Call for Proposals: 5th Global Meeting: Slavery Past, Present & Future, Webster University, Leiden, the Netherlands

SLAVERY PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE: 5th Global Meeting

Webster University, Leiden, The Netherlands
June 22-24, 2020

Slavery (the treatment of humans as chattel) and enslavement through conquest, birth, gender, race, ethnicity, kinship, and exploitation of indebtedness have been an intrinsic part of human societies.

Slavery and a variety of other forms of exploitation existed in ancient societies across the world, and in many other states and territories.  The Transatlantic Slave Trade furnished at least 10 million Africans for slavery throughout the Americas. 

Controversial and contested estimates indicate that up to 40 million people worldwide are enslaved today.  This modern re-emergence of slavery into public view, following legal abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade over two hundred years ago, is said to be linked to the deepening interconnectedness of countries in the global economy, overpopulation, and the economic and other vulnerabilities of individual victims and communities.

But should we think of these people as enslaved? And if so, is slavery an inevitable part of the human condition? Like ‘consumers’ of past eras, such as early industrialization, are we dependent on the exploitation of others? What does the persistence and mutations of different forms of exploitation mean in the context of abolition and recognition of universal individual and collective human rights? 

The varieties of contemporary forms of exploitation appear to be endless. This interdisciplinary conference will facilitate a multidisciplinary exploration of slavery in all its dimensions. 

Submissions are sought from people from all walks of life and identities, including:

• Academics: from all disciplines, such as art, film, anthropology, sociology, history, ethnic studies, politics, social work, economics, and any field that touches the study of exploitation
• Civil society members: human rights activists, leaders in non-governmental organizations, and others in the NGO or social advocacy fields
• Professionals: social workers, corporate social responsibility and business ethics professionals, business leaders, and health care professionals
• Government actors: representatives, policymakers, lobbyists, and analysts
• Global citizens with personal connections to slavery or exploitation: former slaves or indentured laborers, members of at-risk populations, migrant or guest workers, non-regularized immigrants, and refugees

We particularly encourage submissions from the Global South.

Potential themes and sub-themes include but are not limited to:

1. Defining Slavery
1. What do we mean when we talk about “slavery”
2. Using “slavery” to obscure other endemic forms of exploitation
3. Teaching and learning about historic slavery and contemporary forms of exploitation
2. Slaveries of the Past
1. Classical (Egyptian, Greco-Roman, etc.) slavery
2. Conquests and colonization – Aboriginal Australians, indigenous peoples of the New World, dividing and colonizing Africa and Asia
3. Slaveries in Europe pre-Industrialization, such as villeinage and serfdom
4. Trans-Atlantic Slavery and the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
5. Depictions of slaves and slave traders in texts and art during the Abolition Period
6. Systems of slavery in tribal and traditional societies
7. WWII and post-WWII forced labor camps
3. Human Trafficking and other Forms of Contemporary Exploitation
1. Definitions - Is human trafficking “slavery”
2. Types of human trafficking (labor trafficking, sex trafficking, organ trafficking, etc.)
3. Civil society anti-trafficking activism: assessing contemporary initiatives and movements
4. The role of the nation state:

                                                               i.      Can the nation state enslave? (prison labor, mandated military service, etc.)

                                                             ii.      Anti-trafficking policies and legislation

4. Systems and Structures of Enslavement and Subordination (historic and contemporary)
1. Role of slavery in national and global economies
2. Economic, political, legal structures – their role in enslavement and exploitation
3. Slavery’s impact on culture and the cultural impacts of historic slavery
5. Voices of the Enslaved
1. Slave narratives of the past and present
2. Descendants’ interpretation of their enslaved and/or slave-holding ancestors
6. Legacies of Slavery
1. Identifying and mapping contemporary legacies – economic, social, cultural, psychological (e.g., Post traumatic stress disorder and intergenerational trauma)
2. Assessment of slavery’s impact – economic, political, other
3. Commemorations and memorialization of enslavers and/or the enslaved
4. Legal regimes tacitly designed to perpetuate slavery (e.g., convict leasing)
5. Legal segregation or discrimination (in housing, education, banking, transportation, etc.)
6. Racial terror (e.g., lynching, forced removals)
7. Racial subordination and re-enslavement (e.g., voter disfranchisement, mass incarceration, medical apartheid)
8. Desecration of burial sites of the enslaved
9. Destruction of or denial of access to historical information
10. Lack of memorialization of sacred events/sacred persons/sacred sites
11. Transitional justice (e.g., reparations, memorialization, restitution)
12. Limited rights attribution and recognition for Afro-descended peoples
13. Capacities (and limitations) of domestic and international law in creating, implementing and challenging slavery’s legacies
14. Built environment (e.g., architecture, historic buildings, cityscapes, borders)
7. Anti-slavery Initiatives and Movements
1. Reparations
2. Economic compensation
3. Restorative justice
4. Teaching and learning about slavery
5. Relationship to the global racial hierarchy
6. Abolitionism and law: effects and (in)effectiveness
7. The role of technology and multimedia

Conference Committee: 

• Karen E. Bravo (Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, IN, USA)
• David Bulla (Augusta University, GA, USA)
• Ursula Doyle (Northern Kentucky University School of Law, KY, USA)
• Judith Onwubiko (University of Kent, United Kingdom)
• Ulrich Pallua (University of Innsbruck, Austria)
• Sheetal Shah (Webster University, Leiden, The Netherlands)
• Judith Spicksley (University of Hull, United Kingdom)

Submitting Your Proposal:

Proposals should be submitted no later than Friday, February 28, 2020 to:

·         Karen E. Bravo, Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law: kbravo@iupui.edu

·         E-Mail Subject Line: Slavery Past Present & Future 5 Proposal Submission

·         File Format: Microsoft Word (DOC or DOCX)

 The following information must be included in the body of the email:

·         Author(s)

·         Affiliation as you would like it to appear in the conference program

·         Corresponding author email address

 The following information must be in the Microsoft Word file:

·         Title of proposal

·         Body of proposal (maximum of 300 words)

·         Keywords (maximum of ten)

Please keep the following in mind:

·         All text must be in Times New Roman 12.

·         No footnotes or special formatting (bold, underline, or italicization) must be used.

Evaluating Your Proposal

All abstracts will be double-blind peer reviewed and you will be notified of the Organizing Committee’s decision no later than Friday, March 20, 2020.  If a positive decision is made, you will be asked to promptly register online. You will be asked to submit a draft paper of no more than 2000 words by Friday, May 8, 2020.

The conference registration fee is €220.

We offer a limited number of fellowships to participants who would otherwise be foreclosed from attending.  The fellowships take the form of registration deferrals.

Ip on The Idea of Law in Classical Chinese Legalist Jurisprudence

ICYMI: Eric C. Ip, The University of Hong Kong, has published The Idea of Law in Classical Chinese Legalist Jurisprudence at 9 Global Jurist 2 (2009). Here is the abstract.

Being one of the most eminent schools of jurisprudence in Eastern Philosophy, Classical Chinese Legalism has a lot to offer to the understanding of the underlying forces which shaped East Asian legal systems even to the present day. I will comprehensively reconstruct the Legalist idea of law in three dimensions, (1) law and society, (2) law and politics, and (3) law and morality. I will refute the overtly negative and simplistic conventional readings that suggest that Legalism is merely a Legal Positivist blueprint of authoritarian statecraft. The long–neglected connections between Legalism and the cosmic order have grounded law on a particular political morality. Despite being plagued by some difficulties, the Legalists' contributions to social theory, anthropology, and procedural values are significant, even to researchers in a global era.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Law and Humanities Summer School: Law, Art, Politics, University of Lucerne, June 15-19, 2020

Law and Humanities Summer School: Law, Art, Politics

(15-19 June 2020, University of Lucerne)

The Law and Humanities Summer School is an intensive one-week study programme, to be held at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, from 15 to 19 June 2020. The school is co-organised by the following partners:

• Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies – lucernaiuris, University of Lucerne
• Centre for Law, Arts and Humanities, The Australian National University
• Law Department, University of Roma Tre
• Institute for Art History, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Bringing together leading scholars, researchers and postgraduate students, the school will showcase cutting-edge work at the intersections of law and the humanities, and serve as a laboratory for exploring a range of contemporary methods, approaches and issues.

Focus: Law, Art, Politics

The 2020 Summer School will focus on the entanglements of law, art and politics. From statues of the Roman Emperors to Picasso’s Guernica, some of the world’s most celebrated works of art have been explicitly political. But in the twenty-first century everything has been disrupted – including law, including art, including politics. We live in a world obsessed by images and distrustful of politics; a world in which the public sphere is collapsing and private interests seem more powerful than ever. What, then, is the role of art in making and unmaking, representing and challenging the language of law and the power of politics? Can art disrupt the disruptors?

Starting from this contemporary perspective, the school will offer a panorama of the dynamic intercourse between law, art and politics across a variety of sites, contexts and periods. The programme will draw on the expertise of scholars working in different research fields and across multiple critical traditions to address such questions as:

• How do images and aesthetics shape the character of law?
• What role does art play in transmitting legal and political ideology, or in fostering critique or social change?
• How might we understand the relations between forms of artistic cultural expression and legal identities?
• What are the effects of art’s material manifestations on the law?
• How does art participate in, activate, or reflect upon the imagining of legal futures?

Further information here.

Bolatito on Islamic Fiqh (Jurisprudence) and Public Life: A Conundrum

Aina-Obe Shamsuddin Bolatito, Sudan University of Science and Technology, Department of Public Administration, has published Islamic Fiqh (Jurisprudence) and Public Life: A Conundrum. Here is the abstract.

Globalization is today projecting the way and system of life in the contemporary world and a natural interaction among religious people, culture and in the public life. Appears as a secular system; where political or social philosophy rejects all forms of religious faith and worship in matters of civil policy. A philosophy that reject any element of religious jurisprudence at the public life. As in the Western world, Muslim dominated countries are feeling the heat and impact of globalizations and its utmost influence at the public spheres. Among the Middle-East gulf countries, this influence is obviously visible as the Western countries culture, norms and ways of life has infiltrated their Islamic birth-right. Islamic jurisprudence is no longer the system of public life but Western doctrine and system has taken over and profited at the expense of Islamic values, culture and norms. Despite this, there are shadows of Islamic oriented systems such as Islamic Financial systems and many others, alas, globalization has imposed identical rules of procedures and a common standard of all structures of public life. Islamic Jurisprudence is now a subject of personal life, academic studies and topics to be researched by whoever cares to know. Finally, this paper tends to explains through descriptive analysis and explorative context, the challenges before adoption of Islamic jurisprudence as panacea to socio-economic problems.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Herstein on Justifying Standing to Give Reasons: Hypocrisy, Minding Your Own Business, and Knowing One's Place @oriherstein @HujiLawOfficial

Ori J. Herstein, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Faculty of Law; King's College London, Dickson Poon School of Law, is publishing Justifying Standing to Give Reasons: Hypocrisy, Minding Your Own Business, and Knowing One’s Place in Philosophers' Imprint (Forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

Numerous everyday practices exhibit the normative structure of “standing”: forbidding certain interventions in the affairs of others and permitting ignoring such interventions. This normative structure turns on facts about the person intervening and not on facts determinative of the validity of her intervention. When valid, directives count as reasons to do as they direct. When interventions take the form of directives, standing practices may permit excluding those directives from one’s practical deliberations, regardless of the directives’ validity or normative weight. Standing practices are, therefore, puzzling – forbidding the giving of genuine reasons and, if given, permitting disregarding such reasons. What (pro tanto) justifies standing practices are the values they protect which, depending on the particular practice, include privacy, autonomy, independence, valuable relationships, and equal respect. These values count in favor of standing’s duty against certain interventions and, when these duties of non-intervention are breached, the values underpinning those duties count in favor of standing’s permission to discount or exclude those interventions from one’s practical deliberations – the normative weight of those interventions notwithstanding.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Lee on The Conceptions of Self-Evidence in the Finnis Reconstruction of Natural Law @CampbellLawNow

Kevin P. Lee, Campbell Law School, has published The Concepts of Self-Evidence in the Finnis Reconstruction of Natural Law at 50 St. Mary's Law Journal 101 (2020). Here is the abstract.

John Finnis’s natural law theory is widely influential, particularly among conservative Catholic legal scholars. Finnis, who was the advisor for Neil Gorsuch’s doctorial dissertation, accepts the separation of fact and value advanced by legal positivists. To avoid the conflation of fact and value, he argues that the moral claims of natural law are justified by the self-evident first principles of practical reason (these basic first principles are referred to in this essay as the “Basic Goods”). His cardinal example of such a first principle is the claim that the pursuit of knowledge is a cause for action. He says that the validity of this claim is self-evident, by which he means that anyone who knows what knowledge is, knows immediately that knowledge is good to have in abundance and worthy of pursuit. Thus, the validity of the claim is self-evident in the sense that it is immediately grasped by the intellect and not derived from some other standard of validity (such as an empiricism) or from more basic claim (such as a factual claim). Since the moral meaning of the Basic Goods is self-evident on Finnis’ account, he argues that they do not conflate facts and values, since they are wholly disclosed to the immediate awareness by practical reason. While much has been written about various aspects of Finnis’s reconstruction of natural law, little attention has been given to his concept of self-evidence itself. But since the claim of self evidence is the justification for first principles that are the foundation for the entire theory of natural law, a closer inspection of it is warranted. My essay shows that Finnis actually makes use of two distinct conceptions of self-evidence. One is medieval ( coming primarilly from thought of Thomas Aquinas). The other conception comes from modern symbolic logic (Finnis cites to David Hilbert), which is concerned with abstract relations. There is a critical difference between them: the medieval and modern philosophers differ in their conceptions of self-evidence. The medieval conception presupposes that words are, in some sense, about beings (ens) that actually exist (in actu). Therefore, logical propositions are claims about relations between and among existing objects. For example, the truth of the principle of non-contradiction is the claim that a being might either actually exist (or not exist) speaks for itself (per se nota) because it is immediately grasped as true by the intellect. For example, to the medieval mind, the claim that my coffee mug is sitting on the table in front of me is self-evident if it can be observed to be so. The modern conception, however, does not presuppose actually existing things. In modern logic, propositions are formal relations among abstract symbols. They do not anticipate that there is any actual entity that exists in correspondence to the symbols. For example, the identity principle (A=A) does not require any actual entity corresponding to A for the logical proposition to be valid. My essay argues that Finnis equivocates between the medieval and modern understandings of logic. Sometimes, he wants self-evident principles to refer to real things so they can have moral significance. (For example, the claim that knowledge is good would be meaningless unless knowledge and good were extrinsic concepts). At other times, he wants self-evidence to be a formal relation without reference to the facts of actual entities in the world (intrinsic), so that the separation of fact and value can be maintained. Neither the medieval concept (extrinsic) nor the modern concept (intrinsic) serves the purposes he seeks for the grounds of the natural law. Self-evidence as it is understood by medieval philosophers conflates fact and value, and the modern concepts of self-evidence (intrinsic) are inadequate as the justification for a normative claim because it is only abstract and formal. Thus, neither concept is adequate for his reconstruction of the natural law, since he needs a concept of self-evidence that can avoid the naturalistic fallacy, as a modern concept can, but also can ground axiological ethics (a theory of the good), which the medieval concept can. Alone, neither concept can do both. So, for the theory to work, he must equivocate between incompatible concepts.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Twomey on An Analysis of Pitt Cobbett's Portrait of Australia's Constitution from 1788 to 1919 @SydneyLawSchool

Anne Twomey, University of Sydney Law School, has published An Analysis of Pitt Cobbett's Portrait of Australia's Constitution from 1788 to 1919, in William Pitt Cobbett, The Constitution and Government of Australia, 1788 to 1919 (Anne Twomey, ed. The Federation Press, Sydney, 2019). Here is the abstract.

William Pitt Cobbett was Dean of the Sydney Law School from 1890 to 1910, throughout the period when the Australian Constitution was drafted and first interpreted by the Griffith High Court. Upon retirement he devoted the rest of his life to writing a grand opus on the Constitution and government of Australia. It analysed the development of Australia's constitutional system from British settlement to the enactment of the federal Constitution and its early operation, viewing it as a social compact based upon constitutional implications. The manuscript was left unpublished because shortly after Cobbett's death the High Court took a significantly different approach to constitutional interpretation in the Engineers case. A century later Cobbett's "The Constitution and Government of Australia, 1788-1919" has now been published by The Federation Press. It is an historic work of great importance to those looking to discern how constitutional provisions were originally believed to operate. This paper identifies and analyses the most important aspects of Cobbett's work, pointing out where he was prescient, what is surprising, what is dated and how Cobbett's voice still resonates today. It addresses a range of issues including: federalism, the separation of powers, executive government, defence, external affairs, race issues, the Senate's powers, vice-regal powers, elections and the Court of Disputed Returns.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Call For Nominations: The Penny Pether Law & Language Scholarship Award 2019

Call for Nominations: The Penny Pether Law & Language Scholarship Award 2019

A passionate advocate for interdisciplinary scholarship in law, literature, and language, Penelope J. Pether (1957-2013) was Professor of Law at Villanova University School of Law and former Professor of Law and Director of Legal Rhetoric at the American University Washington College of Law. Her own scholarship focused not only on law, literature, and language, but also on constitutional and comparative constitutional law; legal theory, including constitutional theory; common law legal institutions, judging practices, and professional subject formation.

Beginning in November 2013, the Penny Pether Award for Law & Language Scholarship has been given annually to an article or essay published during the preceding year that exemplifies Penny’s commitment to law and language scholarship and pedagogy.

The Committee selecting award recipients from among the articles and essays nominated will look for scholarship that not only embodies Penny’s passion and spirit but also has some or all of the following characteristics:

1. “[S]cholarship concerning itself with the unique or distinctive insights that might emerge from interdisciplinary inquiries into ‘law’ grounded in the work of influential theorists of language and discourse.”

2. Scholarship that “attempts to think through the relations among subject formation, language, and law.”

3. Scholarship that provides “accounts of—and linguistic interventions in—acute and yet abiding crises in law, its institutions and discourses.”

4. Scholarship and pedagogy, including work addressing injustices in legal-academic institutions and practices, that is “[c]arefully theorized and situated, insisting on engaging politics and law, [and that] charts ways for law and its subjects to use power, do justice.”

More explanations and descriptions of these characteristics can be found in Penny’s chapter from which these quotations are drawn: Language, in Law and the Humanities: An Introduction (Austin Sarat et al. eds., Cambridge U. Press 2010).

A list of past winners appears here:

https://law.unlv.edu/lawyering-process/penny-pether

Nominations should be sent by January 31, 2020, to Karen Scullion at kmsculli@law.syr.edu.

Any article or essay published during the calendar year 2019 is eligible.  You are free to nominate more than one work and to nominate work you’ve written. Please provide a citation and a pdf for each work you nominate. 

The Selection Committee includes Linda Berger, Corinne Blalock, David Caudill, Amy Dillard, Bruce Hay, Ian Gallacher, Melissa Marlow, Jeremy Mullem, Nancy Modesitt, Stephen Paskey, Yvette Russell, Anne Ralph, and Terry Pollman.

Members of the Selection Committee are not eligible for the award.

Call For Proposals: The Utopia/Dystopia Project: A Writing Workshop, UNLV School of Law, Feb. 13-14, 2020 @UNLVLaw @elmacdowell @ljewel

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

The Utopia/Dystopia Project: A Writing Workshop 

February 13-14, 2020

William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada Las Vegas

There is no end / To what a living world / Will demand of you.

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower 

In these days of hate politics and urgent need, there is a great need for countervailing narratives and envisioning. The Utopia/Dystopia Project seeks to engage the legal imagination with utopian and dystopian art forms to decolonize mental space, reframe critical consciousness, and engender deep resistance. Project organizers believe that this art has much to teach the legal academy about understanding contemporary politics and re-organizing and re-envisioning what comes next. Popular utopian and dystopian narratives may illuminate truth and sharpen our vision. Indeed, the most critical articulations of these genres struggle with basic questions while expressing alternative visions of what could be. Speculative texts urge us to think from a different perspective than the ones we normally occupy, to live differently than we are, and to dissent from the status quo. They teach us to resist against what scares or enrages us, and to build and engender what we hope for and love. They show us that alternative possibilities for empathy, recognition, and joy may be as near as the next frame or the turn of a page. 

This Workshop follows the powerful Utopia/Dystopia Project Conference held at Tulane University School of Law in April 2019, and panels at critical legal conferences in 2018-19. Guiding questions addressed at these events included: What is law? What is justice? What are our obligations to one another? What is sacred? What is profane? What is a person? What is gender? What is sex? What is race? Must our answers be linear, inevitable, binary? Participants also engaged questions about ethics, power, and the realm of the political: How should we treat one another? What does it mean to live a good or just life? How does power structure our interactions and inevitabilities in our lives? Could power structures be other than they appear to be? How? What institutions shape our life chances/choices? What does it mean to belong or to exclude? What is self,  community, nation, other? 

Please join us for an intimate workshop to support the development of a rich, interdisciplinary legal scholarship that engages these themes. This Workshop will continue this vital dialogue with a focus on developing the participants’ ideas and scholarship toward the goal of publication. Participants will share working drafts before the Workshop and receive intensive feedback at the Workshop, as well as participate in discussions of cross-cutting ideas and issues, in a supportive environment. 

We are seeking proposals for participation. 

Participation may include academic and artistic written materials that engage socio-legal themes, storytelling in the critical race theory tradition, and speculative, utopian and/or dystopian materials, themes, or ideas. Proposals of 250-500 words should be emailed to elizabeth.macdowell@unlv.edu by Dec. 19, 2019 and include the author’s resume. Selected participants will be notified by Dec. 27. 

Working drafts will be due Jan. 24, 2020. Inquiries may be sent to Elizabeth MacDowell or another organizing committee member: Cyra Akila Choudhury, FSU College of Law;  Atiba R. Ellis, Marquette University Law School; Anthony Farley, Albany Law School; Marc-Tizoc González, St. Thomas University School of Law; Lucy Jewel, University of Tennessee College of Law; Brant Lee, University of Akron School of Law; Saru Matambanadzo, Tulane University Law School; Christian B. Sundquist, Albany Law School; and Matthew Titolo, West Virginia University College of Law.

CFP: Media Represetations of Law and Justice: Middle Eastern Perspectives, March 12-13, 2020

Call for papers: Media Representations of Law and Justice: Middle Eastern Perspectives. This workshop will be held at the Institute of Oriental Studies, University of Leipzig, March 12-13, 2020. Professor Lena-Maria Moeller and Professor Hanan Badr will host. Here is the Call. See also below.

The Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA) in cooperation with the Institute of Oriental Studies, University of Leipzig is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the international and interdisciplinary Workshop ‘Media Representations of Law and Justice: Middle Eastern Perspectives’ in Germany at the Institute of Oriental Studies, University of Leipzig, 12−13 March 2020.

Law and/in popular culture has been an emerging field of research (at least) since the 1980s. Its initial prominence was primarily limited to North America – the main hub of popular legal culture which, through various kinds of movies and television shows, impinged on what people generally believe about law and legal institutions. By now, the interrelation of law and popular culture has made its way into European legal academia. In addition, transnational comparative studies on how law and justice are portrayed in movies and fictional television dramas have been conducted, providing additional insight for both scholars of law and media studies.

At the same time, the law and/in popular culture discourse has been largely restricted to Europe and North America. Research usually centers on ‘Western’ legal culture and its cinematic/televised representations. Oftentimes, non-‘Western’ legal traditions and systems are only portrayed as supposed counter-examples to the liberal state under the rule of law that is promoted in dominant popular culture.

The AGYA workshop on ‘Media Representations of Law and Justice: Middle Eastern Perspectives’ moves away from this established regional focus by including Middle Eastern legal regimes and their respective local media depictions. We particularly invite contributions on Arabic-language cinematic and television formats (including those on more recent streaming services and social media sites) screening legal system in either contemporary or historical perspective. We also welcome papers on legal dramas from neighboring countries in the ‘Greater Middle East’, as well as comparative studies to allow for broader transnational perspectives. By enabling a conversation not only between different regional sites of media production, but also among various disciplines, a range of analytical methods will be tested and employed to analyze the means and ends to which a legal system is portrayed in popular formats.

Topics, themes, and issues to be explored include, but are not confined to the following:

·         Cultural representations of domestic legal systems and legal traditions in contemporary courtroom dramas;

·         The political framework in which legal dramas are produced and its impact on both content and format;

·         Audiences, viewers, and their changing perceptions of the law;

·         The impact of satellite TV and online streaming services on legal dramas, their production, and content;

Plots, characters, and sociopolitical critique in legal dramas.

The workshop is organized by AGYA member Lena-Maria Möller (Institute of Oriental Studies, University of Leipzig/Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, Hamburg) and AGYA alumna Hanan Badr (Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Freie Universität Berlin). Travel costs and accommodation for confirmed speakers will be covered by AGYA. Funding is still subject to approval.

Those interested in presenting papers are invited to send a tentative title, an abstract of around 300-500 words, and a short biography to Lena-Maria Möller (moeller@mpipriv.de) by 8 January 2020.

Notifications of acceptance will be announced by 15 January 2020 and draft papers will be due by 15 February 2020. The workshop language will be English. The organizers aim to publish the papers either as an edited volume or as a special issue of an academic journal.

About AGYA

The Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA) is based at the Berlin- Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and at the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology (ASRT) in Egypt. It was established in 2013 and is the first bilateral young academy worldwide. AGYA promotes research cooperation among outstanding early-career researchers from all disciplines who are affiliated with a research institution in Germany or in any Arab country. The academy supports the innovative projects of its members in various fields of research as well as in science policy and education. Currently, 50 members – in equal number Arab and German scholars – realize joint projects and initiatives. AGYA is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and various Arab cooperation partners.

For more information about AGYA and the Institute of Oriental Studies, University of Leipzig please visit:

www.agya.info

www.orient.uni-leipzig.de