Virtual Working Groups
ASLH Themed Virtual Legal History Workshop
Themed Virtual Legal History Workshops provide a space for scholars with common interests to discuss or present innovative work in their fields, and cultivate relationships. The Workshops offer a venue for scholars to form and maintain connections beyond the ASLH Annual Meeting in a context of declining funding and other impediments to travel. You can find the most recent call for workshop applications here.
The ASLH Themed Virtual Legal History Workshops for 2026-2027 have been announced. See the brief descriptions below. For full details on how to apply, click on the link in the title. The organizers of each group will coordinate admission. Applications are due by August 31, 2026.
Law in the Making of Modern Capitalism: Reading Group on Methodological Inquiries (Dana Zuk and Alon Jasper)
This reading group will bring together scholars working on the legal history of capitalism to examine the methodological choices, assumptions, and ambitions that shape research in this field. It will place historians based in history departments, historically trained scholars working in law schools, and legal scholars who use history in doctrinal, theoretical, or normative inquiry in conversation. The purpose of the group is not to resolve methodological and theoretical tensions into a single model of legal-historical scholarship. Rather, it is to make otherwise implicit choices visible and open them to productive examination.
Histories of Law and Technology (Jason Schulman and Kara W. Swanson)
We are delighted to invite legal historians and historians of technology to participate in the “Histories of Law and Technology” virtual workshop during 2026–2027. The group will explore the historical relationship between law and a variety of different technologies, including agricultural, military, industrial, domestic, communication, surveillance, transportation, and reproduction. We imagine historical explorations of key sociolegal concepts such as “technology,” “invention,” and “innovation” that engage not only constitutional law and intellectual property law, but also torts, contracts, and family law (among others), while considering questions of empire, race, Indigeneity, and sovereignty.
Previous Working Groups:
AY 2025-2026
Consent: A Global Legal History (Bianca Premo & Adriana Chira)
This reading group will gather to discuss the global history of consent. Its focus is on historicizing liberal notions of consent and understanding other regimes of assent and refusal in the past. We encourage applications from all scholars, including graduate students, early career scholars, and internationally based scholars. Participants’ expertise might reside in a range of periods, regions, and legal historical subfields, including, but not limited to, the histories of sex; marriage; medicine; healing and the body; crime and punishment; religious conversion; and political participation.
Environment, History, and Law Global Workshop Series (Susan Bartie and David Schorr)
The triangle ‘environment – history – law’ suggests a wealth of opportunities for productive transdisciplinary scholarship: Historical analysis of environmental law, environmental histories of legal change, legal histories of the environment, etc. The workshop will meet approximately every 6 weeks, with a short hiatus from June to August. The workshops will be held online at different times to accommodate a range of time zones. At the workshop we will discuss pre-circulated draft papers. An expert in the area is invited to begin the discussion, followed by general comments and questions from all participants.
Roundtable on Radical Legal Advocacy (Marie-Amélie George and Dan Farbman)
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.