September 24, 2026

Webinar: Peter Goodrich on Retinal Justice: Judicial Images and the Juridical-Methodological Construction of the Gaze

 

From José Manuel Aroso Linhares

Dear Colleagues and Friends

Do not miss this working session with Peter Goodrich about the probative status of images, the visual construction of legal meaning, and the methodological challenges raised by juridical regimes of seeing.

Best,

José Manuel Aroso Linhares

I confirm that this is a webinar and therefore (although it is free) requires registration so that the link can be shared among the registrants.

Retinal Justice: Judicial Images and the Juridical-Methodological Construction of the Gaze: https://www.uc.pt/en/fduc/uciler/uciler-agenda/retinal-justice/

 



Legal Humanities Association: 2026 Funding Call

From the Legal Humanities Association:


LHA Funding Call 2026

Call Details 

The Legal Humanities Association (LHA) seeks applications for the funding of small-scale research projects within the ‘legal humanities’, broadly understood (see ‘LHA Aims and Purposes’, below). There is a limit of £500 for any individual application (see ‘LHA Budget’ below). While individuals can submit multiple applications, the LHA will normally only fund one project per applicant.

The LHA welcome’s applications for any kind of research activity within the legal humanities. Examples for this scale of funding include:

  • Funding for workshops and smaller events, covering such items as key speaker travel and accommodation and/or catering
  • Travel and accommodation for research trips to specialist libraries or archives
  • Costs of research services such as translation, transcription, etc
  • Other cost items for which a rationale can be provided by the applicant(s)

Items the LHA will not fund:

  • Subsistence and expenses beyond travel and accommodation
  • Honoraria and other similar payments
  • Costs deemed to fall outside the LHA’s aims and purposes (see below)

Email for queries and submissions: funding@legalhumanities.com

The deadline for applications is 30 September 2026.

Eligibility

All members of the Legal Humanities Association are eligible to apply for funding under this call. Projects for which funding is sought should be substantially complete by August 2027.

To find out how to become a member of the LHA, visit legalhumanities.com/join/

 

Funding Criteria

Applications will be judged in relation to the nature, importance, and outcomes of the proposed project or activity, considered in the context of the LHA’s aims and purposes (see below). The question of nature primarily goes to whether the proposal is within the scope of the LHA’s remit. The questions of importance and outcomes are more substantive, and look to the project’s significance, value, practicability, and potential effects. The submitted rationale should seek to justified these in disciplinary, practical, or other terms as appropriate to the project in question.

In all cases, the goal of the LHA’s funding is to be supportive of important work within the legal humanities community, broadly understood, and applications will be considered in a collegiate spirit.

Process: Applications will be reviewed by a panel made up of a small number of members of the LHA Governance Committee. The panel’s recommendations will then be reviewed and approved by a meeting of the LHA Governance Committee. While all applications are considered together, special consideration will be given to promoting those from Early Career Researchers and underrepresented groups within academia.

Application Requirements

The application deadline is 30 September 2026. To apply, email a single attached document containing the following sections.

Project Title

Applicant Details: Names and affiliations of all applicants

Contact Details: Email address for a single communicating or lead applicant

Project Rationale (300 words)

A short statement outlining the nature, importance, and outcomes of the project. Applications should clearly explain how the project furthers the LHA’s aims and purposes. If necessary, a rationale justifying that the project falls within the ‘legal humanities’ remit of the LHA should be included (see ‘LHA Aims and Purposes’ below).

Funding Rationale (100 words)

Please include details of why the funding being applied for is necessary and/or how it will be used to facilitate the project.

 

Budget

An itemised list of all cost items and details of any e.g. match funding or items for which funding is not being sought or that has an alternative source of financial support.

Email as an attachment to: funding@legalhumanities.com

Successful Applicants

Funds must be transferred to successful applicant or their institution by November 2026, with projects substantially completed by August 2027.

Successful applicants will also be required to provide a short report to the LHA (100-200 words) on the conduct of their project. A version of this report will be included on the LHA website, and may be used for other public-facing materials as appropriate.

The “Legal Humanities Association” should be acknowledged as a funder for the project in its materials and/or publications. LHA logo files will be available on request.

A Note on the LHA Funding Budget

The LHA has £1,500 available for member funding in its 2026 budget. This is the LHA’s first year, and it is hoped that as the Association grows then larger amounts of funding will become available for future funding rounds. Because the LHA’s budget is relatively limited, individual applications for funding should ideally be within a range up to £300, but we will consider applications up to a maximum total value of £500 per application. This is to help maximise the number of projects that the LHA can support.

LHA Aims and Purposes

For reference, from LHA Constitution, Art 3(1):

‘The aims and purposes of the Association are as follows: (a) to foster and support the development of cultural understandings of law and humanities-inflected legal scholarship, (b) to nurture and maintain an open community of scholars working in these areas, and (c) to facilitate personal, professional, intellectual, and scholarly development.’ (Full LHA Constitution)

For more details on what the LHA’s remit might encompass, see the LHA’s About page.

Ruotolo on Coyote v. Acme

Gianpaolo Maria Ruotolo, University of Foggia, has published The Coyote Finally Has His Day in Court. The piece begins:
For more than seventy-five years, one rule has governed the Road Runner cartoons: Wile E. Coyote orders some ingenious contraption from ACME, activates it, and watches it turn against him. The rocket skates overshoot. The catapult fires the wrong way. The anvil obeys gravity with suspicious selectivity. Road Runner vanishes into the distance. The Coyote hangs in mid-air, realises what is about to happen, and falls. Then he gets up and starts again. In Dave Green’s Coyote vs Acme, however, he changes weapons. This time, he hires a lawyer.

Kastner on Deviance in Nineteenth-Century American Law and Culture

Tal Kastner, Rutgers Law School, has published Deviance in Nineteenth-Century American Law and Culture. Here is the abstract.
Viewing slavery as a defining phenomenon of the American nineteenth century, this chapter traces the unstable and evolving relation in this era between norm or law and deviance or crime. The dynamic negotiations of the parameters of normativity of this period, not least as embodied in the law and in relation to slavery, significantly shaped American culture and society. As norms became the subject of dispute, shifting figures of deviance emerged. It is not until the end of the nineteenth century that certain practices, such as homosexual acts, come to constitute a deviant identity. Indeed, the deviant as an identity determined by an individual’s divergence from a norm does not enter into American usage until the twentieth century. Nonetheless, slavery—itself a contested legal and social phenomenon in this period—significantly shaped the ways normative social structures, including race, gender, and sexuality, are constructed in the course of the nineteenth century through law. Dubbed the South’s “peculiar institution”—in the sense of its distinctiveness to this particular society—slavery figures at the heart of the normative debate and resulting legal and social transformations of the nineteenth century. At mid-century, the contest over slavery precipitated discussion among abolitionists about the normative status of the Constitution. Adherence to the dictates of the law—a purported site of normativity—came to be seen by some as criminal, impacting the ongoing negotiation of the bounds of deviance. The discussion below explores how works of literature, including The Scarlet Letter, Bartleby, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The Bostonians, and other works, along with legal developments and cultural constructs, reflect and participate in the negotiation of normativity in the nineteenth century, as informed by the transforming figure of slavery. In addition, it traces the normative social models and counter-models precipitated by slavery, such as the penitentiary, the ideal of contract, and marriage.
Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.

September 23, 2026

Solove on Philip Roth's Privacy Lesson in the Novel Operation Shylock

From Daniel Solove, George Washington University Law School: A Privacy Torts Lessons from Philip Roth. It begins:


With its central theme of appropriating identity, Philip Roth’s novel Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) involves a fictional account of himself meeting a man impersonating him. Roth decides to impersonate his impersonator.


Link to the essay here. 

September 22, 2026

Forthcoming: Holocaust History (Bloomsbury)

Forthcoming: Holocaust History (Bloomsbury). From the publisher's website:
Holocaust History provides access to a rich collection of primary and secondary sources to support students and instructors to consider the events, impact and legacy of this difficult chapter of history. The reference works, first person accounts, archival documents, and more help to bring to life the voices and experiences of victims beyond the dominant historical narratives. Students will not only gain an understanding of the events of the Holocaust, but of key topics such as racism, nationalism, extremism, and memory politics. The collection will also help them to develop key skills in historical interpretation, archival reading, and critical analysis. Available via perpetual access purchase or subscription to institutions worldwide.

September 21, 2026

Salib on The Bank of England and the British Constitution

Michael Salib, Bank of England, has published The Bank of England and the British Constitution as LSE Legal Studies Working Paper No. 10/2026. Here is the abstract.
Prompted by the United States Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Cook (2026), this article examines the constitutional position of the Bank of England within the United Kingdom's uncodified constitution. The article traces the Bank's development from its foundation in 1694 through nationalisation in 1946 and the grant of operational independence in 1997-98, showing how its constitutional significance has emerged through historical practice as well as statutory design. It argues that the Bank's enduring legal personality, sustained for more than 330 years, means that it does not merely exist within the constitution; it has become part of the constitutional fabric of the state itself. In particular, it argues that the Bank occupies a constitutionally distinctive place within the executive, as an institution of long historical standing, entrusted by Parliament with the exercise of independent expert judgement in safeguarding the value of the currency and maintaining the financial stability, while remaining accountable to Parliament and ultimately subject to the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. It argues that there is a good case that the Bank of England Act 1998 bears the hallmarks of a constitutional statute, structuring the relationship between Parliament, government and the central bank. Finally, it develops a constitutional analogy between the Bank and the judiciary: institutions entrusted with the exercise of specialised expertise and independent judgement, protected from improper political interference, yet accountable within a constitutional framework ultimately established by Parliament.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call For Proposals: Law/Text/Culture

 

From Law/Text/Culture (via Thom Giddens, University of Dundee):


Call for Special Issue Proposal for 2027 Law Text Culture Vol 31

Law Text Culture is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal that explores law and jurisprudence across the intersecting domains of politics, aesthetics, and ethics. The journal publishes a single thematic special issue annually, curated by guest editors and designed to foster innovative encounters between law, culture, literature, philosophy, history, politics, visual arts, and related fields.

 

Proposal Requirements

Proposals (maximum 500 words) should include:

· a concise description of the proposed theme;

· a draft call for papers outlining the aims and scope of the issue;

· an indication of potential contributors and how they will be identified or invited;

· the anticipated range of genres and contributions (for example, scholarly articles, creative writing, visual works, interviews, or reflective pieces);

· brief details of the proposed guest editor(s).

 

Proposals should be submitted by 15 October 2026

Prospective guest editors are warmly invited to contact the Managing Editor at ltc-journal@uow.edu.au to discuss potential themes or proposals prior to submission. All submitted proposals will be considered by the Board, and its decision will be made by 15 November 2026.

Further information about the journal and the proposal process is available on the LTC website: LawText Culture – Proposals and Applications

--

CFP: Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities

 

From Simon Stern, President, the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities: CFP


We are excited to announce that we are now accepting submissions for the Twenty-Ninth Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. The conference will be held in person (with some online components) on May 27-28, 2027 at the University of California, Berkeley. This year's theme is "Discipline."  You can find the call for papers on our website or view the attached PDF version.

We are also accepting applications for our annual Graduate Student Workshop, which will take place the day before the conference on May 26, 2027. Information on how to apply for the workshop can be found in the PDF or on our website here.

Please help us spread the word and circulate the CFP in your academic communities. We look forward to gathering together for another engaging conference and hope to see you in Berkeley!

Best regards,

 

Simon Stern, President, Association for the Study of Law, Culture & the Humanities


Yin on Microaggresstions Against Asian-Americans in Hollywood...and Law Schools

Tung Yin, Lewis & Clark Law School, Boley Law Library, has published Microaggressions Against Asian-Americans in Hollywood…and Law Schools at 33 Asian American Law Journal 1 (2026). Here is the abstract.
Hollywood movies and television shows have a long history of offensive portrayals of Asian-Americans and Asians-what we now call microaggressions. In the 21st century, a new form of microaggression has emerged: taking Asian-American or Asian stories and erasing the Asian presence in favor of (usually) white characters, ostensibly on the grounds that Asian actors are not bankable. For example, the 2022 action thriller Bullet Train took a Japanese novel about Japanese professional killers on a shinkansen (bullet train) and kept the Tokyo setting, but cast white, Black, and Latino actors in most of the roles-a diverse group, but one that is not going to blend into the Japanese crowd. Intended or not, the lesson that Asian-Americans might draw is that our stories are not worth telling unless they involve people other than Asians.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

September 16, 2026

Metzger on Abraham Lincoln Brings Roman Law To Illinois

Ernest Metzger, University of Glasgow School of Law, has published Abraham Lincoln Brings Roman Law to Illinois in Die unverzichtbare Wissenschaft. The Indispensable Science. Festschrift für Wolfgang Ernst zum 70. Geburtstag. Essays in Honour of Wolfgang Ernst on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday (B. Gsell, T. Rüfner & U. Babusiaux, eds.,Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2026) at 603-614.
Abraham Lincoln’s legal practice is now studied a good deal thanks to the publication of his legal papers in 2000. Lincoln's practice was in the common law, but students of other traditions naturally wonder if there could be any Civil law i.e. Roman law traces. If there were, it might say something about Lincoln's intellectual reach, as well as the power of Roman law to do justice in an unlikely place: Illinois, only recently frontier. Happily there's one instance where Lincoln used Roman law and even won with it: an 1846 appeal to the Supreme Court of Illinois. He relied on a single proposition dealing with contract conditions, a proposition derived from Roman law and formulated some forty years earlier by the learned Kentucky judge and advocate George Bibb (1776–1859). We can't really credit Lincoln with knowledge of the Roman roots, but we can certainly credit him for recognising a powerful Roman rule that could effectively dispatch his opponent's case, in a way the common law authorities could not. Risinger v. Cheney, 7 Ill. 84 (1846). In this narrative there is also a (notional) thread linking Lincoln's Roman law to Thomas Jefferson, and to a book still residing in the Jefferson Library. Lincoln wouldn't have known this, but it would have pleased him.
Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Arias-Barrera on Hacking the Financial Order: Mr. Robot, Financial Data as Critical Infrastructure and the Limits of Resolution Law

Ligia Catherine Arias-Barrera, Eternado de Colombia University, has published Hacking the Financial Order: Mr. Robot, Financial Data as Critical Infrastructure and the Limits of Resolution Law. Here is the abstract.
This article examines Mr. Robot as a cultural legal text through which a central problem of contemporary financial regulation becomes visible: the systemic significance of financial data. It asks how financial law should conceptualise and govern the loss, corruption or destruction of records that constitute, evidence and administer financial obligations. The article argues that existing recovery, resolution, operational resilience and data governance frameworks remain principally institution centred. Even where they address cloud concentration, outsourcing and critical third-party risk, they generally assume that the financial institution, its records and the evidentiary basis of its obligations remain sufficiently available during a crisis to permit orderly intervention. Using cultural legal studies and formal adaptation analysis, the article reads E Corp and the 5/9 hack as a regulatory thought experiment. The series condenses within a single fictional institution the concentration of consumer credit, data extraction, technological infrastructure, private currency and political authority. Its central event demonstrates that the destruction of financial records is not simply an operational disruption. It compromises the capacity to identify claims, establish liabilities, protect consumers, supervise markets and resolve failing institutions. The article consequently develops the concept of financial data as critical infrastructure, understood functionally as data whose loss, corruption or unavailability would impair the continued administration of financial obligations or the stability of the financial system. The article concludes that financial regulation should identify and govern critical financial records according to their systemic function. This requires more than conventional cybersecurity or data protection obligations. It requires independently verifiable replication, tested recoverability across jurisdictions, effective supervisory access, clear responsibility among financial firms and technology providers, and governance arrangements capable of preventing private actors from becoming exclusive evidentiary points of failure in financial markets.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

September 15, 2026

Baltodano on Borrowing the Bard: Shakespearean Fluency and the Gatekeeping of Legal Authority

Camilo Baltodano, University of Pennsylvania School of Arts & Sciences, is publishing Borrowing the Bard: Shakespearean Fluency and the Gatekeeping of Legal Authority in volume 1 of the University of Kansas Law & Literature Journal (forthcoming 2027).
This Article argues that Shakespeare plays a distinct role in Anglo-American legal culture. Courts and law schools often treat Shakespeare as a credential as much as a source of language or insight into human nature. Shakespearean literacy is a sign of cultivation, and that sign is not socially neutral. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s account of cultural capital and Annette Lareau’s research on how that capital is acquired, the Article identifies Shakespearean literacy as a form of embodied cultural capital. To judge that practice, the Article borrows a standard from Paul Robinson’s work on the moral credibility of criminal law. Criminal law can create compliance not only through force but also through its reputation for delivering a justice that ordinary people recognize as their own. The Article extends that idea from the criminal rules of liability and punishment to the cultural production of legal authority. But a professional culture that treats cultural sophistication as equivalent to legal wisdom erodes the democratic basis of legal legitimacy. Shakespeare serves as the example because he is at once a symbol of legal culture and a dramatist whose plays expose the instability of legal authority. In The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Measure for Measure, the authority of law is itself put in question. Anglo-American legal culture invokes Shakespeare’s name without acknowledging those critiques. It takes familiarity with his works to be a sign of legal judgment, so that fluency can lend an argument authority before its merits are considered. What the profession rewards is ease. A forced allusion falls flat where a fluent one signals belonging, and the effortlessness that separates them is the product of a cultivation distributed long before anyone applies to law school. Shakespeare endures in legal culture because he supplies what law wants from literature, which is prestige that reads as wisdom.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Knowles-Gardner on The Selma 29: When Courage Risked Conviction (Or Much, Much Worse)

Helen J. Knowles-Gardner, Institute for Free Speech, has published The Selma 29: When Courage Risked Conviction (Or Much, Much Worse). Here is the abstract.
The day after twenty-nine Black residents of Selma put their signatures to a petition calling for the city’s schools to integrate in the fall of 1955, they found their names and addresses published in a front-page article in the Selma Times-Journal. The newspaper’s disclosure of this personal information was, in part, designed to generate a violent response, and the predictable reprisals came swiftly. This was classic political violence, 1950s white supremacist Alabama style. It made headlines across the country but, curiously, has received far less scholarly attention than one might expect. Although not the example of political racial violence for which Selma is most infamous, and by no means the only example of political racial violence directed at the city’s Black population, the story of the twenty-nine deserves to be told. This is because these individuals were not just targeted for supporting desegregation; they were targeted for supporting a primary legal goal of the NAACP. Most, if not all, of the twenty-nine were members of the NAACP, and several of them were prominent local leaders of Selma’s chapter. In Selma in 1955, mere membership in the NAACP could and did (up)end people’s lives and livelihoods. This paper tells the stories of the Selma 29. It situates those stories within a timeline that leads up to the June 1, 1956 issuance of a temporary restraining order that put the NAACP out of business in Alabama for over eight years, and generated a series of landmark rulings from the Supreme Court of the United States holding that the state’s efforts to demand disclosure of the names and addresses of the members of the NAACP in Alabama ran afoul of the First Amendment. This paper is part of Dismembering the NAACP, a book project under contract with LSU Press.
Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

September 13, 2026

Baranowski on Remaking Rulemaking: Lessons From the History of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(b)

Brad Baranowski, SMU School of Law, has published Remaking Rulemaking: Lessons from the History of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(b) at 73 Cleveland State Law Review 617 (2025). Here is the abstract.
This Article uses the lost history of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(b) to provide a framework for rulemaking at the busy intersection of complex litigation and appellate finality. The drafters of the original civil rules spent more time thinking through how to efficiently combine claims and parties in civil actions-a promised benefit of the proposed law-equity merger-than about how combined claims should be disassembled. This failure would haunt the original Advisory Committee on Civil Rules for years. Nowhere was this more evident than in the first decades of Rule 54(b)'s existence. Promulgated in 1938, Rule 54(b) was designed to provide for partial final judgments in multiclaim actions, but it quickly caused confusion in the courts of appeals. Leading jurists such as Jerome Frank, Learned Hand, Felix Frankfurter, and, above all, Charles E. Clark, the first reporter for the Advisory Committee and the Rules' primary drafter, sparred over its purpose, application, and legitimacy. The debate over amending the rule was often technical. But the stakes of the controversy hinged on a fundamental issue about the scope of rulemaking authority under the Rules Enabling Act. Namely, who should work out the tensions between law and equity after their merger: the courts, Congress, or the rulemakers? The Supreme Court resolved this debate in 1956 by tapping the rulemakers. This is the point at which a standard history of Rule 54(b) would begin. But the rulemakers' first, abortive efforts to devise a rule of district-court procedure that would advance the goals of the law-equity merger (especially promoting efficiency in complex litigation) while respecting the separation of powers (especially the statutory policy of the final judgment rule) can provide lessons for rulemakers today as they continue to grapple with appellate finality. And as this Article concludes, those lessons provide a framework for analyzing rule proposals related to appellate finality, one that focuses the exercise of the rulemaking authority on further advancing the law-equity merger.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Duxbury on The General Law Renaissance and the Common Law

Neil Duxbury, London School of Economics Law School, is publishing The General Law Renaissance and the Common Law in volume 102 of the Notre Dame Law Review (forthcoming 2027).
Of late, there has emerged an important body of legal scholarship sympathetically reassessing the concept of “general law” – unwritten legal norms discoverable by courts. This article shows that these reassessments run up against a problem when the general law in question is common law. The problem arises from a question: what makes common law valid as law in the first place? In England, the answer is that common-law norms are presumed to have governed since the beginning of English legal memory in 1189. That answer is strained, even in England. In the United States, it makes no sense. No American legal custom runs to 1189. The English validity test simply cannot be satisfied here. This doesn’t pose a difficulty at state level, where statutory and other modes of reception supply an alternative, positivist foundation for the common law. The difficulty is federal. Erie Railroad v. Tompkins held that federal courts cannot discover a body of general law and use it to displace state law. General-law revivalists challenge Erie’s premises. This article argues that the challenge underestimates the difficulty. Absent federal-legislative or constitutional adoption, there can be no valid common law as a category of substantive general law, because the test that makes common law authoritative as customary law cannot be met on American soil. Rather than discover common-law rules, federal courts, this article contends, do something significantly different: they extract underlying principles from the common-law tradition and fashion new rules from those principles. That is judicial lawmaking, but lawmaking from principle, not from nothing. Attentiveness to this distinction matters more than ever now that general law is back on the agenda.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

September 10, 2026

2027 Law and Society Meeting: Submissions Now Open

From the Law and Society Association:




 

 

2027 Global Meeting on Law and Society: Submissions Now Open!

 

 

SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN for the 2027 Global Meeting on Law and Society in Hong Kong from June 22 to 26, 2027!

 

The main conference programming will take place in-person Tuesday, June 22 through Friday, June 25. All participants scheduled for those days must be present at The University of Hong Kong.

 

The last day of programming, Saturday, June 26, will be entirely virtual. Participants and registrants on that day will be able to join from anywhere in the world.

 

We encourage all sociolegal scholars to consider submitting an individual paper or a session proposal. You will need to select whether you intend to present in person or virtually.

 

Interested in proposing a session with a creative format? Consult with the LSA Executive Office (melissa.king@lawandsociety.org) before submitting!

 

Deadline: October 27, 2027 (12pm ET)

 

 

For submission instructions and general meeting information, visit our Hong Kong 2027 homepage:

 

 

Ready to apply? Click below to get started!

 

 

LSA 2027 Theme:

Law in Motion: Reimagining Mobility, Boundaries, and Belonging

 

 

Penny Andrews, Sida Liu, and Lynette Chua

Program Chairs, 2027 Global Meeting on Law and Society

 

We live in a paradoxical era. On the one hand, the world has become unprecedentedly mobile. Capital, data, goods, and ideas flow across the globe with increasing velocity, while human beings are on the move as never before—as tourists, students, laborers, digital nomads, and, most urgently, as refugees and asylum seekers displaced by conflict, climate change, and economic precarity.

 

On the other hand, this hyper-mobility encounters an equally powerful counterforce: the hardening of boundaries. Around the world, wall-building has resurged, border surveillance has expanded, and complex legal architectures have proliferated to filter, channel, and restrict movement. In this struggle, law occupies a central position, often invisibly. It draws the lines, creates the categories, and ultimately determines who can move, where they can go, and on what terms.

 

The conference theme, Law in Motion: Reimagining Mobility, Boundaries, and Belonging, directly confronts this tension. Emblematic of law and society scholarship, the conference urges researchers to examine law as a dynamic force that is both constituted by and constitutive of movement and to question the concepts that underpin our legal world. What constitutes a “boundary” in the 21st century, when digital borders and biometric databases are as formidable as physical walls? How is “mobility” itself stratified, creating hierarchies of travelers and migrants? And how does law construct “belonging”—not just through formal citizenship, but in the interstitial spaces of temporary visas, precarious statuses, and transnational communities?

 

We invite scholars from law, sociology, anthropology, political science, geography, history, and beyond to investigate the intricate interplays among official law, social norms, and the mobile human experience. At the same time, we welcome submissions that do not speak to the conference theme but nevertheless forge interdisciplinary dialogues about law from all corners of the world. We look forward to welcoming you to Hong Kong!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

STAY CONNECTED!

 

There are numerous ways to stay connected with the Law and Society Association. Follow the LSA on Twitter @law_soc, on Bluesky @lawandsociety.bsky.social, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, and on YouTube.

 

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2027 Globa2027 Glo20bal Meeting on Law and Society: Submissions Now Open!l Meeting on Law and Society: Submissions Now Open!


2027 Global Meeting on Law and Society: Submissions Now Open!


2027 Global Meeting on Law and Society: Submissions Now Open!