Call for Papers: AALS Sections on Law & the Humanities and Evidence, 2017 AALS Annual Meeting

Call for Papers for Joint Program with the Sections on Law & the Humanities and Evidence at the 2017 AALS Annual Meeting

The Section on Law & the Humanities is pleased to announce a Call for Papers from which presenters will be selected for the Section’s joint program with Evidence to be held during the AALS 2017 Annual Meeting in San Francisco on Friday, January 6, 2017 from 10.30 am – 12.15 pm.

The topic for this year’s joint program is Narrating Evidence. In the past year, crime documentaries like Serial and Making a Murderer have been spectacularly successful. These programs and others like them have pushed many boundaries, including the boundaries between truth and justice, advocacy and art, and law and fiction. In so doing the diverse programs have suggested a role for critical interventions that interrogate where boundaries collapse and offer analyses of the interrelation between domains. One particularly rich area of inquiry in this context concerns witnessing, confession, and narrative. How do these legal and personal stories get translated from law into media? And how do humanistic devices help us better understand the complications of these narratives as they exist within the legal system. This panel will address the question of evidence, as it exists between the worlds of law and cultural representation, and in particular the ways in which questions about evidence are embedded in related questions about narrative design.

Submissions should be abstracts between 250 and 1000 words; please send full papers if available. Scholarship may be at any stage of the publication process from work-in-progress to completed article. Each potential speaker may submit only one abstract for consideration. Paper proposals should be submitted electronically to Allison Tait (Allison.tait@richmond.edu) by June 1.

The papers selected for the panel will be announced in late June. Presenters will be responsible for paying the AALS meeting registration fee and hotel and travel expenses. If you have any questions about the panel of paper submissions, please contact Allison Tait (Allison.tait@richmond.edu).