Legal Histories of Empire

August 31 was not a great deadline for our Northern Hemisphere colleagues who are just starting the academic year. So we are extending to 13 September, hopefully allowing for the insanity of the first few weeks of teaching to settle.

We are absolutely delighted to announce that Professor Mitra Sharafi has agreed to be our keynote for Toronto. Mitra is the Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the President-elect of the American Society for Legal History. We are honoured to have her agree to be our keynote. We will update with further details, including topic, soon.

Not long now. Please get your abstracts in! Looking forward to seeing you all in Toronto.

A reminder. The Call for Papers for Empires IV is out with a month(ish) until the deadline of 31 August 2024. We look forward to your abstracts.

And a welcome to our new subscribers!

The Call for Papers is out. The deadine for abstracts is 31 August 2024. Please circulate widely.

Information on registration and accommodation will be provided a little later in the year, well in time to organise your travel.

We look forward to seeing you in Toronto in 2025.

When: 10-12 July 2025

Where: University of Toronto

CFP and further info: Coming soon!

Diarise the dates.

CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST

ASLH Pre-conference workshop:

The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) schedules pre-conference workshops at its annual meetings. The 2024 conference is taking place in San Francisco beginning on Friday October 25^th, 2024. The ASLH’s pre-conference workshops will run from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Thursday, 24 October 2024.

We are proposing that one of these workshops be entitled ‘Canadian Legal Histories: Current Research and Future Prospects.’ This workshop would allow participants briefly to describe their current research in the field of Canadian legal histories, including those that have encompassed empires, borderlands, comparative research, and Indigenous legal histories.  We seek the participation of scholars whose work encompasses diverse geographic areas, chronologies, topics, theoretical frameworks, and methodologies.

The format will be designed to welcome as many voices as possible and provide time for conversation. All topics are welcome within the broad rubric of legal histories relating to Canada. To ensure inclusion of as many researchers as possible, we will structure this as a series of lightning panel sessions, allowing each participant ten minutes to introduce their research.  We will conclude the day with a final panel that seeks to make some preliminary forecasts of what the future might hold for Canadian legal history research. 

At this stage we are asking for expressions of interest so that we can get a sense of the numbers and make arrangements accordingly.   We assume that participants in the workshop will also be attending the ASLH conference. For further information and to express your interest please contact Lyndsay Campbell by February 3, 2024 (lcampbe@ucalgary.ca).

Please feel free to forward this to others you think might be interested.

Workshop Organizers

Constance Backhouse, Professor of Law, University of Ottawa, past president of ASLH. Constance.Backhouse@uOttawa.ca

Jim Phillips, Professor of Law, History and Criminology, University of Toronto, Editor-in-Chief, Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History.  j.phillips@utoronto.ca

Lyndsay Campbell, Associate Dean (Research), Professor of Law and History, University of Calgary.  lcampbe@ucalgary.ca

Philip Girard, Professor Emeritus, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, ASLH Honorary Fellow. pgirard@osgoode.yorku.ca

Congratulations to Ron Harris (Tel Aviv). We are delighted to have learned that Ron has been made an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History. This is such an honour and acknowledges the immense contribution of his scholarship to the discipline of legal history (and of course to the legal history of empires!).  Congratulations again Ron!!

Another conference of interest to colleagues has been sent to us:

The 14^th ISHTIP Conference (International Society for History and Theory of IP) to be held at Tel Aviv University, June 19-21, 2023.

Dear Colleagues, we would like to draw your attention to two upcoming conferences, both of which may be relevant to this group:

• The Fifth Worldwide Congress of the World Society of Mixed Jurisdiction Jurists to be held at the University of Malta from 14-16 June 2023, and

• The Law and History in Small States and Micro-Jurisdictions Conference to be held at Queen Mary University’s Centre for Small States from 22-23 June 2023.