2025 Law and Humanities Workshop for Junior Scholars
Stanford University on June 9-10, 2025
Application Deadline: December 9, 2024
ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
The workshop is open to untenured professors, advanced graduate students, post-doctoral
scholars, and independent scholars working in law and the humanities. In addition to drawing
from numerous humanistic fields, including Black and Indigenous studies, history, literature,
political theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, and philosophy, we welcome critical,
qualitative work in the social sciences, including anthropology and sociology. While the scope of
the Workshop is broad, we cannot consider proposals that are focused solely on quantitative
social science research or that are limited to doctrinal legal research. We are especially interested
in submissions from members of traditionally underrepresented groups and submissions touching
on themes of anti-racism and anti-subordination. We welcome submissions from those working
at regional and teaching-intensive institutions.
Based on anonymous evaluation by an interdisciplinary selection committee, between six and
eight papers will be chosen for presentation at the Workshop, where two senior scholars will
comment on each paper. Commentators and other Workshop participants will be asked to focus
specifically on the strengths and weaknesses of the selected scholarly projects, with respect to
subject and methodology. The selected papers will then serve as the basis for a larger conversation
among all the participants that may include themes connecting all of the projects, as well as
discussion of the evolving standards by which we judge excellence and creativity in
interdisciplinary scholarship.
The selected papers will appear in a special issue of the Legal Scholarship Network at SSRN; there
is no other publication commitment. (We will accommodate the wishes of chosen authors who
prefer not to have their paper posted publicly with us because of publication commitments to
other journals.) However, we will only accept Workshop participants whose papers are true works
in progress; articles or chapters that are already in page proofs or are otherwise unable to be
revised by the time of the Workshop are ineligible.
The Workshop will pay the domestic travel and hotel expenses of authors whose papers are
selected for presentation. For authors requiring airline travel from outside the United States, the
Workshop will cover such travel expenses up to a maximum of $1250.
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Applications should include:
- a 1,500-2,000 word summary of the paper (including footnotes or endnotes),
- a 1-2 page bibliography,
- in Microsoft Word (not PDF)
- and, if your paper is a chapter in a book or dissertation, an optional 1-page
chapter outline of the larger project.
Applications are due on December 9, 2024.
If your application advances to the final stage of consideration, you will be asked to submit the
full paper in early January, 2025. Please do not apply if you will not have a full paper by early
January. Your application should be a summary of existing, ongoing work rather than a proposal
for new or planned work.
Papers must be works-in-progress that do not exceed 10,000 words in length (including footnotes/
endnotes). A dissertation chapter may be submitted, but we strongly suggest that it be edited so
as to stand alone as a piece of work with its own integrity. A paper that has been submitted for
publication is eligible for selection so long as it will not be in galley proofs or in print at the time
of the Workshop; it is important that authors still be in a position at the time of the Workshop to
consider comments they receive there and to incorporate them as they think appropriate in their
revisions.
We ask that those submitting applications be careful to omit or redact any information in the
paper summary or the body of the paper that might serve to identify them, as we adhere to an
anonymous or “blind” selection process.
Applications (in Microsoft Word—no pdf files, please) will be accepted until December 9,
2024, and should be sent by e-mail to: Lawandhumanitiesworkshop@gmail.com. Please be sure to
include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), and phone and email contact information in
your covering email, not in the paper itself.