About Us

The Legal Scholarship Blog features law-related Calls for Papers, Conferences, and Workshops as well as general legal scholarship resources. If you would like to have an event posted, contact us at

legalscholarshipblog@gmail.com

Our goal is to facilitate the legal academy’s development and dissemination of scholarship, and so we do not post events such as Continuing Legal Education programs or regional bar association meetings. We also don’t post events aimed only at students.

Created in 2007, the Legal Scholarship Blog is a free, non-profit service managed by librarians at these U.S. law schools:

 

Ways to Use the Legal Scholarship Blog

This site can help you keep up with what’s going on in legal scholarship.

Read about new conferences, workshops, and calls for papers as they are posted.

  • You can simply visit the site from time to time. The newest posts are always up front.
  • You can subscribe by email and have new posts sent to your inbox. Just type your address in the box below the “About Us” paragraph in the sidebar.
  • You can include Legal Scholarship Blog in your feed reader. In the sidebar, scroll down past Upcoming Events, Categories, Pages, and Archives. The RSS links are under Meta.
  • Follow us on Twitter (@LegalScholBlog).

Look for conferences, workshops, and calls for papers in your field.

  • Use the category list in the sidebar. Click on a category to see the most recent posts.
  • Use the search box.You can search for:
    • terms (“globalization,” “class action”),
    • places (“london,” “san diego”),
    • institutions (“valparaiso,” “yale”), or
    • people (“guinier,” “reva siegel”).

Use the calendar.

  • Looking for a conference for next spring?
  • Want to scan for upcoming deadlines for calls for papers?

Use our resource pages.

We have resource pages listing colloquium series and law review companions and offering information about grants and empirical legal studies.

Publicize your conferences, workshops, and symposiums.

Email legalscholarshipblog@gmail.com.


 

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I get my event or call for papers listed?

Send an announcement to legalscholarshipblog@gmail.com. If you have a web page for your event or call for papers, please send us the URL. When we give our readers a link, they can always have access to current information about your event as you post it. If you have a colloquium or workshop series, you can send us a link to your calendar or a list of speakers for the semester all at once.

How do you find the events you post?

Our favorite way is for the organizers to send us an announcement. We also learn about conferences and calls for papers by searching blogs and by visiting law school and organization websites. Obviously, it is much more efficient to start with an announcement.

What do you consider to be Colloquia, Workshops, or Lectures?

Many law schools have series of workshops or colloquia where a professor (from within the school or from elsewhere) gives a presentation to a group of faculty members. This is often a way for authors to get feedback on drafts they are preparing.  The presentations and discussions tend to be about an hour or hour and a half. These presentations are included in this column. (Sometimes an event will be called a “workshop” or a “colloquium” but lasts a day or more and invites people from outside the institution. We treat events like that as conferences, no matter what their names are.)

Lectures are presentations to a larger group—say, an auditorium rather than a seminar room of people. We include lectures that invite people from outside the law school, including professionals. We do not include lectures that are aimed primarily at law students (e.g., about career planning).

Colloquia, workshops, and lectures are listed together on the date they occur. The idea is that readers of the blog are interested in them—they’re curious about who is delivering a paper on what topic—but they won’t travel across the country to attend.

What do you label as Conferences?

“Conferences” in our listing are events that last a day or longer, open to participants from outside the host institution. The editors might call an event a “forum,” “workshop,” “summit,” “meeting,” or “symposium”—but if it’s a day or longer, we treat it as a conference. In our editorial discretion, we sometimes list events that last about half a day. Our primary audience is professors. We do not include continuing legal education programs aimed only at practicing lawyers. However, we do include conferences we believe will appeal to both academics and practitioners.

What are Calls for Papers?

Calls for papers are announcements from journals, event organizers, or book editors that they are seeking submissions, generally on a specific topic. We include here calls for panel proposals that might not result in published papers.

If you think you might submit a paper, please read the call for papers carefully. Sometimes the organizers want only abstracts by the deadline, and sometimes they want the full papers.

What are in your Other Scholarly Opportunities category?

“Other Scholarly Opportunities” includes grants, fellowships, editorships, prizes, or other opportunities that might interest our readers.

When do you post announcements?

We post conferences, calls for papers, and other scholarly opportunities when we find them. Because of our workflow (maintaining the Legal Scholarship Blog is just one of our many job duties) we might not post an announcement until a week or two after we receive it. Our hope is to post these notices in time for our readers to plan ahead—to submit paper proposals, to make travel plans, and so on. The sooner you send us announcements, the sooner we can post.

I sent in an announcement but my event hasn’’t been listed yet. What gives?

If your event is a colloquium or lecture—something that just lasts an hour or two, it will be listed on the day of the event. If that day has arrived, and you don’t see your event, please send us a reminder: We list conferences and calls for papers as we learn about them. Because of workflow issues (and our day jobs), we might not get to your announcement for several days. If it has been more than a week, feel free to send us a reminder: legalscholarshipblog@gmail.com.

What deadlines do you include for calls for papers?

Some calls for papers present a series of dates: e.g., abstracts due on March 1, authors of accepted papers notified on March 15, drafts due April 30, conference presentation June 15, edited papers due Aug. 30.  We only list the first date as a deadline. If our readers are interested in submitting, the key date is the first one—beyond that, they can add the other dates to their own calendars and to-do lists.

Is the Legal Scholarship Blog American or global?

The blog’s providers are U.S. law schools. When we began the blog, we envisioned it serving primarily U.S. law professors. But U.S. law professors participate in conferences and write for journals around the world, so we have always carried some announcements of events and calls for papers from abroad. And many of the blog’s users are from outside the United States. Our North American emphasis shows in several ways:

  1. We only list colloquia, workshops, and lectures from U.S. and Canadian law schools.
  2. We are more selective in our listing of foreign events than we are for U.S. and Canadian events. For example, we are unlikely to list a Dutch or Indian conference that is aimed only at Dutch or Indian scholars; we will list conferences in the Netherlands or India if they are aimed at international audiences.
  3. Our list of faculty blogs only includes those from U.S. and Canadian law professors.
  4. Our list of online law review companions only includes U.S. and Canadian journals.
  5. We only post announcements in English.

Is the Legal Scholarship Blog just for law professors?

No. It is for anyone interested in the academic study of law. Many of our readers are from related disciplines that study law—e.g., economics, political science, philosophy, sociology. Some of our readers are not yet professors, but hope to be one day. The Legal Scholarship Blog can be useful for law students, too. For instance, students can get ideas for paper topics and journal editors can advertise their symposiums and calls for papers.

Where are the scholarships? I want a scholarship to go to law school.

This site supports scholarship in the sense of writing and presentations by scholars, not in the sense of financial aid. If you are planning to attend law school in the United States, we recommend the Law School Admissions Council’s pages on Financing Law School.

last updated: May 22, 2017