The Forum’s objective is to encourage the work of scholars recently appointed to a tenure-track position by providing experience in the pursuit of scholarship and the nature of the scholarly exchange. Meetings are held each spring, rotating at Yale, Stanford, and Harvard. Twelve to twenty scholars (with one to seven years in teaching) will be chosen on a blind basis from among those submitting papers to present. One or more senior scholars, not necessarily from Yale, Stanford, or Harvard, will comment on each paper. The audience will include the participating junior faculty, faculty from the host institutions, and invited guests. The goal is discourse both on the merits of particular papers and on appropriate methodologies for doing work in that genre. We hope that comment and discussion will communicate what counts as good work among successful senior scholars and will also challenge and improve the standards that now obtain. The Forum also hopes to increase the sense of community among American legal scholars generally, particularly among new and veteran professors.

Each year the Forum invites submissions on selected legal topics. For the upcoming 2017 meeting, the topics will cover the following areas of the law:

• Antitrust
• Bankruptcy
• Civil Litigation and Dispute Resolution
• Contracts and Commercial Law
• Corporate and Securities Law
• Intellectual Property
• International Business Law
• Private Law Theory and Comparative Private Law
• Property, Estates, and Unjust Enrichment
• Taxation
• Torts

A jury of accomplished scholars with expertise in the particular topic will choose the papers to be presented. There is no publication commitment, nor is previously published work eligible. Yale, Stanford, or Harvard will pay presenters’ and commentators’ travel expenses, though international flights may be only partially reimbursed.

QUALIFICATIONS: There is no limit on the number of submissions by any individual author. To be eligible, an author must be teaching at a U.S. law school in a tenured or tenure-track position and must not have been teaching at either of those ranks for a total of more than seven years. American citizens or permanent residents teaching abroad are also eligible provided that they have held a faculty position or the equivalent, including positions comparable to junior faculty positions in research institutions, for less than seven years, and that they earned their last degree after 2007. We accept jointly authored submissions, but each of the coauthors must be individually eligible to participate in the Forum. Papers that will be published prior to the meeting in June 2017 and papers authored by Stanford, Harvard, and Yale Law School junior faculty are not eligible.

PAPER SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: Electronic submissions should be sent to Stephanie Basso with the subject line “Junior Faculty Forum.” The deadline for submissions is Friday, February 17, 2017. Please remove all references to the author(s) in the paper. Please include in the text of the email a cover note listing your name, the title of your paper, and under which topic your paper falls. Each paper may only be considered under one topic. Any questions about the submission procedure should be directed both to Professor Richard Thompson Ford and the forum conference coordinator, Stephanie Basso.

FURTHER INFORMATION: Inquiries concerning the Forum should be sent to Gabby Blum or Holger Spamann at Harvard Law School, Richard Thompson Ford at Stanford Law School, or Christine Jolls or Yair Listokin at Yale Law School.