CRITICAL LEGAL CONFERENCE 2026

The 2026 Critical Legal Conference takes place at a moment of institutional unravelling and re-composition. Law schools, universities, courts, nation states, and international legal orders are no longer the primary or exclusive sites through which norms are articulated, stabilised, or enforced. Their authority is increasingly fragmented, contested, or bypassed – often displaced into supranational, global, private, or hybrid forms – while new forms of governance are being assembled elsewhere. 

​

Digital technologies – AI systems, blockchain infrastructures, platforms, standards, automated decision-making systems, and contractual architectures – are actively producing new protocols of governance and bespoke jurisdictions. These protocols do not simply implement existing rules. They organise interaction, distribute authority, pre-structure decisions, and shape collective outcomes. They increasingly determine who can act, who decides, who bears risk, and how responsibility and legitimacy are assigned. 

​

Technology is not treated here as a separate object of regulation. Instead, these systems are understood as practical arrangements through which governance is now built. Protocols make visible how authority is delegated, how decisions are automated or constrained, and how governance operates without stable sovereign centres – often through private ordering, hybrid public–private frameworks, and infrastructure-led rule-making. 

​

In this context, protocol refers not only to technical standards or rulebooks, but to the conditions under which coordination happens. Protocols set thresholds, triggers, roles, permissions, incentives, and exit options. They are operational, provisional, scalable, and often opaque. They increasingly function as the backbone of economic, social, and political life – whether through markets, platforms, data systems, or community-led infrastructures. 

​

The conference approaches normativity not as something imposed only by formal law, but as something that emerges through systems, practices, technologies, institutions, and collective arrangements. Protocols stabilise certain ways of acting and relating, while excluding others. They make some futures easier to reach – and others harder or impossible. 

​

As traditional legal forms lose their monopoly, normativity becomes a shared design space: something that can be built, automated, outsourced, captured, contested, or reimagined. The question is no longer only how law reacts to technological change, but how protocols are already doing the work of law – often faster than legal institutions can respond, and frequently without established safeguards or accountability mechanisms.

 

The conference understands panels, sessions, and workshops themselves as protocols of encounter: not just spaces for presentation, but environments for collaboration, disagreement, experimentation, and joint problem-solving. 

​

Protocols asks not whether law will survive current transformations, but how governance is already being built – and who gets to participate in shaping the protocols that increasingly organise collective life. 

​

Why participate? 
This conference is for people who are not only analysing governance, but actively shaping it. It brings together academics, technologists, policymakers, lawyers, designers, founders, artists, and community organisers who want to think – and build – together. Participants will have the opportunity to test ideas, work across disciplines, contribute to shared outputs, and engage with others facing similar challenges in building fair, workable, and accountable governance infrastructures. 

​

PROOF OF CONCEPT (PoC) is a format in which participants come together around a problem or an initial idea, and work with others to develop a tangible concept, structure, or prototype that can be tested or further developed. 

Every stream can include any mode of participation (proof of concept, performing bodies, works of text). For PoC sessions, we invite:

 

• Problem-driven, practice-oriented contributions that begin from a concrete social, legal, technological, or ecological problem (e.g. gender injustice, environmental harm, failures of governance, data extractivism).

• Collaborative, workshop-style formats in which participants collectively develop responses across disciplines and practices.

• Conceptual, technical, or institutional prototypes, including governance models, legal or quasi-legal frameworks, financial or incentive structures, or technological architectures.

• Iterative and open-ended processes that move beyond critique towards creative construction, even if outcomes remain speculative or in-progress.

​

Proposals can be submitted by individuals or groups: you may propose a problem or idea without having a full team and use the PoC stream to attract collaborators across fields; equally, you may join an existing stream to contribute your expertise. 

PoC streams are intended as open, interdisciplinary spaces of co-creation, welcoming participants across backgrounds and practices – including those working in or beyond law, the humanities, sciences, technology, design, and activism – where participants bring and combine their different skills, forms of knowledge, and experiences to create alternatives to the status quo. 

 

Stream proposals should be sent to CLC2026@westminster.ac.uk by 27th April 2026.