Every year, the Association holds it annual conference, usually a two-day affair, as well as a graduate student workshop, usually held on the day before the annual conference. The 2025 annual meeting will be held at Georgetown Law from June 17-18th. The theme of the conference, our call for papers, and submissions guidelines can be found below:

Speech Matters

We live in a golden or an iron age, depending on one’s point of view, for laws regulating speech. The COVID-19 pandemic forced governments around the world to reckon with floods of dis- and misinformation. The global rise of the far right has brought with it a need for new legal tools to combat threats, harassment, and hate speech. And in the United States, state and local governments have attempted to suppress speech by or about unpopular subjects through means ranging from book bans to felony prosecutions. For this year’s Law, Culture, and Humanities Annual Conference, we invite papers on how the law conceptualizes, regulates, commodifies, or instrumentalizes speech (broadly defined not just as language but as expressive activity). In particular, we welcome papers that use humanistic tools for making sense of speech and expression—concepts from rhetoric, narrative theory, aesthetics, genre studies, and more—to tackle new or persistent legal puzzles.

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 meet reader sessions (which may include multiple books and their authors in conversation), collaborative presentations, multi-panel streams, etc. Individual proposals should include a title and an abstract of no more than 250 words.

Please note that online presenters should organize a full panel (we will not be accepting individual papers for online presentations this year) and that, though we traditionally accept most papers, we may need to limit the number of online panels we accept, depending on demand. 

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 individual registrants provide 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 keywords to help us align sessions with each other.

Mode

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

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.

How to Submit?

Submissions may be made through the following link:

Creating a Panel: Contact Our Graduate Coordinators Early

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, please 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. 

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. Please contact them well before the submission deadline, to allow time for follow-up.

Submission Deadline

The deadline for all conference submissions is January 31, 2025.

Contact Information

Please email lch@lawculturehumanities.com with any queries.

If you have submitted a complete proposal and require a letter of invitation in order to secure a visa to attend the conference, we encourage you to contact us at lch@lawculturehumanities.com.