Stanford Center's Graduate Student Annual Conference Paper Prize

 [We share the following announcement. The deadline is 3 Jan. 2022.]

Stanford Center for Law and History

Graduate Student Annual Conference Paper Prize

The Stanford Center for Law and History invites paper submissions from graduate students for its fourth annual conference, “Legal Histories of Disease.” The conference will explore how the law has historically responded to health crises and what contemporary insights can be drawn from this history. The one-day conference will be held on Friday, April 29, 2022, at Stanford and is cosponsored with the Stanford Humanities Center. Please note that we are planning an in-person event. But recognizing the myriad of uncertainties surrounding the pandemic, we will remain flexible and reconfigure as may prove necessary.

The conference will include three panels followed by a keynote session featuring Professor John Witt of Yale Law School who will take part in a discussion of his recently published book, American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19 with Professor Deirdre Cooper Owens of the University of Nebraska. Areas of possible, but certainly not exhaustive, legal-historical interest for the conference include:

- Disease and the state

- Disease and public health management

- Disease and welfare

- Disease and private health management including intersections between, disease, law, and insurance

- Epidemics, pandemics, and responses to outbreaks in disease

- Disease, immigration, and borders of entry and exit

- Law, race, disability, and medicine

- Disease and segregation 

- Disease and the courts

- Disease and legislative reform

The conference organizers will select one graduate student as the winner of the SCLH Graduate Student Paper Prize to present on one of the three panels. Funding for travel and housing will be provided assuming we are indeed able to move forward with an in-person event as hoped.

The application deadline is Monday, January 3, 2022. For more details and to apply, click here. Please direct any questions to sclh@law.stanford.edu.