CALL FOR PAPERS: Journal for Digital Legal History invites submissions (DEADLINE: 30 September 2024)

We have learnt of several calls for papers with relevance to the history of international law, insofar empirical or digital methods are used.

Description:

The Journal for Digital Legal History (DLH) is a diamond Open-Access, peer-reviewed international journal hosted by the Open UGent platform. For our second issue, which will be published in November 2024, we are pleased to invite contributions from researchers working on legal history with digital, empirical and computational approaches. The journal welcomes all research questions and outputs at the intersection of legal history, digital humanities and empirical legal studies, broadly defined.

 

In the field of legal history, digital methods are hardly ever the centrepiece of a publication itself, if not downplayed. In 1997, Richard Evans claimed that: 'How we know about the past, what historical causation is, how we define a historical fact, whether there is such a thing as historical truth or objectivity - these are questions that most historians have happily left to one side as unnecessary distractions from their essential work in the archives' (R. Evans, In Defence of History, 1997, p. 9). Nevertheless, in the 21st century, the work of a historian or legal scholar does not stop in the archives. Often, digital or computational techniques are applied in seemingly pedestrian ways, such as "searching" full texts, or they are applied in more elaborate methods to transform the historical facts embedded in our precious archival material or legal documents to answer novel research questions or to explore well-trodden paths from an innovative perspective. 

 

The application of digital techniques to legal history research is often overlooked or omitted from discussions on methodology. We encourage you to highlight the technical tools or methods that proved effective in your research projects without neglecting all the trials and errors that helped structure your final choice of any particular technique. You are welcome to illustrate your work with all forms of outputs, from notebooks to graphs, networks, maps, diagrams, etc.. If you have developed software, a database or a dataset that others could reuse, feel welcome to publish it with us. 

1. 2024 Call for Contributions: continuous call for submissions

 

Submissions that address legal sources from any historical period and any part of the world are welcome. We actively encourage collaborative and multi-authored pieces by authors from different countries working across disciplines. 

We accept publications in English; we can also support German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, but do contact the editorial board in advance. If you wish to publish in another language than mentioned here, please consult us beforehand.

Beyond the following suggestions, feel free to contact us through the DLH website if you have any original ideas that you want to discuss.

 

Topic suggestions 

• Original research articles (up to 10,000 words). 

• Reproduction pieces: Can the results of classic studies be replicated through DLH techniques?

• A dedicated section for your Digital Legal History events: If you are organising a panel, conference, or webinar series that prominently features Digital Humanities performed on legal sources, contact us for a dedicated focus section that will allow you to publish the papers or conclusions of your meeting.

• Shorter focus pieces or provocations (around 5,000 words with fewer footnotes).

• Conference and seminar reports.

• Spotlight articles: inspiration from other social sciences fields on the promising benefits of specific Digital Humanities techniques that could be successfully applied to Digital Legal History.

• Presentations or Reviews of software, databases, datasets, websites, and platforms.

• Tutorials: general presentation, application through a specific study angle (legal linguistics, marginalia analysis).

• Trials & errors: reflections on the productive role of wandering and errors in abandoned, rejected or substantially modified past projects that could help improve the current methodology (inspired by the Journal of Trial & Error). 

Formats

We are open to submissions in traditional and non-traditional formats: from traditional articles to blog posts, from plain text to linked data or hyperlinked texts, from posters to Notebooks, etc.. Illustrations could be included in the form of notebooks, graphs, diagrams, maps, networks, and images.

 

Timeline

Upon receiving your contribution, we aim to publish it within 2-4 months, depending on a positive peer-review. Please send us a short abstract of 150 words, including a provisional title, suggested format and up to five keywords. You can find the detailed guidelines for authors on the journal's website. Please include a short biographical statement for the proposed contributor(s), including the area of expertise, interests, affiliation (if applicable), and any other relevant information. We will respond to all abstract submissions within 14 days (in July and August, this may take a bit longer).

More info: https://openjournals.ugent.be/dlh/

2. Call for Contributions: The Trial and Errors of Grant Applications in Digital Legal History

We are pleased to announce a special call for papers for an upcoming thematic section in the Journal for Digital Legal History. As part of our ongoing commitment to fostering innovation and interdisciplinary dialogue in the field of digital legal history, we invite scholars to submit their successful or failed grant applications that utilize novel methodologies.

In recent years, the intersection of digital humanities, empirical legal studies, network science, and other social sciences has given rise to many innovative research approaches within legal history. However, securing funding for such projects often presents its own set of challenges and opportunities. Through this thematic section, we aim to highlight the grant application process as a crucial aspect of scholarly endeavour in the digital age.

We welcome submissions that explore the following themes:

Methodological Innovation: Successful or failed grant applications that employ novel methodologies in digital legal history research, including but not limited to network analysis, text mining, computational modeling, and data visualization.

Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Projects that demonstrate interdisciplinary collaboration between legal historians, digital humanists, computer scientists, sociologists, and other relevant disciplines, as reflected in the grant application process.

Ethical Considerations: Grant applications that address ethical considerations and challenges associated with conducting research in digital legal history, such as data privacy, algorithmic bias, and the responsible use of digital tools.

Impact and Outreach: Projects that emphasise the potential impact and broader societal relevance of digital legal history research, as articulated in the grant application's outreach and dissemination strategies.

Submission Guidelines:

Manuscripts can be up to 10.000 words. The methodological section of a grant application will be accepted, as long as an introduction is provided, placing the methodology within the wider context of the research project.

All submissions must adhere to the journal's formatting guidelines, which can be found on our website.

Authors should include a cover letter specifying whether the grant application was successful or unsuccessful and any relevant contextual information.

• Submission of your full contribution (of any kind) before September 30th, 2024.

• Peer-review reports before November 4th, 2024.

• Submission of the final version between November 18th - 25th, 2024.

• Appearance on the website – pending positive peer review – two to three weeks after final submission.

3. Call for Contributions: Dedicated "Focus-section: Early Career Digital Legal Historians: Legal History Upside-Down: Novel Methodologies for the History of Law". 

 

We are pleased to invite proposals from researchers and others working with digital legal history in the early stages of their careers for a special section of the Journal for Digital Legal History, which will be published in November 2024. The theme of this section is "Legal History Upside-Down: Novel Methodologies for the History of Law." 

Digital techniques are often not explicitly discussed, and we would encourage you to show us which techniques worked for your research - but we are also open to explaining which techniques failed. You are welcome to illustrate your work with e.g. Jupyter notebooks, R scripts, and excel files,. If you have developed software, databases or -sets that others could reuse: feel welcome to publish with us. 

• Length: Pieces in this section should be 2,500-5,000 words (up to 10,000 words max.). Do also consider alternative formats, such as fully explained Notebooks, posters with additional explanations, linked videos, tutorials, or course outlines.

• We accept publications in English; we can also support German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese but do contact the editorial board in advance. If you wish to publish in another language than mentioned here, please consult us beforehand.

• More info: https://openjournals.ugent.be/dlh/

• Timeline:

• Please send an email before July 1st, 2024, with a short proposal (150 words), including a provisional title and suggested format (and length) for your contribution. Please also include a short biographical statement for the proposed contributor(s), including the area of expertise, interests, affiliation (if applicable), and any other relevant information. We will respond to all submissions within 14 days. Mention in the subject line of the contact form to which CfC you are submitting.

• Submission of your full contribution (of any kind) before September 30th, 2024.

• Peer-review reports before November 4th, 2024.

• Submission of the final version between November 18th - 25th, 2024.

• Appearance on the website – pending positive peer review – two to three weeks after final submission

Consult the Journal for Digital Legal History News section for more info.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Dollar Hegemony, State Sovereignty And International Order: An International Workshop (University of New South Wales, 5-6 December 2024, DEADLINE: 1 July 2024)

Description:

During the past decade, it has become obvious that economic interconnectedness did not bring forth frictionless international relations as many liberal theorists had predicted. To the contrary, the fact that economic integration has been profoundly uneven has enabled the weaponisation of asymmetrical economic relations for the achievement of geopolitical and/or economic goals (Whyte 2022; Farrell 2023). The weaponisation of the unique international role of the US dollar is one of the most consequential examples of this trend. For instance, in the period since 2001, US sanctions designations have expanded by an extraordinary 933%. In the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, dollar hegemony made it possible to freeze Russia’s foreign reserves and expel the country from the SWIFT payments system and US correspondent banking. Many states, including geopolitical rivals of the US such as China, understand this reality as a direct threat to their sovereign rights and interests and have been debating possible solutions, such as the introduction of central bank digital currencies and/or the creation of alternative mechanisms of payments clearing and financial messaging (Eichengreen 2022).

The intertwining between dollar hegemony and private money creation puts additional pressures on state sovereignty, as functions with profound and direct effects on the organisation of public life, such as money creation and credit allocation, are carried out by private institutions. Lawyers and political theorists alike have produced useful elaborations on the effects of dollar hegemony and public money on monetary sovereignty (Pistor 2017; Murau & van’t Klooster 2023). What remains relatively under-explored is the conceptual and practical challenges posed by dollar hegemony to state sovereignty more broadly, beyond the confines of monetary sovereignty. In other words, more work remains to be done on the tensions between state sovereignty, a globalised capitalist economy, and the economic unevenness that hegemonic currencies embody (Tzouvala 2024).

To this end, we seek contributions from economists, IR scholars, political theorists, historians, sociologists and lawyers to explore this important question as well as its theoretical and practical implications. We are interested, amongst other issues, in papers exploring:

1) the material and ideological foundations of dollar hegemony and their effects on state sovereignty and international order;

2) the distributional impacts of dollar hegemony both between states and between classes/factions of classes;

3) the legal rules and infrastructures that enable and challenge dollar hegemony;

4) the historical evolution of dollar hegemony;

5) the interplay between dollar hegemony, private money creation and financial capitalism;

6) institutional and political alternatives to dollar hegemony.

7) public and private experiments with digital currencies and their consequences for state sovereignty.

8) the implications of dollar hegemony and challenges to it for unilateral sanctions.

9) the geopolitics of dollar hegemony;

10) the mutually-sustaining relationship between US militarism and dollar hegemony.

We will explore these and other urgent question in a two-day workshop that will take place on the 5th and 6th of December 2024 at the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia). If interested, please send us an abstract of no more than 400 words and a short bio of no more than 50 words by the 1st of July 2024 at dollarandsovereignty@gmail.com. Limited funding may be available for speakers who do not have access to institutional funding.

Confirmed speakers include: Professor Melinda Cooper (Australian National University), Professor Mona Ali (State University of New York – New Paltz), Professor Will Bateman (Australian National University), Dr Ilias Alami (University of Cambridge), Professor Benton Heath (Temple University), Professor Shahar Hameiri (University of Queensland), Prof. David Blaazer (University of New South Wales), Professor Ryan Mitchell (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Dr Kanad Bagchi (University of Amsterdam).

Organisers: Dr Jessica Whyte (University of New South Wales), Dr Ntina Tzouvala (Australian National University). The event is co-sponsored by the ANU Capitalism Studies Network and the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project Economic Sanctions After the Cold War (FT230100697).

See LPE Project website.

REMINDER CALL FOR PAPERS: 19th ESIL Annual Conference, IG History of International Law Pre-conference Workshop, "Historical Perspectives on Technological Change and International Law" (4 September, 2024, Vilnius, DEADLINE: 22 March 2024)

 

2024 ESIL Annual Conference Technological Change and International Law

Call for Papers:

Historical Perspectives on Technological Change and International Law

The ESIL Interest Group on the History of International Law cordially invites submissions of papers for its upcoming workshop centered on the theme “Historical Perspectives on Technological Change and International Law”. This gathering seeks to unravel the mysteries of technological evolution and its enduring legacy upon the edifice of international law.

We are intrigued by the historical development of various technologies across different spatial and temporal contexts within international law. All papers that delve into the debates concerning technological change in international law or explore the influence of technological change on international law are warmly welcomed.

Centuries have witnessed the inexorable march of technological innovation, each stride leaving an indelible mark on the canvas of international law. Technological change – whatever that may be, but as reasonably defined by an author - has impacted international law, just as international law has responded and evolved in the wake of new technological advancements. New disciplines and fields emerged, and old doctrines and theories disappeared. Novel technologies even prompt the emergence of entirely “new” fields of international law, such as international labor law, international environmental law, and air and space law, contributing to the so-called fragmentation of international law.

History is rife with examples and case studies illustrating the intricate interplay between technology and international law. With regard to the law on the use of force, the requirement for a formal declaration of war has been undermined by the advancement of telecommunications. Technological advancements in weaponry (e.g. chemical and nuclear weapons) have reshaped international humanitarian law. Similarly, the law of the seas has adjusted for innovations in ship-building and seafaring technologies (maps, cartography, GPS). Technology also affects the way and extent to which states project their powers. The limit of three nautical miles no longer defines the limit of the territorial sea now that coastal batteries can shoot beyond this range. The industrial revolution also caused international law to evolve. The inventions of the telegraph and railway required new commercial arrangements, enabled  the expansion of colonialism, and caused a surge of Western investments abroad. For example, in the mid-19th century, the industrial extraction of sugar from beets in Western Europe distorted the international sugar trade for decades, leading to the conclusion of dozens of treaties. Sometimes, an invention causes entirely new fields of international law to emerge. The airplane and space exploration created the need for aerospace law. But sometimes, too, international law fails to catch up with technological changes. For example, the Hague Convention on Explosives from Balloon in 1907 failed to become a general prohibition against aerial bombardments. Such failures to address technological change are equally important moments in the history of international law.

In reviewing the history of technological changes and international law, authors are encouraged to engage in discussions evaluating how international law has both succeeded and failed to accommodate and regulate technological changes. We welcome papers from all methodological perspectives, as long as they address technology and the history of international law.

Papers could address any of the following topics, but also any topic that addresses technological change (reasonably defined by the author) and the history of international law:

•        Governance, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge in international legal history

•        The role of international regulation in the rise of new technologies

•        The influence of new technologies on human rights, both advancing and undermining

•        The impact of technological changes on broader socio-political and sovereign processes

•        How technological changes have affected the development and codification of international law

•        The influence of technological changes on the law of treaties and state responsibility

•        The effects of technological changes on international adjudication

•        The constitutionalization of international law in response to technological changes

•        The emergence of technology-specific international law

•        The impact of technological changes on the laws of war, peace, the use of force, and arms control

•        How technologies have shaped concepts of sovereignty

•        The appearance or disappearance of disciplines, principles, and concepts within international law due to technological changes

•        Case studies of failures to foresee and regulate technological changes in international law.

•        The impact of inventions like the steam engine, railways, and telegraph on international law

We are particularly interested in papers that engage with non-Western perspectives on the historical perspectives on technological change and international law. We welcome submissions from scholars and practitioners at all stages of their careers, and particularly encourage submissions from early-career scholars and scholars from underrepresented regions and perspectives.

The Interest Group is unable to provide funding for travel and accommodation. Selected speakers will be expected to bear the costs of their own travel and accommodation. Some ESIL travel grants and ESIL carers' grants will be available to offer partial financial support to speakers who have exhausted other potential sources of funding.

Please see the ESIL website for all relevant information about the 19th Annual Conference. The Interest Group workshop is open to ESIL members, and all participants are required to register for the Annual Conference. There will be an option to register just for one day to attend the workshop; however, all participants are warmly invited to attend the entire event.

Selected speakers should indicate their interest in being considered for the ESIL Early-Career Scholar Prize, if they meet the eligibility conditions as stated on the ESIL website. The ESIL Secretariat must be informed of all selected speakers who wish to be considered for the Prize before 30 April.

Submissions should include an abstract of no more than 500 words, a short bio of the author(s), and contact information, in Word (not PDF). Abstracts should be submitted by the 22^nd of March, 5 pm (CET) to anastasia.hammerschmied@univie.ac.at. The abstract and bio should be separated to allow for anonymous review by the convenors. The workshop will take place on the 4^th of September (time slot TBA), and will provide an opportunity for participants to engage in a critical discussion of their research and to receive feedback from other scholars and practitioners. Remote participation will be possible, but in-person presence is highly preferred.

Convenors

Anastasia Hammerschmied – Florenz Volkaert - Jaanika Erne – Sze Hong Lam (Ocean)