CFP from the Law & History CRN of the Law & Society Association

A call for panels and panelists in legal history at the 2015 meeting of the LSA to be held in Seattle in May.

Greetings from the LSA’s Law & History CRN. The next LSA meeting will be held May 28-31, 2015 in Seattle (http://www.lawandsociety.org/aboutmeetings.html). The theme of the 2015 LSA annual meeting has been announced (see below); the website for submissions will open August 18, and the deadline for submissions will be October 15.

There are now more than 250 members of this Google Group, from all over the world, and we encourage you to use this resource to organize panels for this year’s LSA meeting. There are a few ways to do this: 

If you have a complete panel and would like to have it listed as a CRN-sponsored panel (so that people looking for legal history panels can find it more easily), please let us know. 

If you have an idea for a panel and want to find some like-minded folks, or want to complete an existing panel, feel free to send an email to the group. 

Finally, we (the organizers) are also happy to put panels together from papers; feel free to send us your paper submissions and we will attempt to create panels from the papers we receive. Please send us your submission by October 1, so that we have time to do this; we will then be able to let you know in plenty of time if we cannot, so that you may submit your paper to LSA on your own. 

We look forward to hearing from you; please let me know if you have any questions.

Sincerely, 

Joanna Grisinger

Senior Continuing Lecturer 

Center for Legal Studies, Northwestern University

joanna.grisinger@northwestern.edu

Kimberly Welch

Assistant Professor  

Department of History, University of West Virginia 

Kimberly.Welch@mail.wvu.edu

Logan Sawyer

Assistant Professor

University of Georgia Law School

lesawyer@uga.edu

Kathryn Schumaker

Assistant Professor

Department of Classics and Letters, University of Oklahoma

schumaker@ou.edu

LSA 2015: Law’s Promise and Law's Pathos in the Global North and Global South

What has law accomplished in the Global North and Global South? Its champions have promised much—the spread of human rights and the rule of law, the elimination of discrimination and the protection of the vulnerable, the lure of economic development and the fostering of global trade, endowments of human dignity and restraints on economic rapacity. Its critics observe law as an instrument for repression, hegemonic control and infringements on privacy and intrusive surveillance (in the context of a never-ending and ubiquitous ‘war against terror’), as a weapon against free speech or political opposition, as a tool of economic exploitation and domination, and as a retreat from politics. The 2015 LSA annual meeting will engage law’s promises and law’s pathos in domestic and transnational contexts, through plenaries addressing the roles of law in the war on terror, in climate change, in emancipation and protection of the world’s most vulnerable populations, and in law’s relationships with religions.