Applications are now open.

The Stanford Center for Law and History will invite paper submissions from graduate students for its seventh annual conference, “Native Legal Histories: Methods, Sovereignties, and Identities.” The Native nations forcibly included within the United States have had complex and nuanced legal histories. This conference will explore histories of both Indigenous law and Native encounters with U.S. law to better understand Indigenous communities’ legal experiences and understandings.It will bring together scholars of law and history to examine Indigenous legal histories across a range of venues and themes. Focusing, in particular, on questions of methods, sovereignties, and identities, the conference seeks to consider how the growing and robust field of Native legal history might help us to reconsider familiar narratives of law and its past.

This one-day conference will be held on Friday, April 11th, 2025, at Stanford Law School. It will include four panels and a graduate student lighting round with breakfast and lunch provided. 

Areas of possible, but not exhaustive, legal-historical interest include:

Methodologies in Indigenous Legal History

Native Peoples and the Courts

Sovereignty and Tribal Law 

Treaties and Constitutions  

Indigenous Identity and the Law 

SCLH’s goal is to bring together faculty, postdocs, and students for workshops, conferences, and lectures examining the relationships between law and history, broadly defined. With these goals in mind we encourage submissions from scholars working across disciplines.

The conference organizers will select one graduate student as the winner of the SCLH Graduate Student Paper Prize. This student will present on one of the three conference panels. Funding for travel and housing will be provided.

Application Requirements:

• CV
• Paper abstract (500 words or less)

Applications closed on January 31st, 2025. Please direct any questions to sclh@law.stanford.edu.