Law-STEM junior scholar conference. Papers wanted!

INAUGURAL JUNIOR FACULTY FORUM FOR LAW AND STEM

University of Pennsylvania Law School, Philadelphia, PA

October 6-7, 2017

 Call for Papers

 

 The Northwestern, Penn, and Stanford Law Schools are pleased to announce the creation of a new Junior Faculty Forum dedicated to interdisciplinary scholarship focusing on the intersection of Law and Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics (STEM).  

The forum will be held each fall, rotating among Northwestern, Penn, and Stanford.  The inaugural forum will be held at Penn Law in Philadelphia on October 6-7, 2017.  The forum is currently seeking submissions from junior faculty interested in presenting papers at the forum.  The deadline for submissions is Friday, June 9.

Twelve to twenty young scholars will be chosen on a blind basis from among those submitting papers to present.  One or more senior scholars, not necessarily from Northwestern, Penn, and Stanford, will comment on each paper.  The audience will include the participating junior faculty, faculty from the host institutions, and invited guests.

Our goal is to promote interdisciplinary research exploring how developments in STEM are affecting law and vice versa.  Preference will be given to papers with the strong interdisciplinary approaches integrating these two areas of study.

The Forum invites submissions on any topic related to the intersection of law and any STEM field.  Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• Artificial intelligence
• Assisted reproduction
• Autonomous vehicles
• Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies
• Computational law
• Customized medicine
• Epigenetics
• Genomics: Human and Non-Human
• Machine learning and predictive analytics
• Nanotechnology
• Neuroscience
• Online security and privacy
• Regulation of online platforms
• Robotics
• Smart contracting and automated analysis of legal texts
• Stem cell research
• Synthetic biology

A jury of accomplished scholars with expertise in the particular topic will select the papers to be presented.  Suggestions of possible commentators are also welcome.

There is no publication commitment, nor is previously published work eligible for presentation.  Northwestern, Penn, and Stanford will pay presenters’ and commentators’ travel expenses, though international flights may be only partially reimbursed.

QUALIFICATIONS: To be eligible, an author must be teaching at a U.S. university in a tenured or tenure-track position and must have been teaching at either of those ranks for no more than seven years.  American citizens or permanent residents teaching abroad are also eligible to submit provided that they have held a faculty position or the equivalent, including positions comparable to junior faculty positions in research institutions, for no more than seven years and that they earned their last degree after 2007.  We accept jointly authored submissions so long as the presenting coauthor is individually eligible to participate in the Forum and none of the other coauthors has taught in a tenured or tenure-track position for more than seven years.  Given the novelty of this Forum, the organizers reserve the right to accept submissions in exceptional cases that fall outside the strict eligibility criteria.  Papers that will be published prior to the meeting in October 6-7, 2017, are not eligible.  Authors may submit more than one paper.

PAPER SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: Electronic submissions should be sent to CTIC with the subject line “Law-STEM Junior Faculty Forum.”  The deadline for submission is Friday, June 9, 2017.  Please remove all references to the author(s) in the paper.  Please include in the text of the email a cover note listing your name, the title of your paper, and the general topic under which your paper falls.  Any questions about the submission procedure should be directed both to Professor Christopher Yoo and the email account for the Forum conference coordinator at [email protected]. 

FURTHER INFORMATION: Inquiries concerning the Forum should be sent to David Schwartz at the Northwestern University School of Law, Christopher Yoo at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, or Mark Lemley at the Stanford Law School.