CALL FOR PAPERS: Native Legal Histories: Methods, Sovereignties, and Identities (Stanford: Stanford Law School, 11 APR 2025): DEADLINE 31 JAN 2025

(Image source: Raven)

The Stanford Center for Law and History (SCLH) invites paper-proposal submissions from graduate students for its seventh annual conference, “Native Legal Histories: Methods, Sovereignties, and Identities.” The Native nations forcibly included within the United States have had complex and nuanced legal histories. This conference will explore histories of both Indigenous law and Native encounters with U.S. law to better understand Indigenous communities’ legal experiences and understandings.It will bring together scholars of law and history to examine Indigenous legal histories across a range of venues and themes. Focusing, in particular, on questions of methods, sovereignties, and identities, the conference seeks to consider how the growing and robust field of Native legal history might help us to reconsider familiar narratives of law and its past.

This one-day conference will be held on Friday, April 11th, 2025, at Stanford Law School. It will include four panels and a graduate student lighting round with breakfast and lunch provided. 

Areas of possible, but not exhaustive, legal-historical interest include:

• Methodologies in Indigenous Legal History
• Native Peoples and the Courts
• Sovereignty and Tribal Law 
• Treaties and Constitutions  
• Indigenous Identity and the Law 

SCLH's goal is to bring together faculty, postdocs, and students for workshops, conferences, and lectures examining the relationships between law and history, broadly defined. With these goals in mind we encourage submissions from scholars working across disciplines.

The conference organizers will select one graduate student as the winner of the SCLH Graduate Student Paper Prize. This student will present on one of the four conference panels. Funding for travel and housing will be provided.

Application Requirements:

• CV
• Paper abstract (500 words or less)

Applications closed on January 31st, 2025. Please direct any questions to sclh@law.stanford.edu.

More information can be found here.

SEMINAR: Representing Justice: Aesthetics of Law and the Visual arts in Italy during the Fascist period (Stanford: Stanford Center for Law and History, 16 APR 2024 h. 12:45-2:00 PM Pacific), [IN PERSON AND ONLINE]

(Image source: Palazzo di Giustizia di Milano on Wikimedia)

Professor Luigi Lacchè, Full Professor in Legal History at the University of Macerata, Department of Law and at the LUISS University, Dept. of Law, Rome, will present, "Representing Justice: Aesthetics of Law and the Visual arts in Italy during the Fascist period." Lacchè will present in-person but participants will be able to attend either in-person or online.

ABSTRACT 

The paper aims at presenting some outcomes of a work in progress (a book) on Italian criminal justice during the fascist era. Justice is not usually considered among the most important pillars of the fascist regime. Conversely, I think that it played an important function in term of repression, consolidation and innovation. In particular, it is useful to understand what it was that justice represented for fascism, what kind of innovations the regime introduced, and why it introduced them, and how it tried to model a particular shape and intrinsically fascist representation of justice. This theme is multifaceted, therefore it is impossible to offer here a complete picture. In this paper I can only select one of the research perspectives, namely, the representations of justice that involve images and the aesthetics of law also. The new fascist justice and legislation (Rocco’s codes above all) needed new spaces in which to celebrate and represent the "justice regime" in line with the directives and cultural and "aesthetic" politics of fascism. If architecture is one of the most recurrent metaphor-images of law, it is in fact central also to the semantic system of fascist law.

To RSVP, click here. Those who confirm their attendance will receive a separate email containing the paper and link to the event after the RSVP deadline.

More information can be found here.

WORKSHOP SERIES: Legal History Workshop Series (Stanford Center for Law and History; 2023-2024)

(Image source: Stanford Center for Law and History)

Programme

Oct. 17, 2023 – Zion on the Mississippi: Imagining a Mormon Theodemocracy (Rachel St. John, University of California Davis History Department & Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences);

Oct. 31, 2023 –  Guess Who’s Coming to Stanford: The Battle for the Desegregation of an Elite Law School (Gabrielle Braxton, Stanford Law School);

Nov. 14, 2023 – The Nation at Sea: Federal Courts and American Sovereignty in the Age of Revolution (Kevin Arlyck, Georgetown Law School);

 Jan. 23, 2024 – The Hidden History of the Insanity Defense (Rabia Belt, Stanford Law School);

Feb. 6, 2024 –  The Story of a Socialist Constable: Ramanand Tiwari, Police Radicalism, and Decolonization in India, 1942-1952 (Partha Pratim Shil, Stanford History Department);

Feb. 20, 2024 – Buried Treasure, Concealment, and the Medieval Archive (Tom Johnson, University of York History Department);

 April 16, 2024 – Representing Justice: Aesthetics of Law & Visuals Arts in Italy during the Fascist Period (Luigi Lacchè, University of Macerata Department of Law);

May 7, 2024 – Gault’s Aftermath: Making Sense of “New” Juvenile Rights in California & Arizona (Doris Morgan Rueda, Stanford Center for Law & History);

May 21, 2024 – Natural Rights of Thought and Opinion: The First Amendment, Conscience, and Compelled Speech (Lael Weinberger, Stanford Law School).

More information can be found here.

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: Stanford Center for Law and History, Fellow (DEADLINE: 15 February 2019)

(Source: Stanford Law)

We learned of an application for a position as Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Law and History. Here the application:

Stanford Law School seeks to hire the best talent and to promote a safe and secure environment for all members of the university community and its property. To that end, new staff hires must successfully pass a background check prior to starting work at Stanford University.

The Center:

The Stanford Center for Law and History, directed by Professor Amalia Kessler, brings together faculty and students from across Stanford University’s many schools and departments (and beyond) to participate in a broad range of conferences, workshops, and lectures devoted to examining the multifaceted interrelationships between law and history (without geographic, temporal, or other subject-area limitations). For details of the Center’s various programs, please see: https://law.stanford.edu/stanford-center-for-law-and-history/ 

The Goal:

This fellowship is intended for people who have recently completed (or will soon complete) their training in law and history and who seek thereafter to pursue their first tenure-track academic position at the intersection of the two fields.

The Fellowship:

The Stanford Center for Law and History is a residential fellowship that provides an opportunity to conduct research in the dynamic environment of Stanford University. We prefer two-year fellowships to help the fellow complete a significant body of independent scholarship, but we are willing to consider one-year terms. We expect that fellows will dedicate most of their time to pursuing their proposed research projects, and the fellowship is designed to ensure meaningful mentorship from faculty within both the Law School and the History Department. Fellows will also devote some time to organizing and implementing other Center activities, including an ongoing workshop series and an annual conference. The fellowship provides a significant opportunity to become part of a lively law-school-wide community of individuals with an interest in academia through attending weekly faculty lunch seminars and by participating in activities with the other fellows at Stanford Law School to learn more about one another’s scholarship and about academic life more generally. Fellows are also encouraged to attend and participate in the broad range of lectures and workshops available within the broader university, including inter alia, the History Department and the Stanford Humanities Center.

For the 2019-2020 fellowship, we will provide a workspace, a competitive salary, and a generous benefits package. Applicants who have completed (or are soon to complete) both a J.D. and a Ph.D in history are strongly preferred. The fellowship is expected to start around August 1, 2019, but there is some flexibility as concerns the exact start date.

The Application Process:

All applicants should apply through the Stanford Careers website (direct link: http://m.rfer.us/STANFORDLMV3oc) and should include the following: (1) a CV; (2) a sample of academic writing; (3) a research proposal of no more than five double-space pages (briefly outlining past work but focused primarily on research to be undertaken during the fellowship); and (4) official transcripts of all academic work pursued in college, as well as in graduate programs. In addition, (5) applicants should provide two letters of recommendation, to be emailed directly by the recommenders themselves to Cheyenne Pico at cpico@law.stanford.edu

All applications should be submitted no later than Friday, February 15, 2019.

Stanford University is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Consistent with its obligations under the law, the University will provide reasonable accommodation to any employee with a disability who requires accommodation to perform the essential functions of the job.

More information here