On April 11, 2025, the Stanford Center for Law and History will host its seventh annual conference, “Native Legal Histories: Methods, Sovereignties, and Identities.” From time immemorial to recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, the Native nations forcibly included within the United States have had complex and nuanced legal histories. This conference will explore histories of both Indigenous law and Native encounters with U.S. law to better understand Indigenous communities’ legal experiences and understandings.
This conference will bring together scholars of law and history to examine Indigenous legal histories across a range of venues and themes, focusing particularly on questions of methods, sovereignties, and identities. It examines how the growing and robust field of Native legal history might help us reconsider familiar narratives of law and its past.