2026 Retreat
For the 2026 event, we will hold a morning graduate workshop. Graduate students who study law related topics will work in cohorts of four with two mentors. Each graduate student will have 30 minutes to workshop a develop proposal or paper. Students' travel expenses will be reimbursed up to $400, and we will facilitate hotel accommodations (individual or shared) for those who wish to stay at the UMass hotel.
During and after lunch, we will hold plenaries on Migration and Democracy, Law and Political Representation, and public engagement. Plenary speakers will also serve as mentors during the morning panels. At the end of the event, we will hold a reception for continued conversation.
At this time, we are accepting applications from graduate students interested in the workshop. Please apply here.
Background on Northeast Law and Society Retreat
The New Directions in Law and Society: A Graduate Student and Junior Scholar Workshop was designed with the generous financial support of the Law and Science Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF). We held it virtually in 2021 and in person in 2022. We adapted our programming to the Northeast Law and Society Retreat in 2024.
This event's goals include the following:
- Extend training opportunities to graduate students and junior scholars who are interested in law, politics, and society topics, and can benefit from mentoring by faculty at different institutions.
- Create communication channels among scholars working on similar law, policy, and society problems across disciplines and institutions.
- Promote dialogue to help develop the new concepts needed to analyze unique law, politics, and society problems, and the empirical tools necessary to investigate those problems.
To meet these goals, we create workshop cohorts of 4-5 graduate students and junior scholars, which were paired with two more senior scholars. Graduate students and junior scholars are expected to share an article draft or draft dissertation chapter (up to 10,000 words) with their workshop cohort one month before the conference, all of whom provided constructive feedback on the paper. Workshop sessions focus on the development of individual papers and how the work fits into broader law, politics, and society scholarship.
As part of the workshop, distinguished law, politics, and society scholars participate in plenary panels on the past and future of law and society scholarship. Professionalization panels on grant funding, publishing, and public engagement are also held.