Call for Papers: Law, Culture and the Humanities (LCH) 29th Annual Conference on “Discipline”, University of California, Berkeley [27-28 May 2027; Hybrid]

The Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities (LCH) is a society of scholars working on interdisciplinary, humanistically oriented legal scholarship: legal history, legal theory and jurisprudence, law and cultural studies, law and literature, law and the performing arts, and legal hermeneutics. It also publishes the peer-reviewed journal Law, Culture and the Humanities.

The Association has opened its call for papers for its Twenty-Ninth Annual Conference, to be held at the University of California, Berkeley on 27-28 May 2027. The conference considers topics broadly related to law and legal studies, and this year’s theme is “Discipline”. The annual Graduate Student Workshop takes place the day before, on 26 May 2027.

The call treats “discipline”, as both noun and verb, as one of many provocative cognates across law and the humanities: it suggests punishment, intellectual tradition, ritual, practice, refinement and improvement, and each meaning carries a shared command of subordination. Submissions may explore discipline from any angle. Questions the call raises include:

• Is discipline a problem, a solution, or something else? Is it too mired in logics of authority and punishment to be redeemed, or a useful point of friction that can be adapted to expand legal and humanistic frameworks?
• What does it mean to produce knowledge within structures that use discipline as their organising logic, and who or what is erased, illegible or silent as a result?
• What logics and structures of discipline underwrite particular areas of law and legal history, criminal or civil?
• How is law defining or redefining punishment and carcerality?
• How do art and literature take up these questions, or theorise discipline themselves?
• Discipline and disciplinarity in the academy: how disciplinarity promotes or inhibits the future of the humanities in relation to law and legal studies, and the possibilities of interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and antidisciplinarity.

• Individual paper proposals: a title and an abstract of no more than 250 words. The Program Committee will combine individual papers into panels.
• Fully constituted panels are encouraged, as are experimental formats: roundtables, “author meets reader” sessions (which may include several books and their authors), works-in-progress sessions, workshop-format sessions and multi-panel streams.
• Panels should include at least three, ideally four, papers or presenters. Give the panel a title and designate a chair (the chair may also present). No abstract is needed for the panel itself.
• For pre-constituted panels, roundtables or streams, every participant must make an individual submission on the registration site, naming the panel and its chair.
• All registrants are asked to give two to three keywords to help the committee align sessions.

The conference emphasises the LCH tradition of in-person conversation and encourages participants to come to Berkeley, but it recognises that travel may be prohibitive for some and will accept virtual panels and papers. LCH will not provide technical support for virtual participants: panel chairs are responsible for supplying the Zoom links listed in the programme. All plenary sessions will be streamed online as well as held in person.

LCH strongly encourages applicants to form full panels before submitting, ideally drawing on a range of institutions, academic ranks, disciplines and identities. The Association’s archive of past conference programmes can help identify scholars working in related fields. The Program Coordinators, Aditya Banerjee and Jack Quirk, can also act as intermediaries: write to them with “LCH panel” in the subject line, well before the deadline. Graduate students and first-time participants who are struggling to find co-panellists are especially encouraged to contact them.

The call for papers does not state a submission fee, and the 2027 conference registration fee has not yet been announced. LCH lists eligibility for its conferences among the benefits of membership. Current membership fees are USD 60 for a three-year membership and USD 30 for a one-year membership (graduate students only), running from 1 January to 31 December.

Submit your proposal through the Association’s 2027 conference proposal form (linked below) by 31 January 2027. For queries, write to the Association at lch@lawculturehumanities.com.