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 2027 annual meeting will be held at the University of California, Berkeley from May 27-28. Our call for papers and submissions guidelines can be found below:

Discipline

As both noun and a verb, “discipline” is one of many provocative cognates across law and humanistic fields of study. The word simultaneously suggests punishment, intellectual tradition, ritual, practice, refinement, and improvement. Each of these meanings of “discipline,” while varying widely in their applications, maintains a shared command of subordination: subordination of knowledge traditions to their larger structures; subordination of the criminal to the state; subordination of the individual to a higher purpose.

Is discipline, then, a problem, or a solution (or something else altogether)? Is discipline too mired in logics of authority and punishment to be redeemed? Is it a useful point of friction that can be leveraged, innovated, and adapted to expand both legal and humanistic frameworks? What does it mean to produce knowledge from within structures that use discipline as their organizing logic, and who or what is erased, illegible, or silent as a result? What logics and structures of discipline underwrite specific areas of law and legal history, whether in criminal or civil law? How is law in the process of defining or redefining punishment and carcerality? How do works of art and literature take up these questions or theorize discipline themselves? By treating discipline as a starting point for inquiry, this conference invites submissions that explore discipline from any angle. In addition to the concepts and questions outlined above, papers and panelists might consider how scholars in recent years have applied pressure to the concepts of discipline and disciplinarity. On one hand, scholars are tasked with developing projects that are “interdisciplinary,” a feature thought to produce innovation, but one that often poses challenges of institutional legibility and support. How does disciplinarity promote or inhibit the future of the humanities, particularly in relation to law and legal studies? What are the future possibilities for interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and antidisciplinarity? As a community of scholars and practitioners working across and between disciplines, LCH is uniquely poised to think about these problems and potentials of discipline.

Submission Guidelines

We encourage the submission of fully constituted panels, as well as panels that reimagine or experiment with models for academic presentation, including for example roundtables, “author meets reader” sessions (which may include multiple books and their authors in conversation), works-in-progress sessions, workshop-format sessions that engage participants in shared thinking or other productive co-creation, multi-panel streams, etc. Panels should include at least three, ideally four, papers/presenters. Please specify a title and designate a chair for all panel proposals (the panel chair may also be a panel presenter). It is not necessary to write an abstract or proposal for the panel itself. However, all individual proposals should include a title and abstract of no more than 250 words.

For pre-constituted panels, roundtables, or streams, all participants must complete an individual submission on the registration site. Please ensure that each individual participant includes the name of the panel and the chair in their individual submission. We also ask that registrants identify two to three keywords to help us align sessions with each other.

Mode

The twenty-ninth annual conference will emphasize the LCH tradition of in-person conversation. While we encourage participants to join us in Berkeley, 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.

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 Program 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 Program Coordinators, Aditya Banerjee (adityabanerjee@g.harvard.edu) and Jack Quirk (john_quirk@brown.edu) with “LCH panel” in the subject line. The Program 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 Program 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, 2027.

Contact Information

Please email lch@lawculturehumanities.com with any queries.