We are pleased to announce that the Twenty-Fourth Meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities will be held at Emory University School of Law, June 16-17, 2022.

We welcome humanities-oriented proposals on topics broadly related to law and legal studies. In addition, our theme this year is:

Unsettling Law

Law often resides in the pull between what is settled and what is not. Precedent guides us until it does not. Law’s stability is in constant conversation with its own necessary responsiveness as well as with what troubles it from outside of legal institutions. Disobediences, whether civil or not, have the power to unsettle what is taken to be settled. And forces like climate change pose challenges to settled law by destabilizing what may make obedience and order possible at all. Law continually expands the range of persons it recognizes, for better or worse, while it claims across all changes that it serves the interests of all. Borders exclude but remain permeable, and we argue about what is owed to others regardless of their citizenship status. States claim sovereignty and face refusals from other sovereignties within their borders. Even settler colonialism is a process rather than an outcome, so what is settled and what remains open to different futures may be contested. How do and should we imagine law in these unsettled times? What creative forces might we bring to bear in these moments between past and future, whether for unsettling what ought to change or stabilizing what is endangered? How might different disciplines, methodologies, arts, literatures, and technologies represent, reinforce, or resist unsettling law? We invite proposals taking up that question from a variety of humanities-oriented perspectives.

The conference will emphasize the ASLCH tradition of in-person conversation while making some panels available for those who wish to participate virtually. Rather than hosting hybrid panels, there will be one full session dedicated to online panels each day of the conference. Virtual attendees can view these, and there will be public viewing rooms at the conference so that attendees can engage in conversation with each other and the virtual panelists. We will also host three plenary sessions that will be available in person as well as streaming online. Some of the in-person panels will be streamed during the sessions that aren’t online-dedicated.

All proposals are due Friday, 11 March, 2022 at midnight (Eastern Standard Time).

This portal allows you to submit a paper or panel proposal. There is no charge to submit a proposal (although the website presents the process as a ticket purchase).

Submission instructions: Individual proposals should include a title and an abstract of no more than 250 words, along with 2 keywords from the list below. We also welcome proposals for panels, roundtables, and streams (two panels on one theme). Please note that online presenters should organize a full panel (we will not be accepting individual papers for online presentation this year) and that, though we traditionally accept most papers, we may need to limit the number of online panels we accept, depending on demand. Panels, whether virtual or in-person, should include three papers (or, exceptionally, four papers). Please specify a title and designate a chair for your panel. The panel chair may also be a panel presenter. It is not necessary to write an abstract or proposal for the panel itself. To indicate your pre-constituted panel, roundtable, or stream, please ensure that individual registrants provide the name of the panel and the chair in their individual submissions on the registration site. All panel, roundtable, or stream participants must make an individual submission on the registration site. We also ask that registrants pick two keywords to help us align sessions with each other.

2021 ASLCH Annual Meeting Proposal Submission