Christopher Buccafusco has posted this Call for Papers on Food and the Law.
The field of food studies has grown enormously over the last decade, as evidenced in part by the steadily increasing number of academics and professionals in the humanities, social and nutrition sciences, culinary arts, and hospitality studies who have become engaged in cross-disciplinary conversations about food. Operating in tandem with the explosion of popular fascination with food, these conversations have been joined of late by academics, attorneys, and activists who are particularly concerned with the question of how our relationship to food is, has been, and should be, mediated through law. In response to this emerging area of inquiry, we are soliciting both conference papers and publishable essays that integrate multidisciplinary scholarship in food studies with legal scholarship related to food in existing fields such as agricultural, constitutional, criminal, administrative, tort, intellectual property, and international trade law.
Among the questions we hope to answer are: How might one account for the law’s varying treatment of food over time and/or cross-culturally? What role does law play in shaping cultural ideas about food production, trade, and consumption?
And, inversely, what role does food play in shaping ideas about the law?
Initially we seek papers written from a variety of perspectives appropriate for presentation at one or both of the following conferences: the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities (Suffolk University Law School, Boston, April 3-4, 2009) and the Association for the Study of Food and Society (details for the 2009 conference TBA on the ASFS website). Although we aim to use these panels as a partial foundation for creating the edited collection, we are also happy to consider abstracts and articles from potential contributors who are unable to attend either ASLCH or ASFS. Finished essays should be of a quality suitable for publication with an established university press and reasonably accessible to a multidisciplinary audience of scholars and students of the law, social sciences, and humanities, as well as interested readers outside the academy.
Topics can include, but are not limited to:
Intellectual property rights in food and recipes Prison food, e.g., hunger strikes & force feeding, Nutraloaf Last meals Food torts, e.g. exploding sodas, fingers in chili, coffee in the lap Regulation of food, alcohol, and/or obesity Dietary laws and regulations in different cultures History of dietary laws and regulations Geographical indications of origin Farm subsidies and international trade law Linguistic classification of food, e.g., kosher, 1st Growths, Organic Sumptuary laws Famine and famine aid Labeling, packaging, and branding Rationing Food stamps Ethanol production and the food supply Illegal food production, commerce, and consumption Agricultural nuisance and zoning law Food and environmental law
Please submit a paragraph author’s bio and an abstract of no more than 500 words to Doris Witt (doris-witt@uiowa.edu), Chris Buccafusco (cjb@law.uiuc.edu), AND Amy Dillard (adillard@ubalt.edu). Abstracts for ASLCH are due by Oct. 1, 2008; abstracts for ASFS or for the essay collection alone are due by Jan. 15, 2009. Please indicate clearly whether the abstract is for ASLCH, ASFS, the essay collection, or some combination thereof. Finished essays should be approximately 10,000 words in length and will be due on or before January 1, 2010.
In advance of submitting an abstract, please feel free to contact Doris Witt, Christopher Buccafusco, or Amy Dillard with any questions about the conference panels or the essay collection.
