June 5-8, 2012

Hilton Hawaiian Village

We invite you to participate in the 2012 International Conference on Law and Society:  Joint Annual Meetings of the Law and Society Association and the Research Committee on Sociology of Law (International Sociological Association), co-sponsored by the Canadian Law and Society Association (CLSA), the Japanese Association of Sociology of Law (JASL), and the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA), UK.

The Call for Participation and Submission Site* will be available on October 5, 2011.

Deadline for submission of proposals is December 6, 2011.

Proposals for Individual Papers and Fully-Formed Sessions are welcome.

THEME:  Sociolegal Conversations across a Sea of Islands

Building on a phrase coined by noted Polynesian scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa, our conference theme alludes both to the location of our meeting in Hawai‘i with its complex cultural and legal terrain and contemporary struggles over sovereignty and indigenous rights; and to the uniqueness of this opportunity for scholars from the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, North America, and other world regions to engage in conversation. So we seek papers, panels, and roundtables aimed at stimulating conversations that will build bridges across the seas of law and society and at the same time redirect their currents; about issues and ideas that are at once locally grounded and globally relevant; that seek to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar; that cross national, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries.   

Our theme is broad, encompassing socio-legal concerns both familiar (such as courts and litigation, legal education, health, legal pluralism) and novel (such as indigenous peoples, finance and economy, war and human security, immigration, counter-terrorism, transnational regulation, globalization, and recolonization).  Please see below for a non-exhaustive list of possible topics.  They are examples only.  Other law and society topics are welcome.

We look forward to receiving your submissions. 

LIST OF POSSIBLE TOPICS

• Courts and litigation, including the recent flourishing of new kinds of judicial mechanisms (e.g. constitutional and administrative courts) and the importation of others (e.g. juries and lay judges).
• The training of a highly qualified, independent, and incorruptible judiciary.
• Gender issues in law and society.
• Legal education and the legal profession, the careers of lawyers, and recent trends aimed at reform or transformation of training and credentialing.
• Indigenous peoples, including their connection to such issues as human rights, natural resources, migration, self-government, children, adoption, and identity. The PC encourages papers and panels in which the experiences of native peoples in Hawaii are connected to experiences of indigenous peoples in other world regions, particularly in Asia and the Pacific.
• Religion and law; new theories of secularism; religious and secular law.
• Regulation, including new forms of non-governmental and trans-national regulatory approaches and their relationship to traditional national regulatory mechanisms.
• Health, including HIV-AIDS, healthcare policy, aging.
• Financial markets, trade, foreign investment, and the global impact of the financial crisis in a broad range of areas that are of interest to sociolegal scholars.
• Immigration and the unprecedented flows of workers across national boundaries throughout the world
• Human security, violence, war, dispossession, refugees.
• Security, technologies of security, governmentality, counter-terrorism.
• East-West dialogue concerning different legal orders and models of law; impact of globalization on different legal traditions.
• New concepts of legal pluralism and legal culture in relation to new forms of legal ordering.
• Colonialism, globalization, and recolonization.
• The United Nations and other transnational bodies, especially in relation to global governance, international conflict, and peacekeeping.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

CONFERENCE ADMINISTRATION: The Executive Office of the Law and Society Association will provide central administration for the meeting, which will include: submission procedures, meeting registration, exhibits, accommodation options, meeting schedule, meeting room assignments, letters to support visa application, and other attendance planning matters.

*SUBMITTING A PROPOSAL Both the 2012 Proposal Submission Site and Meeting Registration will be accessible through LSA’s “User Services” Site, requiring just one login account for all meeting services.  Beginning October 4, a link to the submission site will appear in the menu after you log in to “User Services.” (Meeting Registration will be available in early winter.)

We look forward to seeing you in Hawai‘i!

The PEWA HONUA LOGO was created for the conference by MELEANNA ALULI MEYER

Artist's statement: I feel particularly sensitive to the animating energies that define us as people, through the places that we live, the relationships that we cultivate and the intersecting events of our lives. The logo I created for the 2012 International Conference on Law & Society is called pewa honua. The pewa is a traditional Hawaiian butterfly-style patch that was used to repair wooden bowls. I am using the orbiting single pewa shape to decode the larger design and to signify repair on different levels. The first level, represented by the first inner horizontal triangular pewa circle, signifies repair of personal relationships. The second vertical pewa connects the small inner circle of triangles with outer circle of larger triangles and thus represents repair amongst people and nations across oceans. The ocean waves are found in the middle rings between the pewa design, with the circle shape representing the globe, or honua. The center of the design holds the energy of conversation open so all are able to participate; the striped lined going from center extending outward symbolically represent conversations from all eight directions. Radiating hash lines from center outwards represent "conversations across a sea of islands", to honor our beloved poet Epeli Hau‘ofa's inspired words.

About the Artist: MELEANNA ALULI MEYER is a local artist, educator and filmmaker. She received her degree in the arts from Stanford University. She has been a practicing artist her entire professional life, teaching, lecturing and making films. Her dedication is to social justice issues and access to arts education for youth.