Call for Contributions
Diversity of interests, values, identities, and ways of life is evident throughout social life, whether in ad hoc encounters between individuals, in organisations, in states, or in world affairs. Law has traditionally been seen as essential to ordering a world characterized by diversity, providing frameworks that enable coexistence and cooperation despite deep differences. Legal systems may recognize diversity, but also constrain or even suppress it. They may provide a framework for equality or equity, but also draw upon difference to justify hierarchy, inequality, or exclusion. At a more fundamental level, law itself emerges from diverse traditions and cultures, consequently reflecting different approaches to managing diversity.
Engagement with diversity has acquired new urgency. Alongside a concerted pushback against the agenda of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, we observe the aggressive assertion of difference via ideas such as multipolarity and national or cultural exceptionalism. We invite you to cooperate in a multi-perspectival examination of how the law recognizes, frames, and orders diversity, how diversity shapes the law and its evolution, and of legal diversity (pluralism), both within societies and in the international sphere. Themes to be explored can be found across all areas of investigation covered by researchers in the Max Planck Law network. Without seeking to exclude other themes and topics, we see two main angles on the topic:
(1) Examples of diversity as a perspective in legal research may include feminist and decolonial approaches, themes such as non-discrimination, migration, ethnic diversity and multiculturalism, access to justice, or the representation of diversity within the legal system at both national and international levels. Another area where the protection of diversity is an explicit legal concern is environmental law and the protection of biodiversity.
(2) Analysing law as a means to manage human diversity is an established perspective across private, public and international law. Revisiting it seems appropriate in times where the relevance and function of law in this respect is challenged and transformed.
Please click here for a longer version of this call, including suggestions for how your research area may be linked to the conference theme.
We invite proposals for contributions to the conference theme from all researchers at the nine Max Planck Institutes in our network, from PhD students to Directors. Contributions can take one of the following forms:
- an individual presentation of 15–20 minutes, to feature in the Research Showcases section of the conference;
- a panel, seminar, or workshop organized by a Department or Institute to feature in the Departmental and Institute Showcases section of the conference.
Please send proposals, including an abstract of no more than 500 words, to petersson@law.mpg.de before your summer break if possible and by 31 August at the very latest. Registration for the Conference will open in early July.