The Graduate Law Students’ Society & the UBC Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Graduate Conference Organizing Committee present the 26th Annual Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Graduate Conference: Is Law the Answer? Engaging the Law’s responses to difficult modern questions.
Submission deadline: March 2, 2026. Send abstracts to allardgraduateconference@outlook.com.
For enquiries, please contact: Sopuruchi Christian at sopuru10@student.ubc.ca.
Call for Abstracts: 26th UBC Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Graduate Conference: Is Law the Answer?
The Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia (UBC) is proud to invite graduate students from all disciplines to participate in the 26th UBC Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Graduate Conference, titled: Is Law the Answer? This conference will be held on May 7-8, 2026, in Vancouver, Canada. Vancouver is on the unceded, ancestral, and occupied territorial lands of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish Nations.
The Conference provides graduate students and junior scholars with an opportunity to showcase their research, discuss ideas, receive feedback on works in progress, and network with peers. In response to the multiplicity of global events in the past few years, we invite abstracts from any discipline that aligns with the conference theme: Is Law the Answer? The theme should be interpreted broadly.
The world faces profound challenges that have immediate and far-reaching implications for human societies. Addressing them requires rigorous, interdisciplinary engagement and innovative thinking across methods, disciplines, and forms of communication. Key questions we must answer concern the role of law in addressing these challenges: Have we asked law to do too much or too little? Has the importance of legal change been overestimated, or underappreciated? This conference seeks to foster dialogues of this kind as we work toward sustainable and equitable futures.
Published Volume with the Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice
The conference organizers are collaborating with the Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice to publish a special conference volume. The Windsor Yearbook is a peer-reviewed, well-established, and highly regarded journal in the field of access to justice and critical legal scholarship.
If you would like your submission to the conference to be considered for inclusion in this volume, please indicate your interest in your email. Further information about the editorial process, peer-review requirements, formatting guidelines, and timelines following the conference. This opportunity is subject to publisher approval and standard academic review processes.
Submission Guidelines
Submissions should include:
- The title of the paper or project, a 250-word abstract in English, the author’s name, email address, institutional affiliation, and;
- An up-to-date CV.
We welcome submissions from current graduate students and junior scholars (no more than three years post-graduation). Submissions from JD or LLB students may also be considered.
We welcome abstracts on any topic that speaks to this conference theme. A list of suggested areas includes (but is not limited to):
- TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law), Indigenous law and theory, anticolonial studies
- Public International law, transnational law, and human rights
- Environmental law, climate justice, climate emergency, food resiliency
- Feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, intersectionalities, coalitional spaces
- Law and political economy, Law and economics
- Law and literature, law and the humanities, language and the law
- Criminal law, criminalization, criminal justice, abolition, penal reform
- Law and public health
- Law and public policy
- Private Law, ESG principles, business and human rights
- Social justice, movement lawyering, advocacy and the law
- Socio-legal studies
We especially encourage abstracts that demonstrate creative, critical, and forward-thinking research. We welcome abstracts that engage with innovative research methods, such as visual methodologies, participatory approaches, arts-based methods, ethnographic fieldworks, online or digital research, mixed qualitative/quantitative approaches, comparative legal methods, or socio-legal methods.
We also welcome abstracts from applicants who wish to present in a format other than a panel presentation, such as through film, visual art, an interactive workshop, or a poster presentation. Please indicate, along with your abstract, how you intend to present your work.
Please send submissions by email to allardgraduateconference@outlook.com with the subject line “Submission_[First Name]_[Last Name]” by March 2, 2026. Please combine your paper abstract and CV into one file before sending it to us. Please ensure that your attached document conforms to the file name convention: “[First Name]_[Last Name].”
Applicants will be notified via email if they have been offered a place at the conference by March 16, 2026. Successful applicants must register and pay the $120 (CAD) conference registration fee by May 3, 2026. The Graduate Law Students Society will be hosting a welcome dinner on the evening of May 6, 2026. You will find an option to register for the welcome dinner at the time of registration.
For any questions or enquiries, please contact the Conference Organizing Committee at sopuru10@student.ubc.ca.
