The Law and Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop will be held at Penn Law School in Philadelphia, PA, on June 2 and 3, 2019.
The paper competition is open to untenured professors, advanced graduate students, and post-doctoral scholars in law and the humanities. In addition to drawing from numerous humanistic fields, we welcome critical, qualitative work in the social sciences. Based on anonymous evaluation by an interdisciplinary selection committee, between five and ten papers will be chosen for presentation at the June Workshop. At the Workshop, two senior scholars will comment on each paper. Commentators and other Workshop participants will be asked to focus specifically on the strengths and weaknesses of the selected scholarly projects, with respect to subject and methodology. The selected papers will then serve as the basis for a larger conversation among all the participants about the evolving standards by which we judge excellence and creativity in interdisciplinary scholarship, as well as about the nature of interdisciplinarity itself.
The selected papers will appear in a special issue of the Legal Scholarship Network; there is no other publication commitment.
The Workshop will pay the domestic travel and hotel expenses of authors whose papers are selected for presentation. For authors requiring airline travel from outside the United States, the Workshop will cover such travel expenses up to a maximum of $1000.
Papers must be works-in-progress that do not exceed 15,000 words in length (including footnotes/ endnotes); most papers selected for inclusion in recent years have been at least 10,000 words long. An abstract of no more than 200 words must also be included with the paper submission. A dissertation chapter may be submitted, but we strongly suggest that it be edited so as to stand alone as a piece of work with its own integrity. A paper that has been submitted for publication is eligible for selection so long as it will not be in galley proofs or in print at the time of the Workshop; it is important that authors still be in a position at the time of the Workshop to consider comments they receive there and to incorporate them as they think appropriate in their revisions. We ask that those submitting papers be careful to omit or redact any information in the body of the paper that might serve to identify them, as we adhere to an anonymous or “blind” selection process.
Submissions (in Microsoft Word—no pdf files, please) will be accepted until December 1, 2018, and should be sent by e-mail to: juniorscholarsworkshop@sas.upenn.edu. Please be sure to include your name, institutional affiliation (if any), and phone and e-mail contact information in your covering email, not in the paper itself.
For more information, please send an email inquiry to juniorscholarsworkshop@sas.upenn.edu.
Humanity thrives on the emergence of new generations: each one adds fresh perspectives, new ways of thinking, and changes values, institutions and practices. At times of rapid change on a global scale, new generations are vital in all fields of science and technology. However, global change lays bare the tensions between generations and raises major questions for justice between generations: How can we make the environment safe for generations to come? How do we integrate and include first and second generations of migrants? How diverse should our legal and justice institutions be? What does a just distribution of welfare between generations look like? How are generations linked in the digital revolution that will affect justice systems globally? How are younger generations given a voice and stake in decisions about their future? How are older generations protected in times of rapid social change? 
