Every year, the Association holds it annual conference, usually a two-day affair, as well as a graduate student workshop, usually held the day before the annual conference. The 2026 annual meeting will be held at the DePaul University College of Law from June 17-18th. Our call for papers and submissions guidelines can be found below:

Uprooted Law: Reflecting on the Origins and Outgrowths of Law

What do we follow when we follow the law? Is law what is on the books, or what is observed, or what should be observed? The English term “law” descends from the plural form of the Old Norse “lag,” designating “things laid down or fixed.” Yet law must be flexible enough to adjust and respond to changes. Particularly today, when the line between legal norms and norms rooted elsewhere has blurred, it is difficult to determine law’s location. What is law’s function in times of technological, political, and societal change? Does the law have a responsibility toward itself, and if so, who can be trusted with its observation? Given that law borrows from other areas of culture, from literature and rhetoric to the sciences and dramatic arts, the humanities are in a premier position to respond to these questions.

This conference invites reflections on the origins of law in the broadest sense. What substantiates the rule of law in practice, and how does law itself mediate the difference between original and copy, present and past? How do an ensemble of methods, disciplines, movements, texts, and technologies come together to help law create the past and future? We invite reflections on these and related questions and welcome papers, roundtables, and work-in-progress sessions that help us understand law’s current position by looking at it through a humanistic lens.

Submission Guidelines

We encourage the submission of fully constituted panels, as well as panels that reimagine or experiment with models for academic presentation, such as roundtables, “author meets reader” sessions (which may include multiple books and their authors in conversation), works-in-progress sessions, workshop-format panels that focus on engaging participants in shared thinking or other kinds of productive co-creation, multi-panel streams, etc. Individual proposals should include a title and an abstract of no more than 250 words.

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 each individual participant provides 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. When submitting a proposal, we also ask that registrants identify two to three keywords to help us align sessions with each other.

Mode

The twenty-eighth annual conference will emphasize the LCH tradition of in-person conversation. While we encourage participants to join us in Chicago, we recognize that in-person attendance may be prohibitive for some. To that end, we will also accept the submission of virtual panels and papers.

Since we will not be providing technical support for virtual participants, panel chairs will be responsible for providing Zoom links that will be listed in the program. All plenary sessions will be available streaming online as well as in person.

Creating a Panel: Our Program Archive and Graduate Coordinators

While participants may submit individual paper proposals that the Program Committee will later combine into full panels, we strongly encourage applicants to create full panels prior to submission. Pre-formed panels may cohere better, and allow collaborators to craft focused scholarly exchanges. Panels comprising a diversity of institutions, academic ranks, disciplines, and identities are often the most rewarding.

If you would like support in finding others who might be interested in forming a panel, have a look at our archive of past conference programs, which can be found here. Our recent programs may contain the names of scholars working in fields related to your research. Reaching out to scholars who have previously presented at LCH about creating a panel can be a good place to start. For additional assistance, please feel free to contact our Graduate Coordinators, Aditya Banerjee (adityabanerjee@g.harvard.edu) and Jack Quirk (john_quirk@brown.edu) with “LCH panel” in the subject line. The Graduate Coordinators will act as intermediaries, and may be able to put you in contact with others working on related topics. Please contact them well before the submission deadline, to allow time for follow-up.

We especially encourage graduate students and those new to LCH to consider reaching out to the Graduate Coordinators if they’re struggling to identify potential co-panelists.

How to Submit

Submissions should be made through the following link:

Submission Deadline

The deadline for all conference submissions is January 31, 2026.

Contact Information

Please email lch@lawculturehumanities.com with any queries.