Registration is now open for the UK’s Critical Legal Conference (CLC), to be hosted this year on Kent’s Canterbury campus by a team of academics from Kent Law School.
With a theme of ‘Turning Points’ the annual gathering of international legal scholars will take place from Thursday 1 to Saturday 3 September 2016, exactly 30 years after the first CLC conference was held at Kent.
Law Lecturer Nick Piska, a member of the organising CLC committee, said: ‘This year we want to open a forum for reflection on the precarious political situation of the present for individuals, for markets, for nations and particularly for Europe in a global context – a theme particularly apposite for a conference at University of Kent, which both founded the CLC and is ‘the UK’s European University’.
In addition to 20 conference themes and 200 papers organised into around 70 panels over the three days, plenary speakers include:
- Donatella Alessandrini, Kent Law School
- Paola Bacchetta, Berkeley
- Kathleen Davis, University of Rhode Island
- Isabell Lorey, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies
- Davide Tarizzo, University of Salerno
- Patricia Tuitt, Birkbeck School of Law
A copy of the conference programme is available to view online.
The CLC conference was first launched at Kent in 1986 and this year’s organisers have unearthed a number of early CLC documents in the Kent Law School archive including documents relating to the formation of the CLC and a copy of the Call for Papers in 1986.
Anyone wishing to attend is invited to register online – those wishing to attend the conference dinner on Friday 2 September (at Westgate Hall in Canterbury) are asked to register by Wednesday 12 August.
The CLC is characterised by its informal spirit – it has no overarching organisational structure, and each year the conference meeting decides where it will be hosted the following year. Each year the conference chooses where the next CLC will be held and the next hosts choose the general theme of the conference, with recent examples being ‘law and the political’; ‘reconciliation and reconstruction’; and ‘the gardens of justice’.
Image credit: A Constructed World, Nature Dance, 2013. Synthetic polymer paint, chroma key video paint, inkjet print on transfer paper on canvas, 200 x 355 cm