Law and Society Association Annual Meeting—Minneapolis, MN

The Law and Society Association holds its annual meeting May 29—June 1, 2014. This year’s theme is Law and Inequalities: Global and Local.

Recent decades have seen the persistence and growth of powerful inequalities within and between groups and within and among nations. The 2014 program theme returns to a question central to the Association’s founding: the role of law and legal institutions in sustaining, creating, interrogating, and ameliorating inequalities. The 2014 Program invites participants to explore and consider three questions:

  • How can Law and Society scholarship contribute to unearthing and understanding inequalities?
  • How can Law and Society scholarship contribute to the critical interrogation of discourses of equality and inequality and help to reveal what is at stake in these concepts?
  • What impact can we expect these scholarly contributions to have on the persistence of these inequalities and on public discourse about them?

The submission deadline is Oct. 15, 2013.

New this year
Salons will make their debut at the 2014 meetings. Salons are more informal presentation settings in which 3 to 4 participants and a small interested audience are seated at a round tables in a ballroom. Salons permit focused, engaged and intimate conversation about scholars’ work. Those submitting proposals for individual papers may be asked if they are interested in participating in a Salon. This format is also appropriate for authors in the early stage of a project who anticipate that they may not have a completed paper ready before the meeting, but would like to discuss a Work in Progress.

New procedure for Author Meets Readers Sessions (AMR). Up to fifteen AMR Sessions will be selected from those submitted. Any law and society book published in the last two years is eligible for consideration. Submissions for AMR sessions will be reviewed and selected based upon their connection to law and society scholarship, importance to the field,and the range of readers who may be interested. The Program committee seeks a set of AMR panels that represents the depth and diversity of the Association by including global and international perspectives and a range of disciplines, regions, and presses.

New procedure for Collaborative Research Networks (CRN). CRNs will be asked to submit a block of panels. Each CRN may expect that a maximum of four panels will be scheduled non-concurrently, but CRNs are welcome to submit more panels. A CRN organizer is free to make the case for which panels should be scheduled concurrently and non-currently. The Program Committee will, however, have discretion to make final decisions, including, but not limited to, adding an open submission paper to a CRN panel, which will help connect new attendees to pertinent CRNs.

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