Events

Call for Papers

How to do things with Law: Prefiguration, Performativity, and Alternative Legalities

Law and Society Association, May 22-25, 2025, in Chicago

We – Amy Cohen (Temple University), Stephen Young (University of Otago) and Ben Golder (UNSW) – are organising a mini-conference on the above theme to take place within the 2025 annual meeting of the Law and Society Association in Chicago, to be held May 22-25th.

Theme:

What happens when everyday actors take the law into their own hands and seek to create, or recreate, the legal worlds they inhabit? There is a long, venerable and fascinating tradition of non-legal actors seizing the means of legal imagination. These individuals and groups (sometimes even quasi-institutions) are not formally authorized to make law but they act as if they are, adopting a consciously fictive jurisdiction.

Think, for example, of the work of peoples’ tribunals in international law – starting with the Russell Tribunal on the United State’s crimes in Vietnam in the late 1960s and through to the World Tribunal on Iraq in 2005 – that mobilise a certain (popular) understanding of international law to produce verdicts, raise popular consciousness, and critique (or maybe even redeem) international law.

Think also of the Feminist Judgments Projects (FJPs) or related exercises in critical or imaginative judgment-writing, in which legal scholars and feminist activists assume the position of judges and rewrite important appellate judicial decisions. In so doing, they seek to expose both law’s patriarchal structure but also its contingency, its hidden margin of freedom. Law, in the hands of would-be feminist judges, could always be otherwise.

Or think, in a very different political register, of those litigants (be they sovereign citizens or other individuals) who today – gathered under the sign of what mainstream legal actors pejoratively call ‘pseudolaw’ – mobilise a certain understanding of the common law and of its ancient history in order to assert a particular legal subjectivity and claim their rights. Indeed, sometimes these individuals  fashion an entire normative universe.

These examples are neither exhaustive nor privileged instances of the phenomenon – we could add many others, from exercises of corporate self-governance (the so-called ‘Facebook Supreme Court,’ for example) to heterodox gestures of self-determination (the sovereign claims of micronations, for example).

This conference within a conference presents an opportunity to explore these phenomena, and continues discussions about ‘prefigurative legality’ (Cohen and Morgan, 2023), or other related topics. Without wishing to circumscribe those discussions, we are interested in paper proposals (which we will organise into panels) or fully-formed panels (with 3/4 papers) that address the following indicative list of topics and questions:

• How do we best think about this phenomenon of informal legality – as an instance of prefiguration, or performativity, or parody, or maybe through the lens of legal pluralism?
• What is the relationship between the informal or everyday legal claim (to rights, jurisdiction, statehood, even) and the formal structures of state or international law?
• Do these claims complete, compete with, or critique authorized law, or do they sit outside, beyond or underneath it?
• What are the political possibilities and limitations of these exercises or practices?
• What are historical examples of this phenomenon and what might those histories indicate about similar actions or actors today?
• What understanding of legal form and legal method do these practices disclose?
• What are the similarities and differences between supposedly left-wing invocations of law, and conservative mobilisations of law?

Process:

We invite paper (or panel) proposals for a series of interlinked panels on the above theme at the Law and Society Association 2025 Conference in Chicago, May 22-25. Our intention is to collate a series of paper (and panel) proposals into a mini-conference, crafting a conference within the wider conference setting of the LSA that sustains an intimate and intellectual conversation across the related panels. Below is the set of steps and deadlines leading up to the LSA in 2025 and what you need to do in order to participate. After the LSA, our intention is to work with participants to publish our papers as a collection in either a special edition of a scholarly journal or in the form of an edited book with a leading academic or trade publisher. Once we have the final conference-within-a-conference program we will commence initial discussions with participants (that is, well before the LSA itself) and gauge interest and ideas in future publications.

Timeline:

• Send abstracts, panel proposals or thoughts to young@otago.ac.nz by 15 September 2024
• We will notify people of acceptance or non-acceptance by 1 October 2024
• Participants confirm participation by 7 October 2024
• Participants/Organisers submit panels to LSA by 15 October 2024*
• *Please note that participation in this mini-conference will “count” towards your participation limits for LSA
• LSA: 22-25 May 2025

What to Submit?:

We are interested in receiving either paper abstracts on the above or related topics or fully-formed panels. If you wish to submit a paper abstract please include a 200 word abstract, with a title and also your institutional affiliation. If you wish to submit a fully-formed panel or series of panels, please ensure that the submission contains 3 or 4 abstracts of 200 words, with a title and institutional affiliation for each paper plus a 200 word explanation of the panel’s theme itself. We are open to receiving questions about different formats of panels (roundtables, Author-Meets-Reader sessions, etc) but we encourage people to contact us as soon as possible about this to facilitate organisation.

Please direct your questions to any of the 3 organisers at the following email addresses: b.golder@unsw.edu.au, ajcohen@temple.edu, stephen.young@otago.ac.nz. But final submission of proposals should be directed to stephen.young@otago.ac.nz

We do not have funding for this project so each participant needs to ensure their own travel to, registration at, and attendance at the LSA Chicago annual meeting.