Call For Papers Western Law Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference

 

Law: Helping Hand or Iron Fist?

 

May 21-22, 2015, London, Canada

 

Graduate and Post-Graduate students are invited to participate in Western Law’s Interdisciplinary Conference. The Conference will be held at Western Law, University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, on May 21-22, 2015.

 

This conference offers a forum for new and emerging scholars to build networks, and to exchange and develop new ideas, concepts, and approaches to law and other disciplines.

 

This year’s conference theme is “Law: Helping Hand or Iron Fist?”  We encourage scholars to explore positive and negative aspects of law both generally and theoretically as well as more specifically with regards to certain fields of law and specific issues. Is law a positive tool for regulating the actions and interactions of people, groups, corporations and governments? Or, is it a coercive force and a means of perpetuating inequalities within domestic and international societies? Or, is it both? And if so, how can we overcome the negative while preserving the positive? Scholars are invited to identify, examine, and challenge the potential boundaries of law. We also encourage abstracts which explore the intersection between law and other disciplines, whether these intersections are for better or for worse.

 

Potential paper topics may include in intellectual property the interplay between users’ rights, owners’ rights, and creators’ rights; is the law a sword or a shield; how does the law help the average citizen; how does law encourage good behaviour and is it effective; victimology and how the law regulates behaviour; in literature, an exploration of portrayals of crime, punishment, vigilantism, and the law; critical legal theories such as Marxism, Third World approaches to international law, feminism, and so on; the interplay between law and politics, or law and medicine; environmental regulation; and so many more possibilities. We encourage scholars to feel free to think creatively about the conference theme and how their own research interests fit into it.

 

PAPER SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: Proposals should include the title of the paper, a 250-300 word abstract, the student’s full institutional affiliation, email address and phone number. Proposals should be suitable for a 15-20 minute presentation. Presenters should be current graduate or post-graduate students or have recently completed their studies.

 

Abstracts must be submitted via email to law.grad.conf@uwo.ca by February 1, 2015. Successful applicants will be informed no later than the end of February, 2015. Registration and fees will be payable by April 15, 2015 (for early bird pricing). Detailed information will be posted regularly on the Conference website at law.uwo.ca/conferences/westerngradconf

 

Questions may be directed to conference organizers at law.grad.conf@uwo.ca.