We learned of the call for papers for the British Legal History Conference 2022
LAW AND CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE
Abstracts
are invited for the 25th BRITISH LEGAL HISTORY CONFERENCE which is being run jointly
with the Irish Legal History Society and hosted by Queen’s University Belfast, on
Wednesday 6 July – Saturday 9 July 2022.
The
conference was originally scheduled for 2021. Queen’s, Belfast, was given the
honour of hosting the BLHC in 2021, because it is a significant year in the
“Decade of Centenaries”[1]
in Ireland, north and south, marking both the centenary of the opening in June
1921 of the Parliament of Northern Ireland, established under the Government of
Ireland Act 1920, and the centenary of the signing of articles of agreement for
the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, leading to the establishment of the
Irish Free State. The conference theme, “Law and Constitutional
Change”, was chosen against this background.
The Covid-19 pandemic intervened, making postponement unavoidable.
Organising
the conference in 2022 will, however, allow us to celebrate the half-centenary
of the British Legal History Conference, first held in Aberystwyth in 1972. Our hope is that attendance at the conference
can be in person, but this will be kept under review and, if necessary, the
option of online attendance/participation will be considered.
Conference
papers can examine from any historical perspective the relationship between law
and constitutional change. The difficulty of defining constitutional change was noted by the Select Committee on the
Constitution in their report, The Process
of Constitutional Change (HL Paper 177, 2011, para. 10), but they
identified several examples, without being exhaustive: parliamentary
sovereignty; the rule of law and the rights and liberties of the individual;
the union state; representative government; and state membership of
international organisations, such as (then) the EU and the Commonwealth. These are, of course, only examples and the
conference theme will be interpreted in all its breadth.
In
the context of present-day analysis of the political and constitutional
upheavals in British-Irish relations in the early 1920s, the President of
Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, has adopted the Irish word, Machnamh, meaning reflection, contemplation, meditation and thought,
for a series of online reflections – https://president.ie/en/diary/details/president-hosts-machnamh-100-event In the spirit of Machnamh, we invite you to join the
conversation on law and constitutional change in Queen’s, Belfast, in July
2022.
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Please
note the following rules:
-
If you submitted an abstract in 2020, you
must make a fresh submission.
-
Abstracts must be for individual papers only,
not for panels. Co-authored papers are acceptable.
-
Only one abstract should be submitted per
person.
-
Abstracts must be submitted as Microsoft Word
documents using the online portal on the Call for Papers page of the conference
website. Please do not submit by email.
-
Abstracts must not exceed 500 words.
-
Please indicate if your proposal is
contingent on the availability of an option of online participation.
-
The deadline for submission of abstracts is Monday
30 August 2021.
-
Queries
can be emailed to BLHC-2022-info@qub.ac.uk
-
At the conference, individual oral
presentations will last 15-20 minutes.
We
hope to publish the programme on the conference website in October 2021. Details of plenary speakers will also appear
there in due course.
Proposals
from postgraduate and early career researchers are welcome.
Further
information about travel to Belfast, accommodation, and so on, will be added to
the conference website during 2021-2022: https://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/BLH-Conference-2022/
Poster competition
This,
the second joint BLHC - ILHS conference, was proposed by Sir Anthony Hart, retired
High Court judge, former president of ILHS and enthusiastic supporter of BLHCs,
who died suddenly in July 2019. A poster
competition is planned during the 2022 conference as a tribute to Tony. There will be two prizes, including one for
the PGR/early career category. The prizes are generously funded by the Journal of Legal History and by the
Irish Legal History Society. Details of
the competition will be posted on the conference website.
[1] See https://www.decadeofcentenaries.com, a website sponsored by
the Irish Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, and other websites
linked to it.
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