Participants are sought for a virtual roundtable at the Law and Society Association Global Meeting (Hong Kong) on June 26, 2027 examining how law is interpreted, translated, and given practical effect within universities—and how institutional actors may extend, reshape, or selectively invoke legal mandates in governing academic knowledge.

Rather than treating universities simply as objects of government regulation, the roundtable will explore their active role in determining what law means in practice. How do legal requirements, executive directives, political demands, and broadly framed government policies become institutional rules and procedures? When does implementation become expansion, selective interpretation, anticipatory compliance, or institutional censorship?

Potential topics include:

• curricular and program review.
• governing-board intervention.
• faculty employment and disciplinary processes.
• Research security, national security, and foreign influence regimes.
• funding conditions.
• restrictions on scholarly travel, mobility, and international collaboration.
• institutional invocations of unnamed or indeterminate legal authority.
• differences between formal law and the law as experienced by scholars.

The roundtable is particularly interested in comparative and transnational perspectives. The aim is to bring together scholars working across jurisdictions, political systems, disciplines, and institutional settings.

The session will consider not only how law regulates the movement of scholars and knowledge, but also how universities construct and administer those boundaries. Its placement on the virtual program reflects its theme: some scholars, including the organizer, face legal or institutional restrictions on work-related travel to Hong Kong.

Participants will offer brief opening reflections based on their research or experience, followed by a moderated conversation and audience discussion. No formal paper is required. LSA permits a person presenting a paper elsewhere at the meeting also to participate in a roundtable.

Please send expressions of interest to Deena Varner at devarner at ttu dot edu including:

• a brief description of the perspective, jurisdiction, or institutional setting you would bring to the conversation.
• a short biographical statement and institutional affiliation.
• confirmation that you would be available to participate virtually on June 26, 2027.

Expressions of interest received by October 18 will receive full consideration. The completed roundtable must be submitted to LSA by October 27.