CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: Annual Meeting of the American Society for Legal History (Banff, 12-14 NOV 2026); DEALINE 24 MAR 2026

(image source: lawandhistoryreview)
 

The Program Committee of the American Society for Legal History invites proposals for the 2026 meeting to be held November 12-14 in Banff, Canada. Panels on any facet or period of legal history from anywhere in the world are welcome. We encourage thematic proposals that transcend traditional periodization and geography. The online portal will open in early January 2026. The deadline for Pre-Conference Symposia proposals is Friday, February 27, 2026. The deadline for all other submissions is Tuesday, March 24, 2026.

Panel proposals should include the following: a CV with complete contact information for each person on the panel, including chairs and commentators; 300-word (maximum) abstracts of individual papers; and a 300-word (maximum) description of the panel. Only complete panel proposals will be considered. All conference panel slots will be 90 minutes long.

Scholars looking to build a panel may post their potential paper topics here. We encourage individuals to peruse this spreadsheet to identify other scholars with common interests, beyond their familiar networks. Senior scholars who are willing to chair and/or comment on a panel may register their interest and availability here. All program participants must be current members of the Society by the date of the Annual Meeting. Information on how to build a successful panel can be found here. The Program Committee especially encourages panels that include participants from groups historically underrepresented in the organization, and that include participants who represent a diversity of rank, experience, and institutional affiliation.

Besides traditional panels featuring presentations of work in progress, the Program Committee welcomes other forms of structured presentation, such as a skills/pedagogical workshop (chair, 3-4 presenters) or a roundtable format (chair, 3-5 presenters).

In addition to the above formats, the Program Committee accepts proposals for the following three types of panels:

New Directions: The purpose of these panels will be to identify cutting-edge methodological and topical directions in legal history, to define new subfields, and/or generate dialogue among scholars whose recent books (published since 2023 or forthcoming) have tackled common historiographic questions. These panels may feature three to five authors of new books organized by theme, chronology, or methodology and may also include scholars writing review essays of a field, or others similarly positioned. For a panel featuring new books, the session abstract should include the author, title, publisher, and publication date for each proposed book. Please note that the Program Committee will devote only a very small number of sessions to this type of panel (likely 2-3) that are able to clearly develop broad analytical themes among the included monographs and that illuminate shifts in the “state of field” in a particular area rather than descriptions of the books themselves. The Program Committee will not accept proposals for “Author-Meets-Readers” panels for the 2026 meeting. Book authors are encouraged to apply for:  “Making Connections: New Works in Legal History.”

Poster Presentations: This year’s Annual Meeting will dedicate space during the conference for poster presentations on any aspect of legal history in the main conference common area. Participants in the poster presentations will also join in a “lightning round” panel session to introduce their projects. Individuals interested in participating in this session should submit a short description of their project (up to 300 words) as well as a CV. Accepted participants will be asked to submit a poster design to the organizers by early October. Posters will be printed onsite.

Graduate Lightning Round: In this session, 8-10 graduate students briefly introduce their projects and receive feedback and questions from the audience. Interested graduate students should submit their CV and an abstract of their paper. Note that given the large size of the panel, an individual presenter in this session has much less time to present their work than in a traditional panel with 3-4 presenters.

Read more here.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Workshop "To Write the Earth: Law, the Global, and Planetary World-Making" (Florence: EUI, 26-27 JUN 2026); DEADLINE 15 JAN 2026

Workshop—Call for Contributions   

To Write the Earth: Law, the Global, and Planetary World-Making 

Organising committee: Nikolas M. Rajkovic (Tilburg), Arnulf Becker Lorca (EUI), Tim Lindgren (EUI), Kalypso Nicolaïdis (EUI), Francisco-José Quintana (Edinburgh) & Sofia Ranchordas (Tilburg/LUISS) 

 

Cartography literally means “to write the earth.” If maps write rather than mirror the world, they function as world-making texts that narrate space, distribute authority, and normalize particular orders under the guise of spatial precision. Modern international law is deeply shaped by this cartographic inheritance: sovereignty, territory, and jurisdiction rest on a vision of the earth as a continuous surface partitioned into polygonal units under human control. That this image appears natural is itself a political achievement. It is a way of writing the world that has come to stand in for the planet itself. 

Yet this anthropocentric world-writing is neither exclusive nor inevitable. Many other modes of composing the earth exist and have persisted across time: indigenous cosmologies, ecological and multispecies ontologies, oceanic and atmospheric imaginaries, logistical and digital infrastructures, climate and earth-system models. These do not merely represent different geographies; they articulate distinct assumptions about agency, relation, obligation, and the grounds of authority. The challenge is not simply to add the non-human or other-thanhuman to existing legal frameworks, but to recognize that the very scale and composition of the world shift when humans are no longer presumed to be its sole authors and agents. 

As climatic destabilization intensifies, the language of the “planetary” has emerged as a conceptual alternative to the “global”, which had itself emerged as an alternative to the “international”. Yet these semantic shifts remains superficial if they do not grapple with the deeper conceptual question: How is the earth written, by whom, and to what ends? And how is it written through law? What, precisely, distinguishes the planetary, the global, and the international—and how might these distinctions matter for legal thought and practice? What does it mean to think of the planetary as something other than the global enlarged? How does “planetary law” depart or intersect with other naming projects such as “global law” and “transnational law”? And what forms of law and authority become possible when the earth is understood as a site of multiple and contested writings? Attending to these shifting modes of earth-writing also requires attention to legal and other expert crafts. Planetary and global projects are made and remade through the expert practices of drafting, interpreting, standard-setting, contracting, modelling, litigating, and enforcing. Asking how the earth is written therefore also means asking who writes these norms, in which institutional sites, with what materials and procedures, and how they travel, sediment, or are resisted. 

This workshop invites participants to examine how diverse practices of earth-writing— cartographic, legal, literary, scientific, ecological, and infrastructural—stabilize or unsettle the relationship between law, the global, and the planetary. The workshop is substantively and methodologically interdisciplinary: no single field possesses the conceptual resources required to rethink world-making at planetary scale. It brings together scholars in law, international relations, geography, anthropology, history, political theory, STS, and critical environmental studies to collaborate experimentally. 

Suggested and Interacting Themes (To explore possible themes of coherence) 

1.  World-Making and International Law’s Anthropocentric Inheritance How international law historically linked its ordering project to human-centered concepts (sovereignty, peoplehood, jurisdiction). What happens when ecological and more-than-human processes are no longer background conditions but legal participants? 

2.  Colonial and Imperial Earth-Writings How imperial mapping, surveying, and classificatory practices produced the “global” as a legible whole. What forms of erasure, enclosure, and extraction are reproduced in contemporary legal frameworks? 

3.  Writing Planetary Codes  How existing legal doctrine is being, and can be, rewritten for planetary purposes. Has work on global and planetary legal thinking paid sufficient attention to doctrine and professional legal work? Can close attention to legal craft and doctrinal imagination open spaces within international, global, and transnational legal thought to reshape legal frameworks towards fairer environmental futures? What would such changes look like, down to the level of doctrinal detail? 

4.  Approaches Beyond the Human: Rights of Nature, Post-Human Legalities, and Planetary Scholarship How emerging thought experiments and legal interventions (rights of rivers, ecological personhood, relational ontologies, multispecies jurisprudence) reconfigure who or what can bear authority. 

5.  Imagining Planetary Legal Orders What conceptual tools, narrative forms, and representational practices might enable legal thought to respond to planetary transformations without reproducing global cartographic logics. How might plural earth-writings co-exist without collapsing into universalism? And what would such orders look like in legal detail? 

6.  The Persistence of the Social What risks being obscured by the rise of the language of the planetary. How might projects of planetary law governance remain accountable to questions of redistribution, labour, care, and welfare, historically understood as core responsibilities of the (sovereign) state?  

Workshop Format 

This workshop is structured as a collaborative research laboratory rather than a venue for presenting finished papers. Participants will circulate short working papers or conceptual position pieces (2,000–4,000 words) in advance. Sessions will proceed through shared reading, roundtable discussion, and collective conceptual exploration. Our aim is to develop new analytic vocabularies, methodological approaches, and research directions that render planetary world-making newly thinkable. The workshop will culminate in the co-development of an edited scholarly volume, To Write the Earth, extending the inquiry initiated in the workshop. 

Call for Contributions 

Interested scholars are invited to submit an abstract of 250–500 words outlining their proposed contribution. Please include your name, institutional affiliation, and a brief biographical note (2–3 sentences). We strongly encourage PhD researchers and postdocs to apply as well as more senior colleagues. There is a limited budget for the workshop, and those submitting abstracts should be prepared to finance their own travel and accommodation.   

Submit abstracts by 15 January 2026 to: n.m.rajkovic@tilburguniversity.edu  In the subject title: “To write the Earth, Abstract submitted by [Your Name]” 

Due to limited human resources, only acceptances and invitations will be communicated by 3 February 2026.  

JOURNAL: The Journal of Legal History XLV (2024), No. 2

The Common Law and Civil War in Fourteenth-Century England: The Prosecution of Treason and Rebellion Under Edward II, 1322–1326 (Sophie Thérèse Ambler) (OPEN ACCESS)

DOI 10.1080/01440365.2024.2369416
Abstract:

What did it mean for poor and middling men and women to take up arms against their government? How did they negotiate competing claims for their participation in civil war and what consequences confronted them? This article analyses the crown’s investigation of its opponents following the 1321–22 civil war, comparing its predecessor of the Montfortian civil war (1263–67), to examine how the king, justices and juries tackled these questions. It demonstrates how the crown rooted the summary conviction and execution of Thomas of Lancaster and other noble insurgents in common law procedure; then, at the King’s Bench and a special inquiry in the Welsh Marches, re-framed treasonous offences to tackle non-noble insurgents; then, fearing a new uprising, instrumentalised the common law’s machinery to gather military intelligence. The crown recognized the agency of subjects across society in civil war and juries were ideally placed to investigate it; they also weighed subjects’ culpability, balancing obligation to the king against the mitigating realities of coerced participation in war. Thus, juries and the communities who informed their verdict were invited to engage with the ethical and legal dilemmas of civil war. This article thus presents a people’s history of treason.

On the Origins of Invalidation of British Colonial Legislation by Colonial Courts: The Van Diemen’s Land Dog Act Controversy of the 1840s – Part One (Ian Loveland) (OPEN ACCESS)

DOI 10.1080/01440365.2024.2369421
Abstract:

By 1865 British Imperial governments had accepted that colonial courts had the authority to invalidate colonial statutes which contravened the relevant colony’s constitution. This situation arose notwithstanding the lack of any express grant of such jurisdiction to colonial courts in Imperial or colonial legislation. This paper evaluates the first instance of a colonial court asserting that jurisdiction, during the Dog Act crisis in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in the 1840s. Part one of the paper charts the background to, conduct of and judgment in the relevant litigation. The second part, which will appear in a future issue of this journal, explores the consequential attempts of the colony’s Governor to remove the judges from office and to re-enact the invalidated colonial law. The suggestion made is that the Dog Act controversy provides considerable insight into how, despite the absence of any explicit statutory grant of such jurisdiction, the power of judicial review of colonial legislation by colonial courts became established as an orthodox element of British colonial constitutional law in the latter nineteenth century.

Crime, Trade Marks and Soft Trade Policy in the Interwar Era: Market Realities and the Merchandise Marks Act 1926 (Elena Glover) (OPEN ACCESS)

DOI 10.1080/01440365.2024.2369420
Abstract:

This article explores a facet of the relationship between trade marks and the criminal law in the UK in the interwar era, a pivotal period of transition in UK economic policy from free trade to a more managed economy. Drawing together insights from legal, business and economic history, we show that, in the interwar years, the context of domestic politics and wider international trade policy, produced a greater focus on the relationship between trade marks and market-place understandings of the national origin of manufactured products. This context included the passage of the Merchandise Marks Act 1926, a criminal law statute that stipulated the circumstances in which imported goods were to be marked with an indication of national origin, and included a criminal offence regulating trade marks enforced by prosecutions brought by the Board of Trade. We argue that the criminal law regulating trade marks became entwined with ‘soft’ trade policy, i.e. a means of protecting the domestic/Empire market falling short of tariff protection. Drawing on substantial original archival research, we explore the problems that confronted the Board of Trade when it enforced the 1926 Act in view of market realities.

Book reviews:

• Contractual Relations: A Contribution to the Critique of the Classical Law of Contract by David Campbell, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022, xxiv + 438 pp (including index), £95 (hardback), ISBN 9780198855156 (Warren Swain)
• Subversive Subversive Legal History: A Manifesto for the Future of Legal Education by Russel Sandberg, Oxford, Routledge, 2021, 6 p+234 pp., £109.44, ISBN 9780367191290 (hardback) (Susan Bartie)

Read all articles here

SYMPOSIUM: Le "Consensus". Définitions et usages d'une notion politique, juridique et diplomatique (XIVe-XVIIe siècles) (Genève: Les Délices, 21-22 JAN 2026)

 

(click on image to enlarge)

MERCREDI 21 JANVIER 2026

09h15 – Accueil

 

09h30 – Introduction : Noëlle-Laetitia Perret (Université de Genève)

Penser le consensus: genèse, évolutions et enjeux d’un concept interdisciplinaire

 

PREUVE, CONTRAT SOCIAL ET CONSENTEMENT : PERSPECTIVES JURIDIQUES (XIV^E–XVI^E SIÈCLES)

 

10h00 – Emanuele Conte (Università Roma Tre / EHESS–PSL)

Le consentement le plus présumé : Mario Salamone, le contrat social et la probatio

 

Discutante : Noëlle-Laetitia Perret

 

10H50 – PAUSE

 

11h00 – Beatrice Pasciuta (Università degli Studi di Palermo)

Il consenso della donna nel diritto comune: rileggere Presumitur seducta tra diritto, potere e rappresentazioni

 

Discutant : Ignazio Alessi

 

11h50 – Discussion collective/synthèse de la matinée 12h30 – Déjeuner

14h00 – Dante Fedele (CNRS, Université de Lille)

Consensus et consentement dans le De regia potestate de Bartolomé de Las Casas

 

Discutant : Benoît Caruzzo

 

14H50 – PAUSE

 

MÉMOIRE, PRUDENCE ET GOUVERNEMENT CONSENSUEL : EXPÉRIENCES MÉDIÉVALES

 

15h00 – Jean-Marie Moeglin (EPHE-PSL / Académie des Inscriptions et belles-lettres)

Le consensus dans les Mémoires de Philippe de Commynes

 

Discutant : Maxime Ferroli

 

 

15h50 – Ilaria Taddei (Université Grenoble-Alpes)

Prudence, parole et consentement dans la diplomatie florentine (XIV^e–XV^e siècles)

 

Discutante : Parwana Emamzadah Roth

 

16h40 – Discussion collective/synthèse de l’après-midi

 

19H00 – REPAS

 

 

JEUDI 22 JANVIER 2026

CONSENSUS ET NÉGOCIATION DANS L’EUROPE MODERNE

 

09h00 – Lucien Bély (Sorbonne Université / Académie des sciences morales et politiques)

Un traité comme recherche de consensus: Münster, 1648

 

Discutant : Adrien Wyssbrod

 

 

CORRESPONDANCES ITALIENNES ET CONSTRUCTION DU CONSENSUS POLITIQUE (1454–1455)

 

09h50 – Isabella Lazzarini (Università di Torino)

Accepter une ligue universelle : négociation et consensus dans la correspondance diplomatique italienne (1454–1455)

 

Discutant : Gavino Scala

 

10H40 – PAUSE

 

11h00 - Discussion collective/Table ronde finale

 

Quelle définition opératoire du consensus pour les périodes médiévale et moderne ?

Quelles continuités et quels déplacements des usages politiques, juridiques et diplomatiques?

 

 

12H30 - DÉJEUNER

Format de la rencontre

La rencontre adopte un format conçu pour encourager un travail collectif autour des textes et un échange scientifique approfondi. En amont, chaque intervenant·e a transmis un court dossier de travail (2–3 pages), comprenant des pistes de réflexion et des extraits de sources. Ce matériel peut être transmis sur demande à : noelle-laetitia.perret@unige.ch Chaque session s’ouvre par une brève introduction assurée par un membre de l’équipe organisatrice, destinée à en situer le thème et les enjeux. L’intervenant·e dispose ensuite d’une quinzaine de minutes pour présenter les points centraux de sa contribution, avant une discussion d’environ trente-cinq minutes menée par un·e discutant·e et enrichie par les échanges avec le groupe. 

Équipe du projet Forging Consensus
Le projet réunit une équipe interdisciplinaire de chercheur.es en histoire, droit, philologie, philosophie et humanités numériques :

Noëlle-Laetitia Perret – Professeure associée, directrice du projet (Principal Investigator). Elle coordonne l’ensemble des axes scientifiques, encadre l’équipe et pilote l’étude des traités diplomatiques médiévaux et renaissants. Gavino Scala – Collaborateur scientifique. Spécialiste des humanités numériques, il développe des protocoles d’analyse lexicale et sémantique appliqués au concept de consensus. Parwana Emamzadah Roth – Collaboratrice scientifique. Spécialiste de la philosophie du langage au Moyen Âge, elle conduit l’analyse argumentative et philologique des traités diplomatiques latins et contribue à la structuration méthodologique du projet. Adrien Wyssbrod – Collaborateur scientifique. Historien du droit et de la culture politique moderne, il prépare l’édition critique du traité de Wicquefort (1676) et participe à l’axe «modernité». Benoît Caruzzo – Doctorant. Il consacre sa thèse aux traités de légation (1603-1670) et à la construction du consensus dans les pratiques diplomatiques de l’Europe moderne. Maxime Ferroli – Chercheur associé. Archiviste de la Ville de Dole et chercheur associé au Centre Lucien Febvre (UMLP/UR 2273), il étudie les formes transfrontalières du consensus diplomatique entre la Franche-Comté et les cantons suisses aux XVIe–XVIIe siècles. Ignazio Alessi – Chercheur associé. SNSF Research Fellow à l’University of Cambridge, spécialiste d’histoire du droit et de la pensée politique médiévale, il contribue aux réflexions théoriques et comparatives sur les usages médiévaux du consensus

BOOK: Ioanna PERVOU, Protecting Nationals Abroad and the Reconceptualization of Sovereignty [Studies in the History of Law and Justice, eds. Mortimer SELLERS & Georges MARTYN; 32] (Heidelberg: Springer, 2025)

 

(image source: Springer)

Abstract:

This book helps to conceptualize the doctrine of forcible protection of nationals abroad and illustrates the key elements of state practice. States’ interest in protecting their nationals abroad is timeless; nationality and allegiance are constitutive elements of sovereignty and in some cases, take precedence over territoriality. Yet the forcible protection of nationals abroad has long been debated and attracted the attention of international legal theory. Currently, it is particularly in the spotlight due to Russia’s invocation of the doctrine in the armed conflict against Ukraine. However, protection of nationals abroad is a concept which is expected to fuel international debate in the years to come, primarily because of globalization and the growing trend of more and more people living outside their country of birth. Chapters 1 and 2 delve into the doctrine of protecting nationals abroad. More specifically, Chapter 1 examines how the doctrine was formulated and applied in the pre-Charter era and explores whether there was a customary rule permitting the use of force to protect a state’s nationals abroad, while Chapter 2 offers an overview of the doctrinal debate which followed the United Nations Charter and the prohibition of the use of force. In turn, Chapters 3 and 4 take a closer look at state practice from 1945 onwards. Chapter 3 outlines the major features of states’ practices and their justifications for using force for the sake of their nationals. Chapter 4 assesses the Russian discourse on the protection of nationals abroad, specifically with regard to the armed conflict with Georgia, the rhetoric preceding the annexation of Crimea, and the military invasion of Ukraine. Lastly, Chapter 5 explains how the protection of nationals abroad could be made more human-centric and go beyond jus ad bellum. This chapter re-interprets the concept of “nationals” and sheds light on the terms “expatriates,” “naturalized foreigners” and “diaspora,” suggesting that there is a gap between diplomatic and forcible protection, one not reflected in international law regulation and which needs to be addressed.

On the author:

Dr. Ioanna Pervou is an Assistant Professor in Public International Law at the Law Faculty, Democritus University of Thrace. Ioanna obtained her bachelor's degree from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She holds an LLM in Public International Law from the University of Cambridge, an LLM in Public Law from Democritus University of Thrace and an MBA with a specialization in the administration of public hospitals. Her doctoral thesis, obtained by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, received a scholarship from the Academy of Athens. She is a Research Fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) and a Visiting Fellow from 2023 to 2025 at LSE Health. She is a lawyer.

Read the book here: DOI 10.1007/978-3-032-05231-5.