Call for Papers: Vol. 22 (2) Law and History in South Asia
The Socio-Legal Review (SLR) is currently inviting submissions for Volume 22 (2), a special issue on ‘Law and History in South Asia’. The issue will be published in late 2026. The deadline for submission is 15 March 2026.
About the SLR Journal
SLR is a peer-reviewed, bi-annual journal that encourages interdisciplinary research at the intersection of law and social sciences. It is an open-access, student-run journal published by the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru. First published in 2005, the journal has carried articles by luminaries in the field of law and society and has been cited by the Supreme Court of India on two instances.
Volume 22 (2) : Special Issue on ‘Law and History in South Asia’
Legal history has been a site of growing interest in academic research and public discourse. In recent times, there has been a shift away from earlier pre-occupations with more formal and doctrinal approaches in relation to studying law’s archive to wider and more creative interpretations of methods and sources. In other words, there has been a reframing of the ‘legal archive’ within the larger context of socio-legal scholarship.
In an article for the 20th anniversary special issue of the Socio-Legal Review, legal historian Elizabeth Lhost wrote that ‘critical legal histories turn the typical stillness of the archive into stories of mess and misrule’. Such studies on the intersections of law and history do this by paying careful attention to sources other than statutes and reported court judgments and including government archives, court transcripts, litigation records, petitions, print media, cultural symbols, oral histories, and so on. The recent ‘material turn’ in legal history has generated interest in the long journeys undertaken by the ‘law’ when it is mediated through multiple actors such as judges, lawyers, legislators, litigants, activists, and record-keepers in quotidian legal meaning-making.
Drawing from histories of law which situate it as both a site of oppression and emancipatory possibility, critical legal history asks questions of the varied interpretations of, engagements with, and uses of law by people, communities, and institutions and interrogates how these processes imbue law and legal institutions with evolving and contextually specific meanings. Moving beyond the centrality of the colonial state in the study of law and modernity, it is interested in how law was conceptualised across different fora and space-time contexts, by turning to legal pluralism, and regimes of law in pre-colonial and post-colonial South Asia. It is concerned with how one makes sense of the rhetoric of ‘decolonisation’ in public discourse around the law and legal systems, by interrogating the colonial genealogies of law in contemporary India. Recognising the intrinsic relationship between historical material and legal precedent, it asks what it means for courts to adjudicate claims relying on contested historical and archival material in their judicial reasoning.
We, at the Socio-Legal Review, are interested in investigating these questions by publishing new scholarship on South Asian legal history. We are keen to amplify voices from the margins of caste, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and region. We invite Articles, Notes from the Field/Archives pieces, Case/Legislative Comments, and Book Reviews.
For details regarding our submission categories, editorial policies, and submission process, please refer to the Submission Guidelines. In case of any questions, please write to slr@nls.ac.in.
