CFP: Northwestern Law Review's Empirical Issue

[We have the following CFP.  DRE.]

The Northwestern University Law Review (NULR) is proud to be opening submissions for the seventh annual empirical issue! NULR is exceptional among flagship law reviews in the United States in that it publishes an annual issue fully dedicated to empirical legal scholarship. We seek to bring cutting-edge, interdisciplinary, empirical work to our legal audience, and enrich our understanding of the law, legal actors, and legal doctrine through robust and reliable examination of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method data. Publication at our Journal is especially of interest to authors who would like to benefit from an expedited publication timeline, have their work peer-reviewed from specialists in the field, be supported by a dedicated team of editors who can assist in sharpening the piece’s contribution for the legal audience, and who seek to have their work make impact on legal policy and advocacy in the United States. To provide some examples, we have previously published work evaluating racial bias in police stops, an examination of duplicative proceedings in international litigation, and a field experiment assessing incidence of judicial recusals when potential conflicts of interest come to light. You can find our past empirical issues here.

The exclusive submission window for the Vol. 120 Empirical Issue of the Northwestern University Law Review will open on April 1, 2025, and run until April 28, 2025. A subset of submissions will be selected to move forward to peer review. The Law Review will make every effort to notify authors of rejection or of advancement to peer review by June 30, 2025. Final publication decisions will be issued by August 10, 2025, with the publication date set in March 2026.

Submitted publications must be between 15,000 and 30,000 [words], and conform generally to the style and formatting expectations that are common to law reviews. For more information, please visit our website: Empirical Issue - Northwestern University Law Review or reach out to Thomas Burnett, Senior Empirical Editor for the Northwestern University Law Review at thomas.burnett@law.northwestern.edu.

Queer Constitutional History: A JACH CFP

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

Call for Papers: “Queer Constitutional History” in the Journal of American Constitutional History.  Guest edited by Professors Felicia Kornbluh and Marie-Amélie George     

We invite scholars in history, law, and related fields to submit articles for a symposium issue of the Journal of American Constitutional History on “U.S. Queer Constitutional History,” to be edited by Professors Felicia Kornbluh and Marie-Amélie George, in consultation with journal editor David Schwartz.  We plan to publish the symposium issue in 2025 to coincide with 10th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. At the time the Court issued the Obergefell decision, the opinion appeared to settle specific questions about the legal and constitutional status of marriages between people of the same sex and broader questions about the constitutionality of formal discrimination against gays and lesbians. Since then, the Supreme Court has issued decisions challenging established sexual-liberty jurisprudence, including Justice Thomas’ concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson (2022), which promised a reconsideration of the whole “substantive due process” tradition.

We invite essays on the queer constitutional history that gave rise to the Obergefell decision—including events outside of the realms of marriage, family law, or U.S. constitutional law—as well as the place of marriage equality within the Court’s broader sexual liberty jurisprudence.  We welcome contributions on the evolution of marriage equality, queer parenting, and sexual privacy rights under the U.S. Constitution, as well as related topics. For example, submissions might examine how and why these rights became recognized, their doctrinal underpinnings, the gaps that exist in Constitutional jurisprudence, and the relationship between queer Constitutional rights and the Court’s decisions in related fields.

We hope to publish a broad array of perspectives on these topics, to help inform scholarship on queer legal history and U.S. Constitutional history, as well as studies of legal institutions more generally. For that reason, this symposium issue takes an expansive approach to all of its terms: “U.S.” extends beyond the mainland to include American territories and the country’s diplomatic and international relations; we take “Queer” to mean research on gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, nonbinary, or asexual people, or otherwise relating to nonnormative and stigmatized gendered and sexualized phenomena; “Constitutional” refers to questions that have been considered in U.S. constitutional courts, as well as related questions that have preceded or transcended them, and matters of state-level and not national constitutional adjudication; and “History” means the study of the past, but not necessarily the deep or distant past, and in this case cannot help but look over its shoulder to connections with contemporary issues.

Abstracts are due February 1, 2025. Please submit them by email to Felicia Kornbluh (Felicia.Kornbluh@uvm.edu) and Marie-Amélie George (georgemp@wfu.edu). Authors of selected articles will be notified by March 1, 2025. Drafts, which should range from 5,000 to 10,000 words, will be due July 1, 2025 for submission to peer reviewers. Final versions of the articles will be due September 1, 2025. The guest editors may propose a half-day conference to immediately proceed the American Society for Legal History’s annual meeting in 2025. Contributors to this symposium issue would be invited, but not required, to participate.

Making Connections: New Works in Legal History Series

Making Connections: New Works in Legal History Series.  Sponsored by the American Society for Legal History.  Deadline for Applications: August 15, 2024
 
The ASLH "Making Connections: New Works in Legal History Series" is intended to foster conversation and connection beyond the annual meeting about exciting new work in the field of legal history or likely to be of interest to legal historians. The series is hosted by the ASLH Digital Initiatives Working Group.  Series Events this year will be 1 hour, 6-7 pm (Central) Wednesday evenings on Zoom.    

Event Structure:  Each event opens with a brief introduction by the author of their book or major article, followed by conversation between the author and an interlocutor of their choice, and closing with conversation with the audience.  There is no expectation that audience members have read the featured work; the format is structured with this in mind.

Eligibility:  Books or Articles published January 2023-December 2024
 
We encourage scholars at all career stages working in all geographic and chronological fields to apply as well as applications from international scholars.  We welcome applications for events featuring two books or articles in conversation, and events coordinated with another professional society. ASLH membership is encouraged, but not required to present.  Books featured on a panel at the Annual Meeting are not eligible. 

Applications:  (max. 1 page; 12 pt font)

• Book/Article Author, Title, Publisher (for articles, Journal title) and Publication date
• Book/Article Abstract (1 paragraph)
• Author Bio (1 paragraph)(including email)
• Interlocutor Bio (1 paragraph)(including email)

Please direct Questions & Submissions to: Barbara Welke, welke004@umn.edu

CFP: Family Law History

We have learned that the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers will devote a special issue of its Journal to the legal history of family law.  Proposals are welcome now, with drafts due in the fall of 2024 and publication in the spring of 2025. The submission guidelines are here.  Gary A. Debele, a Minneapolis-based family law practitioner who teaches the University of Minnesota Law School’s Family Law Capstone course and is one of the editors of the special issue, writes:

The topic can be of  the writer’s choosing, so long as it relates to some historical aspect of  family law or family law practice and procedure. We define family law practice broadly, including all aspects of divorce, custody and parentage, but also assisted reproduction, adoption, the Indian Child Welfare Act, child protection, domestic abuse, as well as topics such as changing family demographics, LGBTQ+ issues, and gender issues. 

Update: Interested authors may send their proposals to our executive editor, Mary Kay Kisthardt (whose email address appears in the linked guidelines) who will forward them to the special issue's editors, Mr. Debele and Steven Peskind.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Civil Liberties and Hostile Courts

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]  

The Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties (CRCL) at Stanford Law School seeks articles for a Special Issue (Spring 2022) focusing on how movements for civil liberties strategically navigate hostile courts.  For this special issue, we especially welcome work from activists, practitioners, government officials, and other stakeholders.

About the Special Issue.  As the court system has increasingly turned against the expansion of civil liberties as well as political and economic democracy, activists have needed to adopt new strategies for confronting an unfriendly legal landscape. This year CRCL's Special Issue seeks to highlight these strategies, focusing on how social movements have maneuvered around hostile laws in order to create change in both the past and the present. In particular, we invite papers that center power and autonomy as core concepts within constitutional and civil rights law, in addition to goals of legal rights and federal protection.

Questions of power and autonomy are already becoming increasingly central in civil rights and constitutional law, and in a broad variety of substantive areas including labor law, federal Indian law, reproductive justice, criminal justice, and voting rights. Focusing on power and autonomy raises a variety of questions for practitioners and theorists of civil rights law, including:

• What is the role of lawyers in assisting or facilitating movements to build power, and how does this differ from civil rights litigation as currently practiced?
• When is avoiding hostile courts a meaningful strategy for building power and autonomy, and how can the decision to turn to or avoid courts be made?
• Through which avenues can movements for civil rights build power outside of the courts and the federal state? What is the role of state and local governments or courts?
• How do movements for civil rights outside of the courts and federal state engage directly with communities?
• What would "success" in this context look like? What strategies to advance civil rights in the face of hostile federal courts/government have been successful in the past?
• How have existing systems responded to movements to advance civil rights in this way?
• How does this history inform future efforts?
  

We are interested in writing that engages with any of these questions, or any other topic touching on efforts to advance civil rights through building power and autonomy in the face of hostile courts.
To Submit an Article.  Submit your article through Scholastica.

Criteria.  Submitted articles will preferably be under 25,000 words in length (approximately 80 double-spaced pages or 50 law review pages) with citations for all statements of fact. CRCL prefers articles with a clear thesis or argument that can materially advance discussions surrounding the topic, both within academia and among practitioners. Law journal formatting is encouraged, but not required for submitted manuscripts. Additional information, including an archive of past issues, is available [here].

Deadline.  Articles should be submitted by Nov. 30, 2021. Authors will be notified by Dec. 5, 2021. regarding publication decisions. Please follow up with the submissions committee if your piece is under review elsewhere and you require expedited review.

Call for submissions: IEHS Dissertation Award

 [We share the following announcement. The deadline is Dec.31, 2021.]

The Immigration and Ethnic History Society (IEHS) is accepting submissions for the George E. Pozzetta Dissertation Award. The IEHS presents two awards of $1,000 each to help graduate students with their dissertations on American immigration, emigration, or ethnic history, broadly defined. These awards are intended for students in the process of researching and writing their dissertations and not intended for students completing and defending in Spring 2022.

Applicants must submit:

• a three-page to five-page descriptive proposal in English discussing the significance of the work, the methodology, sources, and collections to be consulted;
• a proposed budget;
• a brief curriculum vitae.

In addition, applicants must arrange for their major advisor to submit a supporting letter.

Application materials and the supporting letter must be received by the committee by the deadline, December 31, 2021.

Inquiries and application materials should be submitted via email to pozzetta_award@iehs.org.

Further information is available here.

--posted by Mitra Sharafi