Reclaiming Constitutional Law: Limiting Executive Power Overreach, Expanding Shields

CLC is soliciting paper abstracts from interested workshop participants. Abstracts are being accepted now through April 21, 2025. 

Abstracts should describe briefly the author's engagement with a critique of constitutional law doctrine, teaching materials and pedagogy that identifies shortcomings in the development and understanding of constitutional law. Authors are encouraged to brainstorm and develop alternative materials and insights to influence constitutional law pedagogy in the future in ways that enable professors and students to fully appreciate the complexity of constitutional law theory and practice through the lens of critical theory. 

Abstracts should be no more than 250 words. Your abstract should be submitted on or before April 21, 2025, using the quick form, below.

Workshop presentations may be considered for publication by the UCLA L. Rev. Discourse (maximum 10,000 words). 

PLEASE PROVIDE: PAPER TITLE AND ABSTRACT; REQUEST FOR HOTEL ROOM: AND REGISTRATION VIA THE QUICK FORM.

Please submit the registration form on or before April 21, 2025.

The two-day workshop concerns a longstanding critique that legal materials and pedagogy decontextualize the development and understanding  of law generally,  and Constitutional Law in particular. This has been compounded by the current government actions as well as recent Supreme Court decisions. This workshop is an ongoing series to brainstorm and develop a set of alternative materials and insights for teaching constitutional law, including web-based materials, art, music and  projects.

Possible presentation topics and tentative program:

Friday — Executive Power Overreach

--The Unitary Executive - the new King (or the Emperor's New Clothes)

--Executive Orders as Law

--Dismantling the Administrative State

--Congress's Responsibility for Executive Overreach

--Structural Limits on Executive Overreach as Protection for Individual Rights

Saturday — First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment Shields

--First Amendment

--DEI restrictions as content-based/view-point based & Hate Speech

--Academic Speech and Government Speech

--Restricting gender ideology

--Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment Shields

--Invigorating equal protection

--Resisting originalism and challenging history and tradition

--Rethinking pregnancy and gender

The Critical Legal Collective (CLC) is a group of legal scholars representing some of the many intellectual formations affiliated with critical legal theory — including, Critical Race Theory, Asian American Legal Scholarship, ClassCrits, Critical Legal Studies, Feminist Legal Theory, eCRT, Indigenous Law and Policy, Jurisprudence of Distribution, LatCrit, Law & Political Economy, Third World Approaches to International Law, and more. CLC promotes a more inclusive, democratic, and just society through scholarship, teaching, and advocacy that reckons honestly with past and present structural oppression. CLC's mission is to build partnerships, projects and power to advance critical knowledge and action in education, in pursuit of the promise of multiracial democracy with equal justice for all.

FORTHCOMING APRIL 22