Call
for Papers
How to do things with Law: Prefiguration, Performativity, and
Alternative Legalities
Law
and Society Association, May 22-25, 2025, in Chicago
We - Amy Cohen (Temple University), Stephen
Young (University of Otago) and Ben Golder (UNSW) - are organising a
mini-conference on the above theme to take place within the 2025 annual meeting
of the Law and Society Association in Chicago, to be held May 22-25th.
Theme:
What happens when everyday actors take the law
into their own hands and seek to create, or recreate, the legal worlds they
inhabit? There is a long, venerable and fascinating tradition of non-legal
actors seizing the means of legal imagination. These individuals and groups
(sometimes even quasi-institutions) are not formally authorized to make law but
they act as if they are, adopting a consciously fictive
jurisdiction.
Think, for example, of the work of peoples’
tribunals in international law - starting with the Russell Tribunal on the
United State’s crimes in Vietnam in the late 1960s and through to the World
Tribunal on Iraq in 2005 - that mobilise a certain (popular) understanding of
international law to produce verdicts, raise popular consciousness, and
critique (or maybe even redeem) international law.
Think also of the Feminist Judgments Projects
(FJPs) or related exercises in critical or imaginative judgment-writing, in
which legal scholars and feminist activists assume the position of judges and
rewrite important appellate judicial decisions. In so doing, they seek to
expose both law’s patriarchal structure but also its contingency, its hidden
margin of freedom. Law, in the hands of would-be feminist judges, could always
be otherwise.
Or think, in a very different political
register, of those litigants (be they sovereign citizens or other individuals)
who today - gathered under the sign of what mainstream legal actors
pejoratively call ‘pseudolaw’ - mobilise a certain understanding of the common
law and of its ancient history in order to assert a particular legal
subjectivity and claim their rights. Indeed, sometimes these
individuals fashion an entire normative universe.
These examples are neither exhaustive nor
privileged instances of the phenomenon - we could add many others, from
exercises of corporate self-governance (the so-called ‘Facebook Supreme Court,’
for example) to heterodox gestures of self-determination (the sovereign claims
of micronations, for example).
This conference within a conference presents an
opportunity to explore these phenomena, and continues discussions about
‘prefigurative legality’ (Cohen and Morgan, 2023), or other related topics.
Without wishing to circumscribe those discussions, we are interested in paper
proposals (which we will organise into panels) or fully-formed
panels (with 3/4 papers) that address the following indicative list of
topics and questions:
1. How do we best
think about this phenomenon of informal legality - as an instance of
prefiguration, or performativity, or parody, or maybe through the lens of legal
pluralism?
2. What is the
relationship between the informal or everyday legal claim (to rights,
jurisdiction, statehood, even) and the formal structures of state or
international law?
3. Do these claims
complete, compete with, or critique authorized law, or do they sit outside,
beyond or underneath it?
4. What are the
political possibilities and limitations of these exercises or practices?
5. What are
historical examples of this phenomenon and what might those histories indicate
about similar actions or actors today?
6. What
understanding of legal form and legal method do these practices disclose?
7.
What are the similarities and differences between supposedly
left-wing invocations of law, and conservative mobilisations of law?
Process:
We invite paper (or panel)
proposals for a series of interlinked panels on the above theme at the Law and
Society Association 2025 Conference in Chicago, May 22-25. Our intention is to
collate a series of paper (and panel) proposals into a mini-conference,
crafting a conference within the wider conference setting of the LSA that
sustains an intimate and intellectual conversation across the related panels.
Below is the set of steps and deadlines leading up to the LSA in 2025 and what
you need to do in order to participate. After the LSA, our intention is to work
with participants to publish our papers as a collection in either a special
edition of a scholarly journal or in the form of an edited book with a leading
academic or trade publisher. Once we have the final
conference-within-a-conference program we will commence initial discussions
with participants (that is, well before the LSA itself) and gauge interest and
ideas in future publications.
Timeline:
8. Send abstracts,
panel proposals or thoughts to stephen.young@otago.ac.nz by
15 September 2024
9. We will notify
people of acceptance or non-acceptance by 1 October 2024
10. Participants
confirm participation by 7 October 2024
11. Participants/Organisers
submit panels to LSA by 15 October 2024*
12. *Please note that
participation in this mini-conference will “count” towards your participation
limits for LSA
13.
LSA: 22-25 May 2025
What to Submit?:
We are interested in receiving either paper
abstracts on the above or related topics or fully-formed panels. If you wish to
submit a paper abstract please include a 200 word abstract, with a title and
also your institutional affiliation. If you wish to submit a fully-formed panel
or series of panels, please ensure that the submission contains 3 or 4
abstracts of 200 words, with a title and institutional affiliation for each
paper plus a 200 word explanation of the panel’s theme itself. We
are open to receiving questions about different formats of panels (roundtables,
Author-Meets-Reader sessions, etc) but we encourage people to contact us as
soon as possible about this to facilitate organisation.
Please direct your questions to any of the 3
organisers at the following email addresses: b.golder@unsw.edu.au, ajcohen@temple.edu, stephen.young@otago.ac.nz. But final
submission of proposals should be directed to stephen.young@otago.ac.nz
We do not have funding for this project so each
participant needs to ensure their own travel to, registration at, and
attendance at the LSA Chicago annual meeting.
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