International Junior Faculty Conference - Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School

Dates: October 16-19, 2008
Location: Stanford, California

Harvard and Stanford Law Schools wish to announce plans for an international junior faculty conference.  The two sponsoring schools will act as hosts in alternate years.  The first conference will be held at Stanford, California, on October 16-19, 2008.  The purpose of the conference is to stimulate the international exchange of ideas and research among members of the legal academy, to encourage and further the work of younger scholars in the international community, and to surmount barriers between scholars of different traditions and cultures, in the interests of the development of legal scholarship on a transnational basis.

The sponsoring schools invite any junior scholar to submit an abstract of a paper for the conference.  The paper may be on any legally relevant subject, and may utilize any legally relevant approach, quantitative or qualitative, sociological, anthropological, historical, or economic, on the role and function of law and legal systems in the modern world, or in the past.  The papers for this initial year should be in English.   Any scholar whose home institution is outside the United States and who has held an academic position for less than seven years, as of 2008, or whose last degree was earned less than ten years earlier than 2008, is invited to submit an abstract of no more than five pages that lays out the major argument of the paper he/she would submit, states what method the scholar will pursue to advance that argument, and indicates the paper’s potential contribution to scholarship. On the basis of these abstracts, the sponsoring schools will invite the submission of full papers. The papers will be reviewed by an international committee of senior legal scholars, representing many different countries and many different styles and approaches.  Approximately ten of the papers will be selected for presentation at the conference.  Each paper will have two commentators, drawn from the international committee of scholars.  The sponsoring schools will cover expenses of travel, including airfare, lodging, and food, for each participant. 

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is January 4, 2008 and of final papers is May 23, 2008.  One copy of each abstract should be sent to:

Professor Lawrence M. Friedman (lmf@stanford.edu)
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305 USA

A second copy of each abstract should be sent to:

Professor William P. Alford (alford@law.harvard.edu)
Harvard Law School
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA

It is preferable to submit papers by email.  Questions should be directed to either Professor Friedman or Professor Alford.