Graduate Law Students' Association Annual Conference
May 21-22, 2010
Osgoode Professional Development Centre, Toronto, Canada
CALL FOR PAPERS (DEADLINE FEBRUARY 15, 2010)

“BEYOND LAW”

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Francisco Valdes, University of Miami School of Law

The Graduate Law Students’ Association (GLSA) of Osgoode Hall Law School is pleased to invite graduate students and junior faculty to submit abstracts to its annual academic conference. Hosted in Toronto, Canada from May 21-22, 2010, this year’s theme – ‘Beyond Law’ – welcomes applications from a variety of perspectives and disciplines.

‘Beyond Law’ aims to consider law from multiple viewpoints, foregrounding the importance of legal pluralism as well as interdisciplinary work. We invite scholars to move beyond the courtroom, the legislature and the law office to discuss the relevance of law in society. Intersections such as law & geography; law & literature; law & philosophy; law & religion; and law & history are now familiar means of bringing legal theory into discussion with other fields. Yet the division between such disciplinary boundaries is porous, and rigid categorizations of knowledge depend on borders that will not hold. ‘Beyond Law’ asks us to conceptualize these intersectional fields as critical junctures between diverging and converging planes of inquiry, discipline and scholarship. We encourage scholars to engage with law as a reflective and contextual domain, and to think about how law is affected, effected and molded by external factors including sexuality, gender, race, health, the environment, economics and poverty.

We do not, however, wish to lose sight of how formal legal scholarship is itself grappling with issues of boundary, regulation and limit. Papers that sharpen the social relevance of critical theorizing from within the legal academy are strongly invited, with suggested topics to include: alternative dispute resolution, transnational law, criminal law, corporate law, environmental law, constitutional law, work law, Aboriginal law, immigration & refugee law, family law, tax law and intellectual & cultural property. Scholars are invited to think about questions such as, Does the limit of formal law affect how we think, research and write as legal scholars? What do lawyers, trained in the formal law, bring to inquiries outside the state’s halls? What, if anything, can lawyers gain from adopting an interdisciplinary strategy? Finally, we may wish to look ‘Beyond Law’ at the future of legal theory. How is law racing to catch up with evolving technologies, frameworks and realities? What continues to operate beyond the law and what is being brought into law’s ambit? Where will law take us within the local, national and transnational? And where do we want it to?