Find the full schedule and attendee list for PLSC 2024 here.
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS:
Privacy Law Scholars Conference 2024
The Program & Planning Committee of the Privacy Law Scholars Conference invites abstract submissions for the 17th annual conference (PLSC 2024) to be held in person on Thursday and Friday, May 30 and 31 at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC.
What is PLSC?
PLSC is a paper workshop conference. It offers no opportunity or obligation to publish. The goal is to provide support for in-progress scholarship related to information privacy law. To do so, PLSC assembles a wide array of privacy law scholars, policymakers, and practitioners who engage in scholarship. Scholars from non-law disciplines—including but not limited to surveillance studies, technology studies, feminist and queer studies, information studies, critical race studies, social sciences, humanities, and computer science—are critical participants in this interdisciplinary field. We follow a format in which a discussant, rather than the author, introduces and leads a discussion on a paper. There are no panels or talking heads; attendees read papers in advance and offer constructive feedback as full participants in the workshop. Having your paper accepted is NOT a requirement for attending and contributing to the conference, and indeed many attendees do not present a paper.
What do we mean by “Privacy”?
The boundaries of privacy as a discipline are dynamic and contested. Although PLSC emphasizes the law of privacy, concepts from other fields play critical roles in our understanding of privacy and in shaping the law. For example, the following topics have received significant attention at previous PLSCs: the concept of “cyber civil rights”, algorithmic governance and discrimination, police practices such as predictive policing, political/social/cultural dimensions of data-intensive technologies, and privacy’s unique importance to marginalized populations, among many more.
Both in the substance of scholarship and in the governance of the PLSC, we are committed to building an anti-racist and anti-subordination scholarly community around privacy law. We are dedicated to incubating scholarship that examines the intersections of technology, law, and policy and its ability to dismantle–or entrench–social hierarchies of all kinds.
How to submit an abstract?
You will be asked to provide your name, institutional affiliation, and contact information, as well as the same information for all co-authors, if applicable. The core of your submission is an abstract of 500-700 words that explains the main contributions of your paper and how it relates to the existing relevant scholarly literature. See below for more information about your abstract. You must then include a bibliography in a separate box; this does not count toward the 500-700 word limit. Note that this is not a list of professional references; it is a bibliography, a list of sources that you are using in your submission. Finally, you must select up to three (3) keywords that apply from a list provided. This is essential to categorize your work and assign appropriate commentators.
What should be in my abstract?
Your abstract should include enough specific information to enable the PPC to appreciate both the genesis of your project and the nature of its contribution to the field. Your abstract should show your awareness of the existing relevant literatures and explain how your work relates to those literatures, such as how it expands upon them, makes connections between them, or differs from them. That said, we understand that part of the benefit of workshopping a paper at PLSC is to get advice on scholarly literatures. A typical law review abstract will generally be insufficient for submission. Please note: If your own prior work is part of a literature to which your abstract refers, the abstract should refer to your work in the third person–e.g. “As Smith argued in (2019),” rather than “my/our work published in the XYZ law review” or “my/our work presented at last year’s PLSC.” PLEASE NOTE: Abstracts that violate this rule and reveal the identity of the author(s) will be rejected. Abstracts that are not accompanied by a bibliography will be rejected. Abstracts that are below 500 words and above 700 will be rejected, as well. There is no option to upload papers or materials.
Award Consideration
If your submission is accepted and you would like to be considered for PLSC’s paper awards, your draft paper must be submitted on time. No exceptions.
Key dates:
Abstracts due:
January 29, 2024
by 11:59 PM Pacific time, no exceptions
Notification of acceptance:
Approximately February 23, 2024
Full workshop paper drafts due:
May 10, 2024.
Registration: You can register for PLSC 2024 here. PLSC is free for students (JD, Masters, and PhD students) invited by the conference hosts and/or volunteer to help staff the conference, and students and post-docs whose submissions are accepted and will be workshopped.
Hotel Reservations: Our hosts have arranged for sets of discounted hotel rooms in Washington, DC.
What if my research is sponsored or funded?
In many disciplines, research is funded by grants. Any funding and sponsorship must be disclosed, and there is a space in the abstract submission portal to do so. We will not accept papers that are subject to pre-publication review/veto by a sponsor, or those where the sponsor controls the content of the paper. We require a conflict of interest statement on scholarship.
Please email info@privacyscholars.org if there are any questions or concerns.
PLSC Program Committee