Legal Histories of Empire

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.

A CFP from one of our sister organisations! The European Society for Comparative Legal History has sent out a CFP for its 2023 conference – 21-23 June, University of Augsburg, Germany.

We know a few people are still registering. If you are still needing to register can you please register through this link and, if you are registering for remote attendance, also send an email to shaunnagh.dorsett@uts.edu.au in order that we can ensure you get the zoom links.

see you next week.

So this really really is the final version of both the abstract book and the program. Please check carefully, there have only a few changes but your slot might be one of them as two or three panels have shifted due to timezone /presenters dropping out!

Thank you to all those who answered the call for chairs. It is most appreciated and it is your collegiality which helps make this a success. If – as is almost inevitable – there are any changes between now and next week these will be communicated to the relevant chairs. The program will not change.

Please bring a copy of each of these. The era of the conference bag is, I hope, dead. So if you do want a hard copy or a note pad, please bring those. Most of us I suspect moved on to some form of device years ago (and a reminder the free wifi is at the end of the transportation guide).

Its not long now. So to ensure you get to us safely, a transport guide has been prepared. It has all the information you need on reaching Maynooth. And so you can stay in touch once you get here, at the end is info on Wifi.