LatCrit 2025 Biennial Conference - 30th Anniversary Conference

LATCRIT 2025 - 30TH ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE

LatCrit/SALT/ClassCrits Faculty Development Workshop: Thursday, October 16, 2025

Biennial LatCrit Conference: Friday and Saturday, October 17–18, 2025

Denver, Colorado

Established by a diverse group of law professors during a 1995 meeting of the Hispanic National Bar Association in San Juan, Puerto Rico, LatCrit theory, community, and praxis have animated critical interventions in the discourse of U.S. legal scholars, primarily, for the past thirty years. From the start, LatCrit has advanced a vision of hemispheric justice, grounded in the antisubordination principle, wherein global South–North relations provide a critical, comparative framework by which to understand domestic sociolegal conditions. With LatCrit 2025 Call for Papers (July 9, 2025 rev.) Page 2 of 3 a multidimensional analysis of the salient sociolegal dimensions of power, identity, and possibility, the scholar-activism affiliated with LatCrit has attempted to “rotate the center” and “shift the bottom” to cultivate human solidarity and critical coalitions capable of resisting and fighting against the kulkurkampf animus and politics that have cloaked so much of the reactionary neoliberal restructuring of law and racialized political economy at the end of the twentieth century and throughout the first quarter of the twenty-first.

Since our start in 1995, LatCrit conferences, and other convenings, have resulted in over forty law review symposium publications, as well as several books, including Raquel Aldana & Steven W. Bender (eds.), From Extraction to Emancipation: Reimagining Development for Guatemala (Carolina Academic Press and ABA Section of International Law 2018), Francisco Valdes & Steven W. Bender, LatCrit: From Critical Legal Theory to Academic Activism (NYU Press 2021), and Francisco Valdes, Steven W. Bender & Jennifer J. Hill, Critical Justice: Systemic Advocacy in Law and Society (West Academic Press 2021).

Also, the LatCrit Student Scholar Program has supported the aspirations of dozens of students and graduates from social groups that are underrepresented in the U.S. legal academy to become law professors, including a dozen tenured U.S. law professors. Moreover, LatCrit has catalyzed a new discourse of hemispheric justice across Las Américas with longstanding projects like the South North Exchange on Theory, Culture and Law, and new projects encompassing the Curso de Verano Teoría Crítica (held during the summer of the Global South), and a new series of publications in Spanish, starting with Hugo Rojas Corral & Sheila I. Vélez Martínez (eds.), Teoría Crítica del Derecho y Justicia Social en las Américas (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado 2024).

Despite our sustained efforts, rightwing, revanchist, and outright racist elites have funded and orchestrated authoritarian political movements across the world. The 2024 U.S. presidential election being the latest example of a strategic effort to restructure law and society away from the social democratic norms of the midtwentieth century and back to a putatively “originalist” vision of law and constitutionality. Under this vision, the rule of law must protect elite interests while disempowering, disenfranchising, incarcerating, terrorizing, and outright killing people who were “originally” marginalized, exploited, and otherwise subordinated— often under the color of law.

Despite the abyss into which rightwing forces are plunging the world, people of conscience and good faith can stand up together, speak out ethically, and teach truthfully. Together we can bulwark democracy across Las Américas and, indeed, the entire world. Now is the time to confront and discredit the rightwing lies that lead us to Gilead or the Gulag. We must not allow reactionary lies to enshrine a new world order wherein the violence of the January 6th Insurrection becomes unspeakable and unknowable, buried under mimetic lies that pass for truth while the world burns.

Join us in Denver! Now is always the time to advance our “ethical ambition” to realize social relations premised on equality under law, interracial justice, indigeneity, human dignity, and ecology. We need each other, and our seemingly individual struggles are always already connected. Let us embolden each other as we face the fire this time, deploying our distinctive LatCrit 2025 Call for Papers (July 9, 2025 rev.) Page 3 of 3 knowledge and experience, and building cross-sector coalitions across Las Américas, Cemanáhuac, and beyond.

For questions about the conference, please email Professors Marc-Tizoc González, [email protected], or Tayyab Mahmud, [email protected]. For general information about LatCrit theory, community, and praxis, see Valdes & Bender, supra, and https://latcrit.org.

CO-SPONSORS

Critical (Legal) Collective (CLC)

Society of American Law Teachers (SALT)

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Seattle Journal of Social Justice

Revista de Estudios Críticos del Derecho (CLAVE)

Host or Publisher Latina & Latino Critical Legal Theory, Inc. (LatCrit)