University College London Faculty of Laws is pleased to invite submissions for its 2017 Postgraduate and Early Careers Conference to be held on 30-31 March 2017, at University College London, London, UK.


The conference is designed to provide current doctoral students and recent PhD graduates with a forum to present and discuss their work among academic peers from different backgrounds and legal disciplines. The conference aims to promote fruitful research collaboration between its participants, and to encourage their integration in a community of legal scholars.

Conference Theme

The Conference theme is “The Role of Law in Reconciling Competing Interests”.

Contemporary legal problems create the need to balance competing interests, values, rights, obligations, and freedoms. This Conference will explore the response of the law and legal actors to modern challenges, be it in the context of domestic law and national jurisdictions or in the framework of international law.

The increasing criticism against the fragmentation of legal fields have brought about the need to reconcile public, individual, and international interests. Additionally, the growing focus on States’ obligations to respect and protect human rights and freedoms has too led to a shift in the manner States conduct themselves both in the domestic and international arenas. Yet, given the ever increasing extent of international regulation and concomitant demands on limited financial, technical and human resources, it is not at all clear how these competing rights and obligations ought to be balanced. Furthermore, the mounting pressure on the States to ensure the security of their population brings about the debate over States’ ability to limit other rights and freedoms on behalf of security interests, legitimate as may be.

Relevant papers may concern any field of law

Examples of issues addressed by relevant papers may include (but are not limited to):

  • Human rights and public interest;
  • Necessity and proportionality and other multi-sourced equivalent norms;
  • Constitutional rights and terrorism;
  • Protection of public health and environment in trade and investment agreements;
  • Sustainable development and climate change and commercial activity;
  • Copyrights, trademarks and patent protection;
  • lex specialis and competing domestic or international law norms;
  • Legal theory’s approach to conflicting rights and freedoms;
  • Constitutional rights and the protection of rights absent a written constitution;
  • Balancing of competing interest by adjudicative bodies.

We welcome applications from current doctoral students, both in law and law-related disciplines, and from recent graduates of doctoral programs up to five years since the completion of their PhD. We encourage submissions engaging all disciplines of law.

Selection will be based on the quality of the proposal, as well as its capacity to engage with other proposals in a collaborative dialogue.

The UCL Laws 2017 Postgraduate and Early Careers Conference will select a number of papers presented at the Conference for publication in a special issue of the UCL Journal of Law and Jurisprudence.

All the participants will be offered an opportunity to publish a blog post based on their papers at the UCL Law Journal Blog.

Accordingly, an invitation to participate in this conference will be issued to a participant on the following conditions:

  • The participant agrees to submit an original, unpublished paper between 8,000 words and 12,000 words consistent with submission guidelines issued by the conference conveners;
  • The participant agrees to submit a full pre-conference draft by 10 March 2017;
  • The deadline for submitting papers selected for publication is 15 May 2017.

Interested scholars should email an abstract of up to 750 words along with a short bio in no more than two paragraphs by 25 December 2016 to the following address: [email protected].

Abstracts should reflect papers that have not been published nor submitted elsewhere for consideration for publication.

Successful applicants will be selected by an Organizing Committee and notified no later than 15 January 2017.


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