On May 15, 2026, the Stanford Center for Law and History will host its eighth annual conference, “Legal History in Times of Crisis.” Our contemporary world is in crisis—on this much, there is widespread agreement. But the nature, scope, and causes of our present crisis—indeed, crises—are subject to fierce debate, whether they be crises of democracy, technology, the rule of law, capitalism, public information and knowledge, local ecology, or global climate. Crisis is, at its roots, a historical concept, deriving from the Greek krisis: a turning point.
The conference will bring together scholars of law and history to examine crises of the past across time periods and geographies, focusing, in particular, on political, economic, and environmental turning points. Topics spanning these three modes of crisis include: turbulent transitions and periods of marked instability, uncertainty, and/or violence; inequalities in the social distribution of crisis; perceptions of crisis; systems and institutions prone to crisis; typologies of crisis; seedbeds for future crises; generative possibilities of crisis; and the utility of history in times of crisis—that is, what good is history during a crisis?
This one-day conference is co-sponsored with the Stanford Department of History.