The Stanford Center for Law and History invites paper submissions from graduate students for its eighth annual conference, "Legal History in Times of Crisis." This one-day conference will be held on Friday, May 15, 2026 at Stanford Law School. We would be grateful if faculty forwarded this message to their graduate students and encouraged them to apply.
Our contemporary world is in crisis—on this much, there is widespread agreement. But the nature, scope, and causes of our present crisis—indeed, crises—are subject to fierce debate, whether they be crises of democracy, technology, the rule of law, capitalism, public information and knowledge, local ecology, or global climate.
Crisis is, at its roots, a historical concept, deriving from the Greek krisis: a turning point. The conference will bring together scholars of law and history to examine crises of the past across time periods and geographies, focusing in particular on political, economic, and environmental turning points. A non-exhaustive list of possible topics spanning these three modes of crisis include:
Turbulent transitions and periods of marked violence, instability, and/or uncertainty
Inequalities in the social distribution of crisis
Perceptions of crisis
Systems and institutions prone to crisis
Typologies of crisis, e.g. acute versus prolonged, discrete versus overlapping
Seedbeds for future crises
Generative possibilities of crisis
The utility of history in times of crisis, i.e. what good is history during a crisis?
Application Information. The conference organizers will select one graduate student as the recipient of the paper prize. The winner will present on one of the three conference panels. Funding for travel and accommodations will be provided.
Application Requirements: CV and Paper abstract (500 words or less). Submissions will be accepted via our website. The deadline for submission is Sunday, March 1, 2026. Please direct any questions to sclh@law.stanford.edu.
