The West Coast Law & Society Retreat has issued a call for panel proposals for its 4th retreat to be held at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles on February 11-12, 2011:

Building on the success of retreats at Berkeley (2005), Hawaii (2008), and Stanford (2009), the fourth retreat will continue our community’s effort to cultivate research, conversation, and engagement on a range of issues that affect our scholarship, teaching, and service.

The purpose of the retreat will be threefold: (1) to discuss substantive questions emerging at the leading edges of the law and society field; (2) to discuss the state of the field as an academic discipline; and (3) to discuss the role of law and society scholarship in identifying and shaping dialogue around new legal challenges. We will be especially concerned with emerging challenges to our profession in a time of significant change in public and academic life. A latent — but very important — purpose is to get to know each other, find out what people are doing, and form new social networks. Even though we are all in the same geographic area, more or less, the distances are great. Social distances can also be a problem. The Retreat is designed to break down barriers.

Please send your panel ideas by October 1 to program chair Michael McCann (Washington).