From the Law and Society Association:
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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!
This Article examines the constitutional evolution of 14th Amendment citizenship and due process protections through the historical lens spanning from Plessy v. Ferguson to the contemporary case of Noem v. Abrego Garcia. While separated by more than a century, these cases illuminate persistent tensions between individual constitutional rights and executive power, revealing how citizenship status and due process protections remain contested terrain in American constitutional law. This Article argues the modern challenges to citizenship and due process rights echo the same fundamental questions that plagued the Reconstruction Era: Who deserves constitutional protections, and what limits exist on government power to deny such protections? By tracing this constitutional arc, this Article demonstrates that contemporary immigration and citizenship disputes represent not aberrations but continuations of America’s ongoing struggle to fulfill the 14th Amendment’s egalitarian promise.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
A few U. S. labor law themed films and tv for Labor Day, 2026.
American Dream (1990).
At the River I Stand (1993).
Boxcar Bertha (1972).
Bread and Roses (2000).
F.I.S.T. (1978).
Harlan County, USA (1976).
Hoffa (1992).
Made in Dageham (2010).
Matewan (1987).
The Molly Maguires (1970).
Native Land (1942). Narrated by Paul Robeson, lawyer and actor.
Newsies (1992).
9 to 5 (1980).
Norma Rae (1979).
North Country (2005).
On the Waterfront (1954).
The Pajama Game (1957).
Salt of the Earth (1954).
Silkwood (1983).
10,000 Black Men Named George (2002).
The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal (1979).
With Babies and Banners (1979).
Television shows and episodes
The Office (2005-2014). This series is centered on the workplace. Many labor/employment law issues.
Roseanne, "Let's Call It Quits" (1989). Fred Thompson (lawyer and Senator from Kentucky) plays the condescending and overbearing manager. Many of Roseanne's first season episodes had to do with working conditions at the Wellman plant.
The Simpsons, "Last Exit to Springfield" (1993).
The Sopranos, "Do Not Resuscitate " (2000).
There are so, so many more! Search for "labor films" and "tv shows labor law episodes" (without the quotation marks) in your preferred search engine.
This article details how the rule-of-law themed games "DOGE vs. ICE" and "Let's Kill All the Lawyers" were created, and how the games were specifically designed to provoke thought about the operation of the rule of law in an accessible way.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
Publication soon:
World Literature and Law (Marco Wan, ed., Routledge, 2027).
From the publisher's website:
The study of law and literature has become global, and now encompasses legal traditions and literary histories from across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. Paradigms such as international law and literature, postcolonialism, and the Global South have further added to the richness of the field. As law and literature takes root in different regions, and as its intellectual and geographical terrain expands, there is a need to re-examine its foundational assumptions, theoretical paradigms, and interpretative praxes. What can we learn from established practices, and what new conceptual frameworks should we develop, to engage with the world’s increasingly diverse jurisprudences, literatures, and cultures? What, in short, might the study of world literature and law look like?
This collection maps the global turn in law and literature, foregrounds under-represented regions, and charts new directions for the twenty-first century. Featuring case studies from Argentina, China, India, Nigeria, and South Africa among others, contributors revisit jurisprudence and aesthetics; trace colonial genealogies of policing and borders; interrogate sexuality, gender and reproduction; and stage conversations between legal reasoning, narrative form and visual culture. Synthesising comparative, postcolonial and international perspectives, the volume surfaces fresh conceptual tools and agendas for research and teaching.
This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of law, literature, comparative literature, legal theory, socio-legal studies and postcolonial studies. The essays in this collection were first published in various issues of Law & Literature.
This Article recovers a case that has not been examined in the scholarly literature since the tribunal that decided it closed its doors in 1904: Samuel C. Caldwell, et al. v. Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, No. 44. Drawing on a previously unexamined 186-page case file held in the Melven Cornish Collection at the University of Oklahoma, the Article follows Samuel Caldwell’s Choctaw citizenship claim through all four of its lives — before the Dawes Commission in 1896, before the United States Court for the Central District of the Indian Territory in 1897 (first on a special master’s favorable report, then on a wholly reversed record after the Choctaw Nation alleged the suppression of a key witness’s testimony), and finally before the Choctaw and Chickasaw Citizenship Court in 1903–1904, a short-lived federal tribunal created by the Supplemental Agreement of 1902 to adjudicate exactly this kind of dispute. The case file offers an unusually granular look at how citizenship was actually litigated during the allotment era: competing and shifting ancestry claims within a single family, testimony estimating blood quantum by appearance alone, and a disputed marriage certificate with an allegedly forged notarial seal. Caldwell himself filed for Choctaw citizenship in 1896 and Mississippi Choctaw citizenship in 1901, even as testimony elsewhere in the record described him asserting Cherokee ancestry and a rival branch of his wife’s family pursuing a separate, never-completed Cherokee claim of its own. The Article situates Caldwell’s case within the broader institutional history of the Citizenship Court’s unusual two-track jurisdiction — original jurisdiction over the tribes’ own representative suits, and appellate jurisdiction over individual claimants’ appeals — and within the vocabulary the Nations themselves used for claimants like Caldwell: not citizens, but “court citizens,” people whose standing rested on a tribunal’s say-so rather than the Nation’s own recognition.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
Congress makes laws necessary and proper to carry the powers of the executive and judiciary into execution—so says the “horizontal” Necessary and Proper Clause. Does this make Congress a mere servant to the other branches, one that helps them, from time to time, in the exercise of their own independent powers? Or does it make Congress the ultimate judge of how far those powers extend? Fifty years ago, William Van Alstyne argued for the latter, more robust reading, but his historical support was thin, and today his work is largely forgotten. This Article uncovers overlooked historical evidence for Van Alstyne's forgotten reading in the writings of two jurists who influenced the framing generation: the seventeenth-century parliamentarian Henry Parker, whose arguments seeded a century of Whig constitutionalism, and the eighteenth-century Whig lawyer Roger Acherley, author of one of the more influential works of colonial-era constitutional theory. Both wrote in response to the infamous Ship Money Case. There, the crown had claimed its prerogative power to defend the nation travelled with unreviewable “incidental” powers, or powers “necessary” to the prerogative’s “execution.” In writings separated by a century, Parker and Acherley countered that Parliament must define and authorize royal incidental powers. Their ideas circulated widely in the colonies and shaped major framing-era thinkers. This Whig tradition on incidental powers has striking parallels with Van Alstyne's checks-and-balances reading of the Clause. At a minimum, recovering that tradition ought to restore his reading as an important candidate for originalist construction. The Article closes by considering how this might inform debates ranging from the tariff challenge in Learning Resources v. Trump to criticism of the Presidential Records Act.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
From Rachel Benharrousse, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Public Law and Governance, Tilburg Law School
We are pleased to announce that the submission deadline for our roundtable on Law and Literature in International Economic Law has been extended to 17 September. We warmly invite scholars working at the intersection of law, literature, and the humanities to submit an abstract.
This roundtable is part of two connected events taking place at Tilburg Law School this November:
5 November Roundtable: Law and Literature in International Economic Law
This roundtable offers a space to experiment with literary methodologies in trade, investment, migration, and business and human rights. We welcome contributions that move beyond conventional legal analysis to explore what discourse, metaphor, and narrative can reveal about the injustices embedded in global economic frameworks. We are particularly interested in work that treats literary and narrative methods not as illustrative add-ons, but as genuine tools of legal and critical inquiry.6 November Law & Literature Consortium Seminar
This seminar is a collegial and non-hierarchical gathering of scholars from Dutch and Belgian universities, offering a low-stakes setting to share work that is still evolving and open to challenge. Early-career researchers are especially encouraged to participate.Key dates and submission details:
· Roundtable abstracts (max. 400 words): due 17 September (extended deadline)
· Consortium abstracts: due 1 October, reviewed on a rolling basis
· Submissions for both events: lawandlit@tilburguniversity.edu
Limited travel funding is available for participants, and childcare or other facilitations can be arranged upon request; please do not let logistical concerns discourage you from applying.
The full calls for papers, including further details on themes and format, are available here.
Facebook's adoption of Meta has moved the metaverse from specialist discussion into mainstream legal debate. Yet the term still describes a loose family of virtual environments rather than a settled juridical object. Some worlds depend on conventional platform infrastructure; others place selected assets or governance functions on public blockchains. This article argues that legal analysis should begin with the institutional architecture through which a virtual world is operated. It develops the idea of a governance stack to identify the contractual rules, software systems, token arrangements, decision-making bodies and public law that together determine a participant's position. The analysis then turns to virtual property, non-fungible tokens, intellectual property, immersive data and cross-border remedies. Decentraland, The Sandbox, Cryptovoxels and Horizon Worlds show that claims of decentralisation can conceal very different allocations of power. The legal task is therefore to identify what the user actually acquires, who can alter that position, and which body of law supplies an enforceable remedy.Download the essay from SSRN at the link.
There is a familiar intellectual line that starts with Jeremy Bentham and ends with contemporary legal positivism. But Bentham also has a good claim to being a founding figure of two other jurisprudential traditions, naturalistic jurisprudence (and within it, law and economics) and realist-critical jurisprudence. This may seem surprising as these three approaches are often seen as antagonistic. At the same time, this may suggest a possible way to reconciling these approaches: if Bentham could be analytic, naturalistic, and critical at the same time, why can't we? In turn, this may suggest that the opposition between these different approaches could be explained away as the result of superficial differences or misunderstandings, and as such as path to reconciliation between these intellectual traditions. Unfortunately, I argue that the source of disagreement is different. It has to do with something that critical jurisprudents got right, and that most analytical jurisprudents got wrong: jurisprudence is political. I argue that at the foundation of analytic jurisprudence has been a commitment to political liberalism, a political stance that most proponents of critical jurisprudents have rejected. If I am right, reconciling the jurisprudential approaches will prove as easy as resolving this political divide.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
Roger Williams occupies an exceptional position in the constitutional genealogy of religious liberty. His defence of liberty of conscience was neither a limited plea for indulgence toward dissenters nor a simple extension of toleration within an established confessional order. It rested on a more radical proposition: civil government and religious authority possess different ends, different instruments and different jurisdictions. Because faith cannot be produced by coercion, and because the civil magistrate is entrusted with the preservation of civil peace rather than the salvation of souls, governmental force cannot legitimately be used to impose religious uniformity. Williams therefore developed an argument that joined theological premises to a recognisably constitutional theory of limited public power. This study examines Williams as a legal and constitutional thinker. It places The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience of 1644 within the political and religious conflicts of seventeenth-century England and New England; analyses his distinction between civil and spiritual jurisdiction; reconstructs his conception of liberty of conscience; and assesses the institutional experiment of Providence and Rhode Island. Particular attention is given to the 1663 Rhode Island Royal Charter and to the later American constitutional tradition. The study also considers the relationship between Williams, John Locke and subsequent First Amendment doctrine. The central argument is that Williams contributed something conceptually distinct to the history of religious freedom: not merely toleration by a dominant authority, but a jurisdictional separation designed simultaneously to protect conscience from government and religion from political corruption.Download the essay from SSRN at the link.
The American Declaration of Independence and Revolution are linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and its Revolution through the mutual, strong influences of the Enlightenment philosophes whom both the American Founding Fathers and the French revolutionaries read. They also were linked through acquaintance and ongoing communication, with the American Declaration serving as a model for the first, but not final, draft of the French one. Both Declarations and Revolutions were to follow divergent paths through time, however, a cause for great concern in nineteenth-century France when intellectuals such as Laboulaye, Tocqueville and Taine, fearful for France’s future in yet another new régime, looked to America’s foundational documents and governmental system to uncover the secrets of America’s stability and of France’s failure to safeguard the principles of 1789. This article proposes that the answers were far less to be found in the U.S. documents or bicameral legislative structure than in a comparative, contextual examination of the two societies, their populations and their political histories. Those were the differences which led France to sink into a Reign of Terror within a few years of its Revolution and to proceed to seesaw among various forms of government thereafter, while the United States was able to enjoy a single Constitution and general political stability. The aims of each Revolution differed, as did the consequences of those differences, including how each nation perceived and dealt with freedom of religion, the abolition of slavery and the struggle for women’s equality. In France, the Revolution was intended to achieve a total rupture with the past, but France unwittingly fell prey to its past, as the absolutist tradition of the monarchy permeated its ranks in new ways, transforming egalitarianism into repression. In America, the colonists’ chief complaint had been their lack of representation in the British Parliament, not a wish to change a constitutional form of government which allowed for freedom of representation and had a king who bowed to the will of Parliament. After the American Revolution, the French looked to the new country overseas, often both idealizing and distorting it, with a view to how it could be a model for a new France. The two nations had a common point of departure in the literature of the philosophes which had deeply inspired and captured the imagination of the American Founding Fathers and the French revolutionary thinkers alike. Even a written text, however, is interpretive, such that the texts themselves were a function of what they meant to their readers. Some have thought that the Founding Fathers understood Montesquieu’s intentions better than the French. This article hopes to illuminate twists and turns from a shared point of departure, and to address ongoing debates concerning their nature.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
The Enlightenment transformed the relationship between religion, nature and law. Nature ceased to function solely as an object of theological explanation and increasingly became a normative vocabulary through which political authority, rights and religious belief could be assessed. The appeal to nature took several distinct forms. Natural law provided a standard superior to positive command; natural rights located fundamental entitlements in the person prior to the state; natural religion sought religious truth accessible to reason independently of ecclesiastical revelation; and the scientific image of an ordered universe encouraged the idea that public reason could distinguish civil interests from theological claims. This study examines the legal significance of that transformation. It argues that the Enlightenment did not simply replace religion with secularism. Rather, it reorganised the relation among religion, nature and political authority. Locke used natural rights and limited government to restrict the magistrate's religious competence. Spinoza naturalised biblical interpretation and defended the freedom to philosophise. Voltaire connected natural reason with toleration and criticism of confessional persecution. Rousseau converted religion into a constitutional problem through the category of civil religion. Hume destabilised rational proofs of natural theology and thereby weakened claims to public coercion based upon metaphysical certainty. Kant relocated religion within the limits of reason and moral autonomy. These intellectual movements contributed to a legal transition from confessional government to constitutional freedom of conscience. The study further considers the constitutional crystallisation of this transition in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, with its reference to the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God, and in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, which proclaims natural and inalienable rights while expressly protecting religious opinions. It concludes by analysing the continuing relevance of the Enlightenment synthesis for contemporary freedom of thought, conscience and religion under international and European human-rights law.Download the article from SSRN at the link.
The setting for a murder that took place in the early days of the New South Wales penal colony in Australia was the regional town of Agnes Banks. Beginning with an outline of the transported convicts William Williams from England in 1798 and Julia Leahy from Ireland, the paper follows the life of their daughter, Mary Ann, who married the unrelated Robert Williams in 1840, who had the distinction of having all four grandparents as convicts. Some forty years later, in 1881, the now mentally challenged Robert was charged with murdering a neighbour, William Freeman, and was committed to an insane asylum where he remained for the rest of his life. The research reflected in this paper shows that there were numerous flaws in the prosecution's case, which was treated as open and shut. Robert had pleaded not guilty, and there was every chance he was correct. This paper examines the lead-up to the trial and the questions that should have been asked to avoid a possible miscarriage of justice.Download the essay from SSRN at the link.
The article takes as its starting point the debate between Justices Scalia and Stevens in their respective Citizens United opinions. The subject of that debate was colonial and post-revolutionary society, and thereby the Framers’, opinion about corporations. Scalia wrote his concurrence in response to the portion of Justice Stevens’ dissent that argued the Framer’s did not trust corporations. A problem, for a historian, of Scalia’s and Stevens’ opinions is that they did not cite any statement by the Framers of the Constitution. All instead relying on the opinions of historians. Neither Justices provided any document actually written by the Framers in support of their position. Were this testimony in a trial, such would amount to hearsay. Such hearsay would be necessary if such statements were lost to antiquity. But those statements DO exist. The National Archives has collected a vast repository of the writings of many of the Founders, including those at the Constitutional Convention. And since 2009, those writings have been entered into a vast database: Founders Online. So I decided to research those writings for mentions of the British East India Company and then report what was said in a tidy little article. The hypothesis guiding my research is that leading figures of the convention 1) knew about corporations; 2) considered corporations a threat to republican government and its underlying philosophy of popular sovereignty; and therefore 3) wrote the guarantee clause in broad language so the federal government might address any threat to a republican form of government, including corporations. Based on the above, I argue that the Guarantee Clause grants Congress and, indirectly, state legislatures independent authority to regulate corporations’ participation in elections through political donations. This does not mean that campaign finance regulation should be shielded from by the political question doctrine central to Guarantee Clause jurisprudence: courts should continue to reach the merits of any First Amendment issues. But in deciding those issues, courts should take into account the Framers’ concerns and purposes for the Guarantee Clause in reaching and justifying a decision.Dowload the article from SSRN at the link.
From the American Journal of Legal History:
Special Issues: Call for Proposals for 2027
The American Journal of Legal History is a well-established, quarterly publication covering all facets and periods of legal history. We are now accepting Special Issue proposals for 2027.
Deadline: November 30th, 2026
A Special Issue is a peer-reviewed collection of articles centred on a specific theme. Ideally, the theme should focus on a new or distinctive area of inquiry that has not been sufficiently explored in previous AJLH work, holds broad relevance, and aligns with the Journal's aims and scope. This provides an opportunity to collectively explore a new topic, potentially developing insightful new lines of research and practice through interdisciplinary dialogue.
More information here.
