The organisers of the 2015 Melbourne Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory are pleased to announce plans for the 8th annual Forum, to be held 7th and 8th December 2015. The Forum is a welcoming, collegial and supportive environment that aims to foster intellectual and personal relationships between researchers and to help build a community of new scholars engaging with interdisciplinary approaches to law and legal theory.
This years’ Forum sets out to explore issues of space and law. Law cannot exist in a vacuum – it must be situated within a wider geography: temporal, spatial or cultural. For this years’ Doctoral Forum, we invite PhD researchers to present draft papers representing work engaging with the ways that law occupies physical, theoretical and jurisprudential space.
Examples of the sort of themes that participants might wish to reflect upon include:
- Topological understandings of the boundaries of law
- Mapping the intersections of legal place
- Transitioning from “legal black holes†to bounded spheres of law
As in previous years, this year the Forum will again bring together research students and early career researchers, who in different disciplines and across diverse fields of scholarship engage with the political, theoretical and methodological issues associated with law.
Application Process
The first step is to submit an abstract to the organisers. The word limit for this is 300 words, including author’s name, institutional affiliation and contact information, due 30 September 2015. If your abstract is accepted, you will need to submit a paper of 5,000 – 8,000 words, due two weeks before the Forum. This does not have to be a finalised paper: one of the aims of the Forum is to allow participants to obtain feedback on work in progress, and to test out new ideas in a friendly environment. Abstracts can be sent to law-mdflt@unimelb.edu.au. Bursaries may be available for international or interstate attendees depending on funding.
The Forum
During the Forum, senior academics will provide comments on each paper. After these initial comments, all participants will have the chance to join in the discussion.