44th Annual Conference of the
Australian and New Zealand
 Law and History Society

  Call for Papers

Dates: Thursday 27 – Saturday 29 November 2025 (TBC)
 The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Keynote speakers:
Professor Sundhya Pahuja, University of Melbourne 
Professor Andreas Thier, University of Zurich

Conference Theme: ‘Currency’

Currency:

1.  that which is current as a medium of exchange; the money in actual use.
2.  the fact or quality of being passed on, as from person to person.
3.  general acceptance; prevalence; vogue.
4.  the fact or state of passing in time.
5.  circulation, as of coin.
6.  someone born in Australia (opposed to sterling).

(Macquarie Dictionary)

While legal historians look to the past, they are also deeply concerned with currency.  They areinterested in how ideas, stories, legal concepts, and legal doctrines gain and lose currency at different times and in different places. The 2025 conference theme invites consideration of ‘currency’, in every sense, in the context of law and history. 

Some conference streams will focus specifically on ‘currency’ in its monetary sense. As historian Katie A. Moore writes, ‘money has always been socially constructed, historically conditioned, and culturally specific.’ Over the past two decades, interdisciplinary scholarship has increasingly focussed on money, in its political, cultural, legal and material forms. In the field of legal history, this development has coincided with a decisive turn towards transnational and comparative work, including a new attention to imperial legal networks. 

This work has shown how transnational flows of credit and debt supported both the economic and the epistemological projects of empire. Along with bankers, brokers and merchants, colonial lawyers played a central role in facilitating the international and intranational circulation of money.  Through legal innovations such as the joint-stock company, they enhanced settler-colonists’ access to capital.  In this way, they enabled both the generation of colonial wealth and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

This conference invites participants to explore various forms of ‘currency’, including:

• Ideas of legal innovation, modernity and temporality, in different cultural contexts, geographical settings and historical periods;
• The law’s engagement with money, in its material and symbolic forms, and capitalism more broadly; and
• Indigenous peoples’ relationships with financial and legal change, from Invasion to the present.

Call for Paper Guidelines

On behalf of ANZLHS, the Conference Organising Committee cordially invites papers from any period or geographical area, and from all disciplines and fields, including but not limited to law, legal theory, history, political science, indigenous studies, gender studies and law and literature.  Papers are invited on any topic, but the conference organisers particularly welcome abstracts addressing the conference theme of ‘Currency’.  Please note presenters must be members of ANZLHS before their papers are presented.

An Early Career Researcher (ECR) session will be held on Thursday 27 November 2025. If you are an ECR, please indicate your interest in attending the session when submitting your abstract.  Graduate students may apply for Kercher Scholarships to support their attendance at the conference. Please contact the Organising Committee at anzlhs2025@gmail.com by 30 September to express interest in this scholarship.  Graduate students and other ECRs may also wish to enter for the Forbes Society Prize.

The Society’s peer-reviewed journal law&history will consider submissions from those who present papers at the conference.

Registration details and accommodation options in the Melbourne CBD will be advised later in the year.

Abstracts should be no more than 300 words and should be accompanied by a short biography (100 words). Panel submissions are also warmly encouraged. Submissions should be sent to anzlhs2025@gmail.com.

We look forward to receiving your abstracts by Monday 4 August 2025.  Acceptances will be communicated by Monday 15 September 2025.