Yale Law School is proud to host the Ninth Annual Doctoral Scholarship Conference, to be held on November 8-9, 2019, in New Haven, Connecticut. The conference provides doctoral students and recent doctoral graduates with a forum to workshop, present, and debate their work. It seeks to promote quality research and to facilitate meaningful academic dialogue, with a view towards fostering a community of legal scholars.

The conference is open to all current doctoral candidates, in law or related disciplines, and to those who completed their doctoral degrees during the 2017-2018 or 2018-2019 academic year. The participants will be selected through a blind review process, in which reviewers will receive only the applicants’ abstracts and gender information. The selection will be based on the quality of the abstracts and their capacity to provoke thoughtful debate with other submissions. It will also aim at composing gender-balanced panels. Applications should be submitted through the online form.

This year’s conference is divided into four workshops that will run in parallel, each with around eight participants. The workshops will cover papers in “International Law”; “Public Law and Institutional Design: Assemblies, Executives, Courts, Agencies”; “Law & Economics, Network Theory, and Policy”; and “Law and Philosophy”. You may find a description of each workshop in the conference’s Call for Papers. We welcome the submission of papers that use a variety of methodologies, including scholarship that is interdisciplinary, empirical, doctrinal, comparative or historical.

The purpose of this breakdown into workshops is to allow enough time for each paper to be thoroughly workshopped and receive comments from scholars who are well versed in the academic field in which each paper is situated. Authors will be expected to offer a brief, ten-minute introduction to their paper followed by an intensive workshop-like discussion. Participants will be expected to attend all conference events, read other participants’ work in advance, and come prepared to comment on and discuss all papers presented in their respective workshop. We anticipate that the conference will be the beginning of a longer-term collaboration amongst participants.

All participants will also have an opportunity to attend several receptions, keynotes and workshops by Yale Law School faculty to get to know one another, advance their professional development and socialize.

The Doctoral Scholarship Conference is generously sponsored by the Graduate Programs Office at Yale Law School. We regret that we are unable to provide financial support for travel and accommodations.