Methodologies Symposium 'Law is but let me explain it once more'
24-25 September
Newcastle University, UK
At Newcastle Law School, we have a history of engaging law and legal methodologies through diverse approaches, including doctrinal, critical, socio-legal, interdisciplinary and heterodox.
To mark the creation of our new research group focused on legal methods and methodologies, we invite you to join us for a symposium inspired by W.H Auden's poem Law, Like Love, where we will be exploring and discussing the ways we can approach legal research and think beyond the discipline/disciplining of legal thought and law. Accepted presentations will have the opportunity to be published papers in a special issue of the North East Law Review in 2026.
Call for papers
We welcome presentations and proposals that explore diverse, plural, interdisciplinary, critical, decolonial, anti-colonial and socio-legal methodologies alongside mainstream and doctrinal legal approaches. We welcome papers that may speak to the following themes:
- Law as/and poetry
- Law as embodied, lived, performed
- Law and sound
- Law and protest/resistance
- Law as/and storytelling
- Legal histories, the archive and memory
- Utopias/dystopias
- Dissident bodies and voices and the law
- Alternative judgment writing
- Law and the nonhuman/posthuman/more than human
- Law and space/ legal geographies
- Legal temporalities
- Alternative justice projects
- Abolitionist methodologies
- Lore, custom, myth and tradition as law
- Law as technology, law and technology
- Decentring law/anti-law
As well as papers that examine the use of podcasts and social media/ new technologies as a space for legal, socio-legal and academic knowledge production.
.png)
If you would like to take part, please submit an abstract (200 words max) by 7 July 2025 to law.research@newcastle.ac.uk. Non-standard paper formats also welcome.
Participants to be confirmed by 31 July 2025, with programmes circulated in early September 2025. We hope to have funds to support early career participation, although this will be confirmed at a later date. Please let us know if this applies to you.