PROTOCOL: WORKS OF TEXT
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 normativity is 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 law and governance are being assembled elsewhere. Digital technologies – AI systems, blockchain infrastructures, platforms, standards, and automated decision-making architectures – are actively producing protocols of governance and bespoke jurisdictions. These protocols do not merely implement rules: they organise encounters, distribute authority, pre-structure decision-making, and shape collective futures. They operate as formats through which power, responsibility, value and legitimacy are newly arranged. Yet technology is not treated here as a discrete object. Rather, these systems are understood as crystallisations of a broader transformation in what law is, how it operates, and where its institutional force now resides – making visible the redistribution of authority, the delegation of judgment, and the emergence of normative infrastructures without stable sovereign centres.
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In this context, protocol names not only a standardised procedure, a fixed rulebook or technical script. More fundamentally, the protocol refers to distributed conditions of encounter, with or without stable institutional anchors. Protocols are formally minimal yet normatively dense: they establish the parameters and conditions of coordination – such as thresholds, triggers, endpoints, roles, and relations – through which distribution, automation, consensus, delegation, command and collaboration can take place. Protocols are operational, provisional, iterable, often opaque, and increasingly function as the infrastructure of social, economic and political life.
The conference approaches normativity as ontological: not simply as a set of rules imposed from above, but as something that emerges through relations between bodies, technologies, institutions, imaginaries, and material conditions. Protocols perform cuts into this wider field of normativity, temporarily stabilising particular ways of living together – while foreclosing others.
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As law’s traditional formats lose their monopoly, normativity itself becomes a frontier space: something to be captured, automated, designed, contested, or collectively reimagined. The question is no longer only how law responds to technological change, but how new protocols are already doing the work of law – frequently through private ordering, contractual infrastructures, and delegated authority – often without law’s grammars, safeguards, or modes of accountability.
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The conference understands panels, streams, and sessions themselves as protocols of encounter: not merely sites of presentation, but settings designed to generate events – moments where methods collide, assumptions fail, and new alliances form.
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Protocols asks not whether law will survive these transformations, but how normativity is being reformatted – and who gets to participate in composing the protocols that increasingly govern collective life.
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Every stream can include any mode of participation (works of text, performing bodies, proof of concept). For sessions employing the textual mode, we invite:
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Textual work broadly conceived.
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Writing that experiments with form (fiction, poetry, personal essay, code).
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Audio papers, prerecorded (if made and presented there and then, consider Performance mode).
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Collaborative papers including work in progress and open discussions on themes.
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Stream proposals should be sent to CLC2026@westminster.ac.uk by 27th April 2026.