Graduate students from all disciplines are invited to participate in the 22nd UBC Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Graduate Conference, to be held at the Peter A. Allard School of Law on May 10–11th, 2018. This conference will offer graduate students a unique interdisciplinary opportunity to engage with contemporary perspectives in law and other disciplines.
The conference theme is “Law and Contemporary Problems“. Today’s world is rapidly being transformed by technological, political, social, and environmental changes. Law must adapt. There are no easy answers, but disciplines outside of law can provide valuable tools and perspectives that law should engage with in order to meet these challenges.
The world faces issues such as the global rise of nationalism, refugee and migration crises, the rise and fall of world powers and the reimagining of North-South relations, the development and use – legal or otherwise – of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. There are also issues in business and human rights, income and wealth inequality, myriad environmental problems including the effects of a rapidly changing climate, the increasing ubiquity of digital technologies and the Internet, transitional justice and even the potential exploitation of natural resources in outer space. Further, law and legal scholarship have changed, often in response to these same world issues: social care law, increased attention to law and the third world, corporate regulation and corporate social responsibility, global insurance regulation, trends in international and domestic tax policies, new regulation of carbon emissions, climate change litigation, transnational climate law, a reemergence of indigenous law, new dimensions in criminal justice, regulation of the urban space, contemporary feminism and other new developments in legal theory.
All of these topics will be a topic of discussion during the event. Please feel free to address any questions to Godwin Dzah, Chair of the 2018 UBC Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Graduate Conference.
Conference’s keynote speaker is Professor Gregory Hagen, Associate Dean of Research and Director of Graduate Programs, Faculty of Law, University of Calgary. The guest speaker is The Honourable Judge Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia.
