CFP: Yale Law School 4th Doctoral Scholarship Conference

Yale Law School is proud to host the 4th Doctoral Scholarship Conference, which will be held on November 14-15, 2014. The conference aims to provide doctoral students and recent graduates with a forum to present, share and discuss their work beyond conventional academic boundaries. It seeks to promote quality research and to facilitate discussion across diverse subject areas and methodological approaches, with a view towards fostering a community of aspiring legal scholars.

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Law is a central social tool for establishing responsibility and for holding agents accountable for their actions and omissions. These functions of the law raise fundamental questions: What is it that the law does when it calls agents to account? What justifies its authority to do so?  What values underlie the law’s call of those under its jurisdiction to responsibility? What are the limits of holding persons legally responsible? What modes of responsibility can and should the law impose? In what ways do these functions interact with the other social functions of the law? In what ways can and should legal institutions themselves be held responsible?

These questions materialize in idiosyncratic ways across the various areas of law, with different issues taking center stage in each area. At the same time, these questions illuminate aspects of law that should be considered across arbitrarily constructed disciplinary boundaries. Legal responsibility manifests itself in different ways in the realms of private and public law as well as in the domestic and international spheres. In a complex, global society, states, corporations and individuals must thus make sense of their multiple and shifting responsibilities in areas as diverse as the economic, the criminal, the environmental, the contractual and the international. In all these areas, and in many others, law engages with various modes of responsibility, including the personal, the social and the civic, each of which is situated within different legal relationships. This conference aims to examine the many and varied modes of responsibility with which the law interacts, as well as broader themes that emerge from taking a bird’s-eye view of the legal system as a whole.

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The conference is open to current doctoral candidates, in law or law-related disciplines, and those who graduated during the previous academic year (2013-2014). We welcome submissions engaging any area of law. Papers will be selected based on quality and their capacity to provoke fruitful debate with other submissions. Selection will be informed – but not strictly bound – by fidelity to the theme.

Submissions: Abstracts of 300-500 words (with your institutional affiliations) should be submitted to [email protected] by August 1st, 2014. Selected applicants will be informed of acceptance in late August, and presenters will be asked to submit their papers of up to 10,000 words in length by October 10, 2014.

We regret that we are unable to provide financial assistance. However, the conference organizers will endeavor to facilitate accommodation at the homes of current Yale Law School graduate students for those presenters who request it.