than 250 words per paper, accompanied by a 1-page CV, should be sent to the organisers (Alex Coccia and Mitch Roberson - povertyinamericaconference@gmail.com) no later than 1 March 2019. Proposals for individual papers or full panels are welcome.

Thanks to the generosity of the BAAS/US Embassy Small Grants Programme we will be able to offer some travel bursaries for this event.

CFP: ASCL 2019

[We have the following CFP.]

The American Society of Comparative Law (ASCL) has just issued a call for proposals for (1) concurrent panels and (2) a works in progress conference to be held in association with the ASCL 2019 Annual Meeting, which will be held at the University of Missouri School of Law between Thursday, October 17, and Saturday, October 19, 2019.  The event is open to ASCL and non-ASCL members.

The theme of the Annual Meeting is “Comparative Law and International Dispute Resolution Processes” and will feature presentations on how comparative law affects various types of cross-border conflict, including but not limited to litigation, arbitration and mediation.  Concurrent panels and works in progress papers need not fall within this general theme, although of course they may.  Multilingual panel proposals will be considered as part of ASCL's mission to foster plurilingualism.

Information on the event, including the call for panel proposals and works in progress submissions, is available [here].  Proposals will be accepted until May 20, 2019.

ASLH ISO: Warren Court Panelists

Although LHB readers ISO others for ASLH panels should feel free to leave comments on this post, we're happy to post the following from Earl Maltz, Rutgers Law:

I am interested in putting together a panel commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the end of the Warren Court for the 2019 meeting of the ASLH.  My own contribution is tentatively entitled “The Changing of the Guard:  The Triumph of Richard Nixon, the Travails of Abe Fortas, and the Transformation of Constitutional Law.”  If you would like to be part of such a panel, please contact me at emaltz@law.rutgers.edu.

CFP: Autonomy in Private Law

[We have the following CFP.  Please note: the deadline is January 20, 2019, midnight EST.]

Autonomy in Private Law: Past, Present, Future.  Organization: The Private Law Junior Scholars Conference.  June 19-20, 2019, Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law, Safra Center for Ethics.  @PLJS_conference

The Private Law Junior Scholars Conference is a collaboration between the law faculties of the University of Toronto and Tel Aviv University. It aims to create a forum for junior researchers from around the world to exchange about private law and different aspects of private law scholarship. The conference provides a select number of doctoral candidates, post-doctoral researchers and junior faculty (pre-tenure) with a unique opportunity to present their work and receive meaningful feedback from senior faculty members and peers. Last year’s conference, themed ‘Public Aspects of Private Law’, received 70 submissions. A total of seven presentations were selected by the organizers and leading private law scholars from the universities of Tel Aviv, Toronto and Yale, which included Hanoch Dagan, Avihay Dorfman, Larissa Katz, Daniel Markovits, Ariel Porat, and Arthur Ripstein.

This Year’s Topic: Autonomy in Private Law: Past, Present, Future  .Autonomy has long stood as the central pillar of conventional scholarship in private law. Much of private law, as depicted in these accounts, is built around the ideal-typical vision of autonomous agents as the relevant legal subjects, and frequently, private law is also claimed to realize and enhance autonomy. The assumption of the existence and desirability of autonomous agents and agency appears to be shared by widely diverging approaches to private law.

Private law’s autonomy-paradigm is, however, increasingly challenged by alternative theoretical accounts of the field that identify freedom as private law’s central pillar, and/or stress the relational dimension of private law. Additional challenges emanate from societal and technological developments that create new areas of power imbalances. At the same time, precisely because of its perceived emphasis on autonomy, private law might seem to offer a promising normative framework for addressing some pressing societal problems.

These challenges and promises invite further reflection about the place of autonomy in private law’s past, present and future. The 2019 Private Law Junior Scholars’ Conference aims to explore these issues, shed light on resulting tensions, and develop possible future perspectives. We invite papers that explore the overall conference topic from different theoretical and methodological vantage points, including historical, comparative, empirical, and critical perspectives.

Coming Home: The Postwar Return of Refugee Scholars

[We have the following call for papers.]

Coming home: the post-war return of refugee scholarship, 10-12 April 2019, University of Helsinki

The process of “refugee scholarship”, whereby scholars finding themselves in a conflict situation forcing them to flee their pre-existing academic context and thus having to adapt their scholarship to suit the new environment has been widely researched in the context of post-war scholarship and exile studies. Questions remain however relating both to the scientific change in the result of exile and studying the contemporary refugee scholarship. What happens when the conflict is over, and refugee scholarship “comes home”? And what are the new ways and methods of studying such scholarship in the context of the contemporary refugee and migration crisis?

The main instance of refugee scholarship coming home relatively successfully is the reinstatement after the Second World War of the work of those from the humanities and social sciences that had escaped the atrocities of the Nazi regime in Europe between 1933 and 1945. Post-War Europe saw a search for a new legal-political system: in this context, some refugee scholars had retained their authority among their peers despite being ousted, and some obtained a new-found audience for the works they had composed before and during the War. In their new academic environment, not all refugee scholars were successful in the process of adaptation: yet, those that were had been elementary in the foundation of novel fields of legal and political science particularly in the Anglo-American academic world. Arguably, these fields such as international relations could be classified as hybrids, containing scientific elements from both the continental European and Anglo-American academic traditions. To approach the return of refugee scholarship as a concept, the conference strives to link exile studies with contemporary refugee and migration studies in order to explore new methods of studying migration and its links with knowledge production. As such, it explores the possibility of historical parallels with the experiences of scholars as well as other asylum seekers on route or in Europe currently.

The conference revolves around the following set of questions in particular:
-    In what measure does the status as (erstwhile) refugee scholars determine the scope of their influence?
-    How does the refugee experience transform scholarship? Is it even possible to generalize here, or should this purely be determined on a case-by-case basis?
-    What happens when a hybrid form of scholarship comes to be reinstated in its “old” academic and institutional context? Do both elements survive or is the hybrid stripped of its new context, retaining what was familiar for those that had stayed behind?
-    What are the institutional, political, and societal consequences of a return of refugee scholarship to its former context?
-    Is there a historically valid parallel present between historical and current instances of refugee crises?
-    What is the contribution of mobility to knowledge in general, and scientific knowledge in particular?

The conference aims at a cross- and multidisciplinary perspective on the issues of refugee scholarship coming home and a new wave of scholars and intellectuals displaced by ongoing conflicts. Speakers and panellists are explicitly invited to engage with scientific disciplines other than their own, as well as taking into account both pre-Second World War and post-1945 historical continuities and discontinuities as well as contemporary discussions.

Confirmed keynote speakers include Michael Hoeflich, professor of law at the University of Kansas; Christina Eckes, professor of European law at the University of Amsterdam; Richard Lebow, professor of international political theory at King's College London; Dana Schmalz, visiting scholar at the Zolberg Institute of the New School, NY; Alfons Söllner, emeritus professor of political theory at the University of Chemnitz

The conference will be held on 10-12 April 2019. The deadline for abstracts (max. 500 words) is 15 February 2019. The abstracts and further queries may be sent to Jacob Giltaij (jacob.giltaij@helsinki.fi), university researcher at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence for Law, Identity and the European Narratives (EUROSTORIE, eurostorie.org) of the University of Helsinki. The organizers will unfortunately be unable to assist with travel arrangements or costs.

Weekend Roundup

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section, Louis Masur (Rutgers University) on "Why It Took a Century To Pass an Anti-Lynching Law"; Christopher Petrella (American University) on "What We Get Wrong about the 'Poor Huddled Masses'"; and more.

• Some CFPs for junior scholars: the LSA's Junior Scholars Workshop Call is now out here. The deadline is Jan.15, 2019. The University of Michigan Law School's Junior Scholars Conference Call is here, for the 5th annual version. Applications due Jan.12, 2019.

• There's nothing new about soldiers' post-war struggles with mental illness and domestic violence. Jessica Butler's take on WWI veterans and violent crime against family members (H/t: Nursing Clio)

• With the AHA annual meeting happening now in Chicago, there's good job interview advice about, including this Twitter thread by Beth Lew-Williams and this one by Claire Potter.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

CFP: A PhD Workshop on Minorities in Finland

[We have the following CFP.]

Writing In, Writing Out: Historcizing Agency, Mobility and Possibility.  Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland, April 26th 2019

We invite papers for the PhD Workshop organised in conjunction with the Åbo Akademi's annual seminar in the minority research taking place on April 25th.  The annual seminar of the Åbo Akademi University minority research profile will explore histories and historiographies of minority positions. It will trace practices of exclusion and inclusion, agency and mobility through archives and the materialities of class, race, body, gender and religion. How, what and whose stories are being told and untold - and by whom? How can they be told otherwise?

Confirmed seminar speakers are Milinda Banerjee (Presidency University), Daniel Blackie (University of Oulu), Gunlög Fur (Linnaeus University), Mona Oraby (Amherst College), Dorottya Szikra (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Miika Tervonen (University of Helsinki).

Speakers will also act as commentators at the doctoral workshop.  The organizers invite doctoral researchers approaching histories and historiographies of minority position from diverse disciplinary angles to submit paper proposals critically exploring dominant and marginalized minority narratives, subjectivities and identities they produce/have produced and resistance they engender/have engendered.

Interested PhD students can submit abstracts not exceeding 500 words by January 15th to both magdalena.kmak[at]abo.fi and pamela.slotte[at]abo.fi Selected speakers will be asked to submit full papers of approx. 3000 words by March 30th.  The organizers are not able to pay for travels or accommodation of selected workshop speakers.

CFP: Law, Trade and the Sea: Discovering Maritime Trade in the Roman World

[We have the following call for papers.]

Law, Trade and the Sea: Discovering Maritime Trade in the Roman World
University of Helsinki, September 12th -13th, 2019

The ancient Roman Empire utilized, promoted and relied upon long-distance maritime trade in a scale unprecedented in the ancient world. This led to the development of both trade networks that made possible the growth of urban centres, water-related infrastructures and economic specialization, but also a normative framework, which enabled trade and commerce across political, linguistic and cultural boundaries. The purpose of this workshop is to explore the emergence of the Roman system of maritime trade both as a logistical and a normative enterprise. The technology of transportation, from the ships to the ports and warehouses, developed in tandem with the rules that governed that trade. The conference will benefit of communications that place legal theory versus daily sea practices. The organizers invite paper proposals for a number of central themes relating to the topic.

The issues addressed are Food distribution and the annona; Taxation; Socio-legal structure of maritime enterprises;  Administration and regulation of port environments; Risks and hazards of seafaring (e.g. piracy); Financing maritime trade; Stockage and warehousing; Freedom of navigation and the administration of trade (migration, control of movement); Interaction between native and Roman law (issues of compliance and enforcement, dispute resolution).

Confirmed keynote speakers are Prof. Eva Jakab (University of Szeged, Hungary); Prof. Roberto Fiori ("Tor Vergata" University, Rome); and Prof. Simon J. Keay (BSR, BA, University of Southampton, UK).

The proposals should be 400-500 words long and accompanied by a short CV of the author.  The deadline for abstracts is March 10th, 2019. The proposals should be sent to lawtradeandthesea@gmail.com

There is no conference fee. The organizers are unfortunately unable to aid in either travel arrangements or the cost of travel.

With the collaboration of Law, Governance and Space. Questioning the Foundations of the
Republican Tradition (Spacelaw).  Funded by the European Research Council and Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and cosponsored by the University of Edinburgh.