News & Announcements

July 30, 2025

Virtual Working Group: Roundtable on Radical Legal Advocacy (a reading, writing, and discussion group)

We are gathering a group of historians, legal scholars, and practitioners to participate in an iterative process of discussion, collaboration, and research on the topic of the history of radical legal advocacy. The ultimate goal of these meetings is some form of collective/collected writing–likely a book, although possibly a special journal issue. We hope to draw in participants who have worked or are interested in working on the subject of legal advocacy in relation to social movements and radical politics across time periods, geography, and subject matter. Although radical politics is generally associated with the political left, we encourage those studying the right to join the conversation.

The format of the workshops will be exploratory. The group will meet virtually every other month, beginning in September 2025 and continuing through May 2026, with the expectation that participants will attend most/all of the meetings. Meeting dates/times will be set based on the group members’ availability. One of the roundtable’s primary aims is to gather people working in this area together so that we can define the outlines of the field of inquiry and begin to define some common questions and methodologies. To further that goal, we will spend the initial meeting(s) discussing the historical, historiographic, and methodological questions that are framing our research. Later, we will discuss shared readings and workshop works in progress.

To Apply: We invite those interested in joining the group to apply by sending a brief (one to two paragraph) explanation of your interest and description of your work to Marie-Amélie George (georgemp@wfu.edu) and Dan Farbman (farbman@bc.edu). To the extent you have any practice experience that is relevant to the field, please include that in your message. We will select participants based on level of interest and field of study, so as to gather a group that represents the broadest range of inquiry possible. Applications are due by August 22, 2025. We will notify selected participants by September 1, 2025.

We encourage graduate students, early career scholars, international scholars, and practitioners to apply and hope that you will share this call broadly to your networks. If you know of anyone who would be a good fit for the gathering, we also welcome emails with suggested names, so we can reach out to potential participants directly.

Convenor Biographies:

Marie-Amélie George is a Professor of Law at Wake Forest University, where she has taught since receiving her PhD in History from Yale University in 2018. George is the author of Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition (Cambridge University Press 2024). Her scholarship on queer legal history and contemporary LGBTQ+ rights has appeared in numerous law review articles, peer reviewed pieces, and op-eds. George is a three-time recipient of the Dukeminier Award, which recognizes the country’s most influential sexual orientation and gender identity scholarship. In 2025, the AALS Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues recognized her with its Inclusive Excellence Award. She is currently writing an article on radical legal advocacy during the AIDS crisis, which she plans to expand to a book project on a legal history of AIDS. She is a lifetime member of the ASLH and can be reached at georgemp@wfu.edu.

Dan Farbman joined Boston College Law School in 2017. He teaches classes on constitutional law, local government law, movement lawyering, inequality, and legal realism. His research focuses on the legal history of radical reform movements in public law from both an institutional perspective and the perspective of the practice of cause lawyering. Farbman’s work has been published in the California Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, Fordham Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Yale Journal of Law and Humanities. He is currently working on a collective history of abolitionist lawyers and lawyering in the United States between 1820-1865. Before earning his Ph.D. in American studies at Harvard University, he was a clerk for Judge Margaret Morrow on the Central District of California in Los Angeles and a Skadden Fellow at Advancement Project in Washington, D.C. In this role, he worked with community organizers around the country on grassroots efforts to fight racial injustice in public education, with a particular focus on the school to prison pipeline. Farbman is a lifetime member of the ASLH and his email is farbman@bc.edu.