LSA Early Career Workshop 2013
The Law and Society Association is pleased to announce the Early Career Workshop to be held Tuesday, May 28, and Wednesday, May 29, 2013, immediately preceding the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. This workshop is for scholars in the early stage of their careers (first three years of initial appointment or in a post doc position) and whose scholarly interests include socio-legal studies in any field.
The Association will reimburse up to $250 for participants traveling from within North America and $450 for participants traveling from outside North America (reimbursement in U.S. dollars) of your expenses to attend the Workshop.
The Early Career Workshop encourages new faculty to move their research and writing toward law-and-society topics, and to further develop their awareness of the field and the scholars working in those areas. The Workshop is structured to focus on methodological approaches to law-related areas of inquiry. The workshop will also highlight the LSA's Collaborative Research Networks (CRNs)—of which there are more than 30—to introduce participants to networks where they may find opportunities and intellectual allies.
The workshop will invite participants to consider the kinds of sociolegal research projects members of the Law and Society Association are involved in. For those trained as lawyers, social science may seem a bit daunting. For those trained in one social science, methodologies from other fields may seem foreign. But for all concerned, seeing how these various methods are used by socio-legal scholars will be edifying and productive. The sessions will be animated by intellectually broad questions such as:
- What are the intellectual approaches and analytical trends that shape the pursuit of certain kinds of sociolegal inquiries?
- If discussions of methodology in law are usually empirical, what does a critical inquiry into methodology of sociolegal research entail?
Workshops will also offer insight into particular empirical research methodologies and will allow participants to learn about methods that they may not have tried before:
- formal modeling and quantitative approaches -- focusing on countable and quantifiable elements of legal phenomena
- ethnographic/qualitative methods -- focusing on experience-based methods of observation and interviewing
- historical/textual analysis -- focusing on the analysis of documents, from archives to cases
In addition, participants will be asked to submit a current working paper or project description in advance of the workshop and will be given individual feedback from faculty in individual meetings (with one or two faculty) during the workshop. The workshop will be structured to allow for informal discussion and networking over meals and during breaks. This year’s planning committee is co-chaired by Eve Darian-Smith, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Michelle McKinley, University of Oregon. Twenty scholars will be selected to participate in the Workshop.