Global Meeting on Law and Society

We live in a paradoxical era. On the one hand, the world has become unprecedentedly mobile. Capital, data, goods, and ideas flow across the globe with increasing velocity, while human beings are on the move as never before—as tourists, students, laborers, digital nomads, and, most urgently, as refugees and asylum seekers displaced by conflict, climate change, and economic precarity.

On the other hand, this hyper-mobility encounters an equally powerful counterforce: the
hardening of boundaries. Around the world, wall-building has resurged, border surveillance has expanded, and complex legal architectures have proliferated to filter, channel, and restrict movement. In this struggle, law occupies a central position, often invisibly. It draws the lines, creates the categories, and ultimately determines who can move, where they can go, and on what terms.

The conference theme, Law in Motion: Reimagining Mobility, Boundaries, and Belonging, directly confronts this tension. Emblematic of law and society scholarship, the conference urges researchers to examine law as a dynamic force that is both constituted by and constitutive of movement and to question the concepts that underpin our legal world. What constitutes a “boundary” in the 21st century, when digital borders and biometric databases are as formidable as physical walls? How is “mobility” itself stratified, creating hierarchies of travelers and migrants? And how does law construct “belonging”—not just through formal citizenship, but in the interstitial spaces of temporary visas, precarious statuses, and transnational communities?

We invite scholars from law, sociology, anthropology, political science, geography, history, and beyond to investigate the intricate interplays among official law, social norms, and the mobile human experience. At the same time, we welcome submissions that do not speak to the conference theme but nevertheless forge interdisciplinary dialogues about law from all corners of the world. We look forward to welcoming you to Hong Kong!