Vulnerability and the Law: Multidisciplinary Perspectives - Call for Abstracts

From climate breakdown and algorithmic bias to shrinking social safety nets – vulnerability is a defining feature of our time. Yet while the concept is widely used in legal and policy debates, its meanings, applications, and implications are anything but straightforward. Who defines vulnerability? How does it shape legal responses, access to justice, and institutional reform? And how can law respond meaningfully to vulnerability in an age of environmental crisis, digital transformation, and disrupted welfare state?

On Friday 14 November 2025, the symposium Vulnerability and the Law: Multidisciplinary Perspectives will take place in Maastricht. The event is organised by The Netherlands Association for Philosophy of Law (VWR) and the Dutch-Flemish Law & Society Association (VSR), and is hosted by the Maastricht Centre for Law & Jurisprudence (MCLJ). This one-day symposium brings together scholars working across disciplines to explore how vulnerability functions as a concept, a condition, and a call to action in legal research and practice. 

We welcome both legal-philosophical inquiries – examining how vulnerability challenges dominant ideas of autonomy, rights, and justice – and socio-legal approaches that investigate how legal systems structure, mitigate, or exacerbate vulnerability and lived experiences of precarity and exclusion. 

We invite short abstracts (up to 150 words) for 10-20-minute presentations on one of the following themes:

1. Vulnerability and Climate Change
2. Vulnerability and Digitalisation

3. Vulnerability and the Responsive State

Contributions may be theoretical, empirical, or practice-oriented, and we especially welcome interdisciplinary approaches and critical perspectives. We particularly encourage early-career scholars and practitioners from law and other related disciplines to apply.

Please submit your abstract, including a title, five keywords, your name and institutional affiliation, by 22 September 2025 by clicking on the green box on this webpage mentioning "Abstract Registration". In your submission, please describe how your presentation would fit under one or more of the three themes mentioned above. Applicants will be notified by 29 September 2025.