ClassCrits XIV Conference

DEMANDING JUSTICE IN THE FACE OF RETRENCHMENT: FINDING COMMON GROUND and BUILDING COALITION ACROSS BORDERS

Registration Open! See details here.

When

February 9-10, 2024

Where

Southwestern Law School, Los Angeles, CA

Lodging

Sheraton Universal Hotel

$209 per night plus taxes and fees

Participants must book their own lodging.
Conference hotel rooms must be booked by January 16, 2024

Book a Room

ClassCrits XIV Keynote Speaker

We are excited to announce that Veena Dubal, Professor of Law, UC Irvine School of Law, will be our keynote speaker!

Professor Veena Dubal’s research focuses broadly on law, technology, and precarious workers, combining legal and empirical analysis to explore issues of labor and inequality. Her work encompasses a range of topics, including the impact of digital technologies and emerging legal frameworks on workers' lives, the interplay between law, work, and identity, and the role of law and lawyers in solidarity movements.

Retrenchment and Common Ground

There is no better teacher than adversity. Malcolm X

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall. Che Guevara

He who stands lives; he who sits perishes. Maori proverb.

In light of the challenges we are facing, now is the time to come together. We invite you to help find the common ground between us and work with us to build coalitions.

It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism. Angela Davis

We share the same River of Life. What befalls me, befalls you. Oren Lyons, Onondaga Nation Chief.

Without community there is no liberation . . . Audre Lorde

Environmental Justice

World

WHO estimates that climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths per year between 2030 and 2050. Small island states, such as the Maldives, Fiji & the Marshall Islands, have begun to disappear and may completely disappear within 80 years. Low-income countries and communities are more likely to be exposed to climate change threats.
________

US

People of color make up 56% of the population living in neighborhoods with Toxic Release Inventory facilities, compared to 30% elsewhere.

Workers’ Rights

US

26 States and Guam have right to work laws, which stifle union participation.

The United States’ systemic violations of workers’ rights earns a grade of 4 on Trade Union Confederation’s five-point scale, with a score of 5 representing the worse.
_______

World

Arbitrary arrests & Detentions in 69 countries.

Trade Unionists killed in 13 countries.

Grade 4: Systemic violations of workers’ rights in Venezuela, Australia, Vietnam, Chile, Saudi Arabia, & much of Africa.

Abortion Rights

World

Abortion prohibited for 6% of world’s women (91 M),
prohibited except to save life of mother, affects 22% of world’s women (358 M), and
prohibited except to preserve health, affects 12% of world’s women (186 M).
_______

US

Post Dobbs: Abortion rights at risk of being severely limited or prohibited in 26 states and 3 territories.

Book Bans

US

More than half of US states have banned books as anti-race education and anti-LGBTQ+ laws have spread across the country.
_______

World

Asian countries responsible for almost 44% of book bans worldwide.

Europe: 33.07%
Africa & Australia: 6.61% each

LGBTQIA+ Rights

US: Anti-LGBTQIA+ Bills

All 50 states
Texas—53
Missouri--48
Oklahoma—35
_______

Countries Criminalizing LGBTQIA+

Asia (e.g, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia)
Africa (e.g., Nigeria, Libya, Uganda)
Caribbean & the Americas (e.g., Jamaica, Guyana)
Pacific (e.g., Samoa, Tonga)

Sometimes we need to be reminded that we are all in this together. We are currently in the throes of a retrenchment, marked by an overt White nationalism in the United States and right-wing populism in other parts of the world that has stoked palpable if not overt hostility toward critical ideas that center the experience of marginalized people and/or create solidarity among people to fight injustice and inequality. Backed by global corporate elites, the resurgence of the right was goaded into the open by Donald Trump’s ascendancy in US politics (2016-2020) and other powerful right-wing populists around the world, including Viktor Orbán in Hungary (2010-present), Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey (2014-present), Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (2019-2022), Narenda Modri in India (2014-present), Joko Widodo in Indonesia (2014-present), Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel (2009-2021, 2022-present), and Aleksandar Vucic in Serbia (2017-present). Given the gross disparity in wealth that currently exists in and between countries, the ongoing assault on individual rights in the US and around the world, and the global inability (or simply the lack of willingness) to address climate change and other environmental justice issues- to name just a few of the issues confronting us - the worst may be yet to come.

Proposals

We invite participants to submit applications to present at the 14th Annual ClassCrits conference, to be held at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. We invite panel proposals, roundtable discussion proposals, paper presentations, poetry and fiction reading, and art that speak to this year’s theme, as well as to general ClassCrits themes. We also welcome proposals from law clinicians who engage in activist lawyering as a core part of their curriculum design.

ClassCrits themes include:

The legal and cultural project of constructing inequalities of all kinds as natural, normal, and necessary.
The relationships among economic, racial, and gender inequality.
The development of new methods (including the interdisciplinary study and development of such methods) with which to analyze
and criticize economics and law (beyond traditional “law and economics”).
The relationship between material systems and institutions and cultural systems and institutions.
The concept and reality of class within the international legal community, within international development studies and welfare strategies, and within a “flattening” world of globalized economics and geopolitical relation

Individual Proposals

Individual paper proposals should include a title and short abstract, along with the presenter’s name, contact information, institutional affiliation (if any), and a short speaker bio (1-3 sentences). Individual papers (other than works-in-progress submissions, see below) will be grouped by the conference organizers into panels.

Panel Proposals

Panel proposals may use a variety of formats, including traditional paper presentations, roundtables, and audience discussions. Please indicate the format of the proposed panel, and include a proposed panel title, a short description of the overall topic, and a list of confirmed panelists, with contact information. For panels comprised of individual presentations, please include titles and short summaries of each presentation and a short bio (1-3 sentences) for each panelist or panel organizer.

Works in Progress

We extend a special invitation to junior scholars (i.e., graduate students, aspiring faculty members, or faculty member with less than two years of experience in a full-time position) to submit proposals for works in progress (WIPs). A senior scholar as well as other scholars will comment upon each work in progress in a small, supportive working session. Due to the increasing popularity of our WIPs program, we will be limiting the number of WIPS at this year’s conference to twelve (12) papers. Works-in-progress submissions should be clearly identified as “Work-in-Progress” and should include a title, short abstract, name and contact information, and a 1-3 sentence bio identifying the author’s current status as a student or new or aspiring faculty member. Scholars submitting WIPs who are not selected to workshop their paper may have the opportunity to participate on a regular conference panel. We anticipate selecting WIP papers addressing topics with which ClassCrits members have expertise. Priority will also be given to WIP authors who are committed to the ClassCrits community.

Logistics & Fees

The venue for the gathering is Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, California. The conference will begin with continental breakfast on Friday, February 9, 2024 and continue through the afternoon of Saturday, February 10, 2024. Arrangements are being made for conference hotels.

For updates, please check our website, www.classcrits.org, where you can also sign up as a ClassCrits member to be on our contact list and to post a profile that will build our network and showcase your work. Associate membership is free; full membership dues are $25 for 2024 (includes ClassCrits, Inc. voting rights and 2024 conference discount).

The registration fee is $275.00 for accepted presenters who are full-time faculty members, and $250 for dues-paying ClassCrits members. Registration is free for students and activists. Attendees are responsible for their own travel and lodging expenses.

Fee Waiver

There will be a limited number of full or partial registration fee waivers for participants who for individual reasons cannot afford the registration fee and who do not have access to institutional funding. To request a fee waiver, please complete a fee waiver form. Waivers will be granted on a first come, first serve basis for those eligible, but applications will be accepted no later than December 1, 2023.

Who We Are

Seventeen years ago, a group of scholar-activists organized a series of conversations about law and the growth of economic inequality, both nationally and globally. Building on “outsider” jurisprudence, which moved inequalities of race, class, gender, and sexuality from the margins to the center of law, the group theorized a jurisprudence of law, economic inequality, and class. To foreground economic justice, the group critiqued mainstream law and economic perspectives and focused specifically on economic power and its deleterious effects on the day-to-day lives of poor and working-class people.

Rejecting the neoliberal ideology of scarcity, and reclaiming the possibilities presented by the commons and by collective action, ClassCrits was born. Our name “ClassCrits” reflects our ties to critical legal analysis and our goal of addressing economic class in the multiple intersecting forms of subordination. We confront the roots of economic inequality in divisions such as race and gender and in legal and economic systems destructive to the well-being of humanity and the planet.

ClassCrits Conference Planning Committee and ClassCrits, Inc. Board of Directors

Shelley Cavalieri, University of Toledo College of Law
Antonia Eliason, University of Mississippi School of Law
Victoria Haneman, Creighton University School of Law
Angela Harris, U.C. Davis School of Law & U.C. Davis Center for Poverty Research
Danielle Kie Hart, Southwestern Law School
Lucy Jewel, University of Tennessee College of Law
Thomas Kleven, Thurgood Marshall School of Law
Martha McCluskey, University at Buffalo School of Law (Emerita)
Athena Mutua, University at Buffalo School of Law
René Reich-Graefe, Western New England University School of Law
Lua Kamal Yuille, Northeastern University School of Law