Call for Papers: History, Law and Reproduction: New Challenges for Legal History, 1 May 2026
In legal studies, the engagement with history can often be restricted to using history as background or context for a given study. Historical precedents tend to be referred to in a decontextualised manner. And legal historians are commonly perceived as those working on ancient legal sources (Sandberg 2022).
In this workshop we seek to address the following questions:
• Why does history matter for the legal study of reproduction?
• Does the legal historical study of reproduction pose specific methodological and theoretical challenges?
• Are socio-legal and feminist legal scholars shaping legal history?
The workshop will bring together a selected group of researchers to present work-in-progress papers at the intersection of law, history and reproduction. Legal history is not tightly defined, and diverse forms of engagement with historical sources/questions/context within the legal study of reproduction is strongly encouraged. While the papers need not explicitly address the questions above, they provide a framework within which discussions will proceed.
We invite contributions, especially from early career researchers, located at this interface.
We particularly encourage submissions that:
• Address methodological and/or theoretical questions
• Engage with little-known legal contexts, in terms of both time and place
• Adopt feminist and/or decolonial approaches.
The workshop will take place at the University of Bristol Law School on 1 May 2026, from 1-4 pm.
Please send an abstract (max 500 words) and a bio (max 200 words) to Dr Elena Caruso (elena.caruso@bristol.ac.uk) and Dr Gauri Pillai (gauri.pillai@bristol.ac.uk) by 15 December 2025. Selected participants will be informed by 7 January 2026.
The deadline for the full paper (5,000- 8,000 words) will be 1 April 2026.
For more details, refer here
