The AALS Professional Responsibility Section invites papers for its program “2024 New Voices Workshop.” The goal of this audience interactive workshop is to provide a forum for new voices and new ideas related to professional responsibility (PR), broadly defined.

Many scholars might address PR without realizing it. We are interested in your potential contributions whether you are an evidence scholar writing about the attorney-client privilege, a feminist interested in gender dynamics that affect lawyering, a critical race scholar commenting on how power plays out in legal systems, an ethicist exploring the moral foundations of the rules governing lawyering, or something entirely different.

Toward that end, we encourage you to submit a proposal even if you are pursuing scholarship on PR for the first time, even if you question whether your ideas really do relate to PR, and even if you are reticent to submit for some other reason.

The selected papers will be presented at the AALS Annual Meeting in January of 2024.

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:

The Workshop will be an opportunity to nurture the growth of a broad scholarly community in the field of Professional Responsibility and Legal Ethics. As such, it is a place to take risks and develop high quality work—test ideas, work out issues in drafts and dialogue with academics doing interesting and cutting-edge scholarship.

We welcome consideration of works in different formats and stages of production. Depending on the stage of your work, the workshop format will differ.

• Some authors may have a full draft paper or substantial outline ready for distribution in advance of the conference. In that case, papers will be allocated sufficient time for authors and participants to thoroughly explore each work. The expectation is that all participants will read and prepare comments on fellow participants’ work prior to the conference.

• For early stage ideas, authors may only have an abstract or one-page treatment for distribution and discussion. In that context, authors and participants will brainstorm around each idea much more briefly than in a typical workshop, making space for a larger number of comments in each session.

Workshop groups will include senior scholars in the field who will aid in the discussion of the pieces and provide feedback. Successful papers and topics, depending on their stage of development, should engage with the scholarly literature and make a meaningful original contribution to the fields of professional responsibility and legal ethics, broadly defined. The format will be determined based on the submissions received and accepted.

ELIGIBILITY: Full-time faculty members of AALS member law schools are eligible to submit papers. Preference will be given to junior scholars. Pursuant to AALS rules, faculty at fee-paid law schools, foreign faculty, adjunct and visiting faculty (without a full-time position at an AALS member law school), graduate students, fellows, and nonlaw school faculty are not eligible to submit. Please note that all faculty members presenting at the program are responsible for paying their own annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses.

PAPER SUBMISSION PROCEDURE:

There is no formal requirement as to the form or length of proposals. Abstracts are welcome. Please email submissions to Executive Committee Member, Ben Edwards (benjamin.edwards@unlv.edu) on or before September 15, 2023. The title of the email submission should read: “Submission – AALS PR New Voices Program 2024.”