2025 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS)
Call for Papers
Panel on “Islamic Law and Social Movements”
Date: January 7 – 11, 2025
Venue: San Francisco, CA, USA
Abstract Submission Deadline: September 9, 2024

The Association of American Law Schools (AALS), formed in 1900, is a non-profit organization of 176 law schools in the United States. The AALS Annual Meeting, held in early January each year, is the largest gathering of law faculty in the world. More than 2,500 law teachers, librarians, and law school administrators from member schools, fee-paid schools, and law schools of other nations attend the gathering.

The 2025 Annual Meeting is scheduled for January 7 – 11, 2025. The theme for the 2025 Annual Meeting selected by President Melanie D. Wilson is Courage in Action.

AALS hosts more than 100 free sections for law school faculty, administrators, and staff that are organized around various academic disciplines, affinity groups, and areas of professional interest. New law faculty are encouraged to join one or more sections and connect with colleagues across the country. Sections also plan most of the programs at the Annual Meeting.

Panel on “Islamic Law and Social Movements”

The Islamic Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), in co-sponsorship with the International Law Section, invites submission of paper abstracts for a panel entitled Islamic Law and Social Movements at the 2025 AALS annual meeting.

The panel will explore the relationship and interconnections between Islamic law and social movements in the past, present, or future. Islamic law often provides contested terrain upon which debates about social and legal issues and advocacy for change are forged. Narratives, conceptions, arguments, debates, and practices of “Islamic law” have played and continue to play diverse roles within social movements in both Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority contexts. The Section invites papers for this panel that examine the ways in which Islamic law is constructed, imagined, mobilized, and debated by or within social movements; the role of Islamic law and discourse on Islamic law in social movements; the ways in which grievances, rights, and demands are framed through Islamic law; the ways in which Islamic law is deployed or negotiated in movement lawyering or in legal strategy; and the relationship between Islamic law and community formation, identity formation, or mobilization. Papers from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to legal studies, including law, sociology, anthropology, politics, and history, are welcomed. The Section particularly encourages submissions focused on the conference theme, “Courage in Action.”

Paper abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent to Dana Lee (dlee@law.uci.edu) no later than Monday, September 9, 2024. The Section welcomes submissions from academics at all levels: tenured, pre-tenure, non-tenure track, fellows, visiting assistant professors, adjunct professors, graduate students, etc. You do not need to be based at a law school to submit a paper proposal. Note that presenters will be expected to pay the membership and registration fees to attend AALS.

More information on: The Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School