2008 Conference: Call for Papers

Call for Participation : 11th Annual 2008 ASLCH Conference

(March 28-29th, 2008, hosted by San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley)

The Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities is an organization of scholars engaged in interdisciplinary, humanistically oriented legal scholarship. The Association brings together a wide range of people engaged in scholarship on legal history, legal theory and jurisprudence, law and cultural studies, law and literature, law and the performing arts, and legal hermeneutics. We want to encourage dialogue across and among these fields about issues of interpretation, identity, and values, about authority, obligation, and justice, and about law's place in culture.

We will be accepting papers, panel proposals and volunteers for chairs and discussants from July 1st 2007 until October 15th 2007.
PLEASE NOTE: To submit proposals, as well as to obtain information on conference accommodations, please visit the "ASLCH Annual Conference Information" page on the ASLCH webpage at http://www.law.syr.edu/academics/centers/lch/conference.html.

The theme for the 11th annual meeting will be Imagining Justice and Injustice. Justice, or some imagining of justice, is always present to, but never fully realized in, law. It is, in one sense, constitutive of the legal imagination, if not our imagining of law. Injustice, or the spectre of injustice, is the dangerous underside of law and moves interdisciplinary legal scholars to critique. In choosing Imagining Justice and Injustice as the theme for this meeting we want to encourage exploration of these two contestable propositions. We want to encourage scholars from across the full range of disciplines in law, culture, and the humanities to think through the complex relations of law, justice, and imagination.

In addition to papers and panels exploring this theme we welcome submissions on any law, culture, and humanities subject. Examples of the panels offered at previous meetings include:

History, Memory and Law; Reading Race; Law and Literature; Human Rights and Cultural Pluralism; Speech, Silence, and the Language of Law; Judgment, Justice, and Law; Beyond Identity; The Idea of Practice in Legal Thought; Metaphor and Meaning; Representing Legality in Film and Mass Media; Anarchy, Liberty and Law; What is Excellence in Interpretation?; Ethics, Religion, and Law; Moral Obligation and Legal Life; The Post-Colonial in Literary and Legal Study; Processes and Possibilities in Interdisciplinary Law Teaching.

We invite scholars with interests across the range of areas in Law, Culture and the Humanities to organize panels, performance pieces, screenings, or to submit proposals for individual paper presentations.

We URGE those interested in attending to consider submitting complete panels, and we hope to encourage a variety of formats such as roundtables, sessions in which commentators respond to a single paper or issue or sessions in which the chair presents the papers and their authors respond. We invite proposals for sessions in which the focus is on pedagogy or methodology, for author-meets-readers sessions organized around important books in the field, or for sessions in which participants focus on performance (theatrical, filmic, musical, poetic).

Ideally, traditional panels should include NO MORE THAN 3 papers. All panel proposals should indicate the name of the chair. In some cases having a separate discussant may be desirable. All panels should be planned in such a way that 30 minutes of the one hour and 45 minutes generally allotted for sessions is reserved for discussion/comments by the audience.

We also welcome volunteers for chairs and discussants from people who are not submitting proposals, as well as from those who wish to present a paper. If you would like to serve as a chair and/or discussant, please indicate the areas or subjects of your interest/expertise.

Participants will be notified of their acceptance by December 31st 2007. We cannot promise that we will be able to accommodate all proposals.

2007-2008 Program Committee
Laura Dickinson, Law, University of Connecticut
Reginald Oh, Law, Cleveland Marshall College of Law
Ravit Reichman, English, Brown University
Austin Sarat, Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought and Political Science, Amherst College (Program Committee Chair)

Questions?
Contact:
Austin Sarat