Call for Papers: Enforcing Equality? Promises and Limits of Legal Responses to Systemic Inequalities

Inequalities are rising, with social divisions being increasingly presented as cultural, ethnic, religious, or racial, as resulting from unchangeable traces and/or deep historical roots, revolving around essentialist visions of groups of people. This undermines the moral equality of, and solidarity between, individuals that are central to constitutional democracy, and arguably to the very concept of law. The impact on law could not be more pronounced. While legal solutions to combat inequalities had proved in many cases to be insufficient (that many claim is the result of the individualist approach that cannot capture systemic violations resulting from exploitation), even these limited responses have now come under attack in many contexts, including gender and sexual orientation. Documenting and understanding this process can become a part of overcoming this challenge and can lead to new insights and innovative solutions that enable law to address systemic inequalities.

Intersections is committed to publish research at the intersection of various disciplines and is open to studies that present insights from various academic fields on how to address systemic challenges to core human rights commitments. Contributors are welcome to address questions about the limits as well as the true potential of law – both law-making and adjudication – in advancing equality, generally or in specific contexts like segregation, language usage, education, social, economic, and environmental rights; about strategic considerations of advocacy and litigation; the proper framing of claims and notions of victimhood and vulnerability; the challenges of existing legal instruments and practices to empower groups and individuals without a voice; the specific challenges of intersectional violations.

We welcome contributions from lawyers as well as from all fields of social sciences, and works building on experiences from various minority groups like migrants, national minorities, the Roma, or violations based on gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, and class.

We invite scholars to submit an abstract of no more than 800 words including a short bio and the description of the main questions and findings of the paper along with the methodology applied, by 15 April 2018 via our online submission system. Authors will receive feedback from the editorial team by 30 April 2018. The deadline for submitting the final papers is 30 September 2018.

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