SLS Conference

Call for Papers 2025

2 – 4 September 2025,
University of Leeds

CALL FOR PAPERS

Call for Papers 2025

The 2025 Society of Legal Scholars’ annual conference will be held at the University of Leeds, from Tuesday 2 to Thursday 4 September and will be an in person event.
All speakers will be required to present in person. However, we will also endeavour to allow speakers unable to attend due to ill-health or travel restrictions to present virtually. Please ensure you make a note of this when submitting your paper.

Those presenting do not need to be members of the Society, although we encourage those eligible to be members to join. The Best Paper Prize and Best Paper Prize by a Doctoral Student at the conference are only open to fully-paid-up members. For more information on becoming a member visit the SLS website.

The allocation of subject sections between the two halves of the 2025 conference is as follows:

Subject Sections at the University of Leeds – #SLSLeeds25

Section A:
Tuesday 2 & Wednesday 3 September

Section B:
Wednesday 3 & Thursday 4 September

Comparative Law

Company Law
Banking & Financial Services Law
Energy Law
Contract, Commercial & Consumer Law

Health Law

Criminal Law and Criminal Justice
Intellectual Property
Cyberlaw
International Law
Environmental Law

Labour Law

EU & Competition Law

Legal History

Family Law
Legal Theory
Human Rights

Media & Communications Law

Legal Education
Migration and Asylum
Practice, Profession and Ethics

Public Law

Property & Trusts
Private International Law
Tax Law

Remedies and Restitution

Torts

Torts

Section A:
Tuesday 2 & Wednesday 3 September

Comparative Law

Banking & Financial Services Law
Contract, Commercial & Consumer Law
Criminal Law and Criminal Justice
Cyberlaw
Environmental Law
EU & Competition Law
Family Law
Human Rights

Legal Education

Practice, Profession and Ethics
Property & Trusts
Tax Law

Section B:
Wednesday 3 & Thursday 4 September

Company Law
Energy Law
Health Law
Intellectual Property
International Law
Labour Law
Legal History

Legal Theory

Media & Communications Law
Migration and Asylum
Public Law
Private International Law

Remedies and Restitution

Torts
There will be no theme for the conference in 2025; we hope this allows for real creativity in the ways we, as legal scholars, can explore our subject and the viewpoints we take on it and we look forward to a substantively and methodologically diverse and engaging range of papers across the wide spectrum that is our common subject of law.
However, we will be picking up again on themes from the 2023 conference at Oxford Brookes University and explore ways in which our work and our scholarship can inform the public good, public policy and public discourse. As legal scholars none of us wish our work to disappear into the aether unnoticed. We do the research we do and the scholarship we do precisely because we want it to make some sort of difference.
We will also pick up on themes from the 2024 conference at the University of Bristol and continue to explore the ways in which scholarship and legal research has become ever more interdisciplinary as we seek to grapple with ever more complex and varied local, national and international challenges. Inevitably those things are linked. We want to make a difference and increasingly that can best – or only – be done by engaging critically, even before we start, both with other disciplines and with those we hope will read and take notice of our research – the “research user” in the dreaded jargon.

The SLS provides a positive inclusive environment for legal academics at whatever stage of their career to engage with each other and learn valuable lessons from a diverse and inclusive community of legal scholars. Doctoral students are very welcome and are encouraged to submit papers for consideration in the Subject Sections Programme.

If you are interested in delivering a paper or organising a panel, please submit your paper abstract or panel (maximum of 3 speakers) details by 11:59pm UK time on Friday 4 April 2025. All abstracts and panel details must be submitted through the Oxford Abstracts conference system which can be accessed using the button below – and following the instructions (select ‘Track’ for the relevant subject section).

SUBMIT AN ABSTRACT

If you registered for Oxford Abstracts for last year’s conference, please ensure that you use the same e-mail address this year if that address remains current. For those whose papers are accepted, the original submission offers the facility to upload a full paper nearer the time, but this is not mandatory.
Those wishing to present a paper should submit a title and abstract of 300 words. Those wishing to propose a panel should submit a document outlining the theme and rationale for the panel and the names of the proposed speakers (who must have agreed to participate) and their abstracts. Sessions are 90 minutes in length and so we recommend panels of a maximum of three speakers, though the conference organisers reserve the right to add speakers to panels in the interests of balance and diversity.
As the SLS is keen to ensure that as many members with good quality papers as possible can present, we discourage speakers from presenting more than one paper at the conference. When you submit an abstract via Oxford Abstracts you will be asked to note if you are also responding to calls for papers or panels from other sections.
After the calls for papers close, there is extensive liaison between Convenors and the Subject Sections Secretary to try to ensure that papers of sufficient quality can be accommodated within the programme, even if in a different subject section from that to which the paper was originally submitted.

Decisions on papers and proposals being included in the programme will be released by the end of Friday 2 May 2025. All speakers will then need to book and pay to attend the conference and will have to register for the conference by Friday 13 June 2025 (more information on ticket prices is available here) to secure their place within the programme.

This year we will also continue to offer support for attendance via our additional support fund those with special circumstances or in financial hardship warranting funding. Priority for support will be given to applicants who have no other source of funding.

If you do have any queries on the call for papers, please email Sarah Byrne on slsconference@mosaicevents.co.uk or call +44 (0) 1904 702165.

Please contact the Secretariat:

SLS 2025 Conference Secretariat
c/o Mosaic Events
Tower House
Mill Lane
Askham Bryan
York
YO23 3FS

Tel +44 (0) 1904 702165

Email: SLSconference@mosaicevents.co.uk

Please note the SLS Treasurer and SLS web team are unable to answer questions relating to the conference.

Contact us: