Annual Meeting Update: Plenary Sessions – Dates & Details Announced!

The Program Committee has been hard at work finalizing the sessions, and the program can now be viewed here. Thank you for your patience as we put together what will be our second and largest virtual conference ever. Please note that the conference dates are May 26-30, since there will be one plenary taking place on the first evening.

 

In the meantime, we would like to provide you with a glimpse into some of our headline events. We will be holding three fabulous plenary sessions organized around the conference theme of Crisis, Healing and Re- imagining, with one session on each theme. We will also be hosting a special panel on (Re)Naming and and (Re)Framing: “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” in the Age of Anti-Racism. Please view the details regarding these sessions below.

 

This panel focuses on the theme of crisis. It centers the challenge of crises that are too slow-moving to be grasped by the tools of the legal exception, and which defy the possibility of a return to normalcy. Further, even fleeting crises may be symptoms of structural problems, and may trigger long-lasting disruption as they exacerbate or reveal these problems. What is the role of law in identifying and addressing crises?  

 

 

 

In many ways, law is a social institution that looks backward, or that seeks to create stability and conserve agreements for the future. Further, much law and society scholarship reveals how law in action reproduces structural inequities despite its promise to undo them. This panel seeks to highlight instead the possibilities of law for creating change, and as a site for re-imagining and re-writing social relations.   

 

 

In the past year, we have witnessed a marked shift in the way we talk about race and racial power. A coalition of racial justice activists and scholars has focused renewed attention on the problem of structural racism and insisted that “anti-discrimination” and “diversity, equity and inclusion” are not enough. While we may all be “anti-racists” now, questions about what anti-racism means and what it demands as a concrete matter in individual and institutional practice will no doubt generate fresh conflict, controversy and cooptation. This panel of LSA Diversity Committee members will explore the challenges of (re)naming and (re)framing issues of racial justice in law and legal studies in the “age of anti-racism.” 

 

 

We are also planning a series of social events to make space for networking and fun, despite the virtual conditions. We will share details about these events in mid-May.