Unsettling Territories: Tradition and Revolution in Law and Society

What began with a breakfast meeting in 1964 has become a global tradition. 2024 marks the 60^th anniversary of the Law and Society Association. This year’s annual meeting returns to Denver, the site of the Association’s first summer institute on social science methods in legal education.

The annual meeting marks more than an anniversary for law and society. 2024 is also the 60^th anniversary of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 – a landmark antidiscrimination law enacted 100 years after Black Americans in the Colorado territory first petitioned for the right to vote – and the termination of the Bracero program that powerfully shaped U.S. immigration policy.  2024 also stands out as the 100^th anniversary of the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, which established the U.S. Border Patrol and banned immigration from Asia. The year 1924 also saw the enactment of the U.S. Indian Citizenship Act, which declared that all non-citizen Native Americans within the United States were citizens.

LSA’s return to Denver, Colorado is an opportunity to reflect on these themes. Settlers dispossessed Colorado’s Indigenous Peoples of their lands, including through official policies of violence. Colorado also witnessed displacement of Hispano settlers. Today, more than 40 Native nations maintain relationships with Colorado lands, the drying Colorado River Basin makes visible the existential threat of climate change, and Colorado’s shifting politics underline the uncertainty of the 2024 election.

Taken together, these histories and our host site highlight law’s roles in settling territories of all kinds, both physical and ideological. As a movement, law and society has the power to understand these roles and potentially to unsettle them. We invite papers on the colonial, political, and environmental territories of law and society, the promise and threat of unsettling them, as well as other themes within the long and by now storied tradition of law and society scholarship.