Law professors are tasked with, and often produce a significant amount of scholarly publication. However, It is hard finding law conferences of substantial importance in the United States. Usually, law schools will host a yearly symposium, but they are put on by the students on various journals. It is not common that I have been able to find any conferences in the U.S. involving law professors outside of a law school.
I have had luck finding some with a tangential relationship to law, such as “___ Conference on governance,” or “___ conference on human rights,” but largely they are held outside of the U.S., and the people speaking in them are usually degree holders of fields like political science or sociology rather than lawyers.
I also get the impression that people in academia do not consider JD degrees to even belong in the field of research. So, do they belong, or do they not, hence my inability to find ample research and exchange opportunities?
And also as a footnote, since people will probably reference it, I should mention that any type of “SJD or JSD” degree is so astronomically rare and useless that I won’t consider it a real avenue.
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Highly recommend:
https://raceipconference.org/2025/about/
My daughter is working on a D. Juris degree and she made a study based on interviews of actors in the field she is working in. Her professor advised strongly against this and suggested some kind of lazy chair philosophy to ponder the points instead. But she has persisted. Let us see what comes out finally…
> I also get the impression that people in academia do not consider JD degrees to even belong in the field of research. So, do they belong, or do they not, hence my inability to find ample research and exchange opportunities?
JDs, like MDs, in the US are called “professional doctorates” — their equivalent is bachelors or masters degrees (MBBS/LLB) in most places outside the US, and places outside the US that offer the degrees would call them Bachelors level (JD/MD in Canada is considered bachelors level) or masters level (in Australia).
Neither of those degrees has a significant research component and the degrees have minimal research training.
Law (and medicine) research does exist and if you want appropriate training, you’ll get a PhD in Law which is not the same as a JD.
Law is the least popular PhD field at my university, but we do get a couple people per year. It’s also one of the faculties where not all academic staff have PhDs, some have for example an LLM and years of industry experience.
I do work in legal geography and I’ve been to both a legal geography conference and a __ justice conference and they both had a number of legal scholars. Theres a good network of critical legal studies too, especially in the US & UK.
Law and Society Association is hands town the largest academic conference I have ever attended and also the best.
Besides US JDs being a bachelor of laws in disguise, another reason is that law is not a science in the same way physics or sociology are. It is a normative science. A lot, but not all, legal research is doctrinal, it is about how certain sources of law (case law, wording in a statute or contracts) “ought to be” interpreted. That, firstly, makes law a “normative science” rather than a more observational one.
This, secondly, means that legal research produces localized rather than universal knowledge, i.e., country (jurisdiction) specific (except human rights and international law) knowledge. This, in turn, means law conferences will often be local (Dutch private law, German social security law, etc. ). So, having a major conference on all areas of law of all countries is not very valuable as an endeavor – in contrast to more universal topics like physics or sociology. That said, there are still lots of law conferences that cross national boundaries, like the Law and Society ones.
Lastly, law in US academia has this weird quirk that a lot of journals are student edited (I have heard, and read, not experienced) and suffers from being a common law jurisdiction. In civil law countries like France and Germany, law itself has this reputation of being more scientific/systematic as a result of fancy codification projects, etc.
I don’t know if this has already been clarified, or if you understand this already, OP, but a lot of law publications are in law reviews. These should not be considered scholarly publications, as they do not require peer review. As others have pointed out, there are those who do actual research in law (generally those who obtain a PhD in law) who publish in peer-reviewed law journals, which are distinct from law reviews.
There are several quirks of American legal academia that help explain the comparative isolation of law from the rest of academia, and you’ve basically identified both: the non-necessity of having a doctorate, and the predominance of student-edited (and non-peer reviewed) scholarship as the coin of the publication realm. Both of these features tend to be looked down upon by the rest of academia.
For background: I teach at a US law school and hold both a J.D. and a Ph.D. (in political science). I got my Ph.D. after spending some time in legal academia (i.e., I was a legal academic, then spent time in political science, then returned to legal academia), which gave me an interesting outsider-insider perspective on how legal academia was viewed by people who aren’t a part of it. I’ve also published (and continue to publish) in both student law journals and peer-reviewed journals in other disciplines.
Regarding doctorates, it is becoming more common than it was twenty or thirty years ago, but even now only about a third of entry-level law professors have Ph.Ds or equivalent. And while the Ph.D. in law is also becoming more common, in my experience it is still more likely to see candidates with Ph.Ds in related disciplines (economics, political science), compared to a pure Ph.D. in law (the Ph.D. in law programs — not counting the JSD degrees which were mostly geared towards foreign lawyers seeking an American credential — are relatively new. Berkeley’s “Jurisprudence and Social Policy” doctoral program is as far as I know by far the oldest, dating to 1978; Yale’s Ph.D in Law program was launched in 2012).
While it’s generally true that a J.D. curriculum doesn’t do significant scholarly research training, such training is available as one moves into the handful of elite law schools which produce the overwhelming majority of law professors (e.g., Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago). Beyond that, a lot of the acculturation into norms and expectations of scholarly publications occurs via “Visiting Assistant Professor” (VAP) positions, which function as the law equivalent of a post-doc.
And as for student-edited journals, this is a controversial topic in legal academia and it’s quite clear that our colleagues in other departments think we’re nuts (which is a bit amusing, since when they’re not staring agog at us academics in other fields spend most of their time grousing at how broken the peer-review system is). For my part, I’m a qualified defender of the law review system and think it gets a bad rap. There’s a lot of superb scholarship that gets published in law reviews, and also a lot of dreck; there’s also a lot of superb scholarship in peer reviewed journals and a lot of dreck. There are things I write that I think fit better in the former and things I write that fit better in the latter, but I don’t view either as inherently superior. Regardless, for better or worse, the center of scholarly conversation in American legal academia flows through the student journals (when I was interviewing for poli sci/public law jobs, I was very explicit that I intended to keep publishing in student-edited law reviews because that’s where the conversations relevant to my discipline were actually happening. A U.S. political science department trying to hire in public law but insistent that law journal articles don’t count for tenure is going to severely limit its options, and not in a good way).
The result of all this is that the legal academic community can get a bit insular. Other disciplines don’t invite us to their conferences because they barely view us as real professors to begin with. Outsiders don’t attend our conferences because they see the link to student-edited journals (or just the host being a — shudder — professional school) and think they’re not legitimate.
That said, there are lots of great US law conferences (even if we discount the law review hosted symposia). People have already mentioned Law & Society. The Loyola Constitutional Law Colloquium or the National Conference of Constitutional Law Scholars are both well-regarded in my subfield. But ultimately, if you want to imbricate yourself into American legal academia, you have to participate in the structures American legal academia has set up — which means going through law schools and the law reviews.
Worth mentioning that what OP and others identify in this thread is largely unique to the US.
In Europe, at least, law is an undergraduate degree and most law academics at research-focused universities do have PhDs (at less research-focused places you are more likely to find some people teaching without a PhD but with years of professional practice). Law academics here publish almost exclusively in peer reviewed journals rather than student law reviews, and we do have conferences. We also broadly think the US system is odd
youre right US law schools are professional training schools, and a JD isnt equivalent to a phd (as drmonstrated by the woeful state of US legal research) its not an accident that the best and most innovative legal scholarship to come out of the US comes out of geography and sociology departments not law schools!
I’m a legal historian, and I go to many conferences outside of law schools with legal academics. They mostly (but not universally) have a PhD as well – this is more common in legal history than in other fields of legal academia.
The journals are edited by students and they’re totally rando. Like the scholarship is pretty mixed. So it’s not a serious profession with a commitment to building a solid core of knowledge.
Most basic legal research I know has been done by psychologists and sociologists. In psychology there are even “law psychologists” and/of “forensic psychologists” whose entire research program focuses on understanding perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors related to legal parameters and processes. For example, forensic psychology does a lot of work on eyewitness testimony and false confessions.
Certainly there are lawyers and judges who contribute scholarly writing. But often it’s very material about the law and how it should be interpreted (current federal Supreme Court Justice Barrett did a lot of such work (that is biased and right wing)).
Why does it seem like car mechanics are not a field in academia?