Call for Papers: AALS 2010 Annual Meeting, Law & Computers Section: “Law & Wikis”

By Eric Goldman

[feel free to redistribute this post widely]

Call for Papers on the Topic of “Law and Wikis”

2010 AALS Annual Meeting, New Orleans, Jan. 6-10, 2010

The AALS Section on Law and Computers invites you to submit a request to present on the topic of “Law and Wikis” at the Section’s session at the 2010 AALS Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Annual Meeting will be held January 6-10, 2010; the session’s exact day and time is TBD. Selected speakers must submit a paper to AALS prior to the Annual Meeting for posting to the AALS website; those papers may be accepted for publication in other venues so long as the paper is not published before the Annual Meeting. The Section hopes to place the group of selected speakers’ papers in a to-be-designated law journal.

About the Topic: Wiki technologies offer novel and interesting ways for people to work online collaboratively. The best-known wiki application is Wikipedia, a highly successful website that has generated millions of encyclopedic articles from volunteer contributors. This panel will explore the interaction between law and wiki technologies, including Wikipedia. We are interested in presentations that address any aspect of wikis or Wikipedia. Example topics might include:

* Ownership of content created using wikis

* Who (if anyone) is responsible for ensuring the accuracy of wiki-generated content?

* Wikipedia governance structures

* Should the legal regulation of wikis differ from other Internet communications technologies?

* Wikis and deliberative democracy

* The use of wikis in legal pedagogy

How to Apply: Please email your presentation proposal to the section chair, Professor Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University School of Law, no later than April 6, 2009, noon Pacific time. Email address: egoldman@gmail.com. Your proposal should include your name, professional title, professional affiliation(s), contact information, presentation title, short abstract (less than 500 words please), estimated length of your paper, and (if applicable) any information about the paper’s publication status. Abstracts will be reviewed by a working group of the AALS Law & Computers Section, and selected speakers will be contacted no later than April 25, 2009. Selected speakers must bear their own travel and conference registration expenses.