SUPPORT THE SLSA

With a membership of around 1200 in the UK and 23 other countries, the SLSA has an ambitious programme to represent, support and build the socio-legal community. Our activities include bringing scholars together through conferences and events, celebrating excellence through our annual prize and supporting our members through grants and funding schemes.

Our schemes offer members access to much-needed resources for their projects and dissemination of their findings. They provide targeted and essential seed funding to help build and sustain academic careers in socio-legal studies. Our work in this regard has been praised as a key sign of the vigour and sustainability of the field by funders including the AHRC, Nuffield Foundation and Legal Education Foundation.

Your support today, at any level that is meaningful to you, will make a difference to our work.

UK universities are dealing with a severe funding challenge, one response being to reduce or strictly limit support for conference attendance. Our current priority is to raise funds for our Annual Conference bursary scheme which enables postgraduate, early career and precariously employed scholars to attend our Annual Conference to develop their research ideas, build networks and participate in the SLSA’s career development events on impact, research funding, and legal education.

Your contribution will help us maintain our ability to provide bursaries and ensure the financial support necessary for members from across the range of institutions to join the vibrant, supportive and intellectually stimulating environment of our Annual Conference.

Our Board works in accordance with our charitable constitution ‘for the public benefit to advance education and learning in the field of socio legal studies and to promote research’ by

• organising an Annual Conference

• securing recognition for excellence in the field through the Academy of Social Sciences

• annual prizes and awards for outstanding socio-legal scholarship and impact

• participating in governance of the Research Excellence Framework

• contributing to QAA benchmarking, and the development of socio-legal education

• consultation with UKRI and other funders

• active engagement with law schools across the UK

• collaboration with CARA to support socio-legal scholars at risk

• engagement with other learned societies to support interdisciplinary training; and

• partnerships with law journals and legal publishers.

Providing practical support for socio-legal scholars is a central goal of the SLSA. Our annual investment is now over £50,000 in a range of funding schemes and initiatives including:

• our generous conference bursary scheme;

• our Research and Fieldwork grants;

• our Seminar Competition;

• our low membership fees, held fixed since July 2021.

Informed by comprehensive EDI surveys, and the direct feedback of our membership, we have recently introduced further programmes for socio-legal scholars and their work:

• in 2022, Impact Grants for members – to help achieve wider benefits from socio-legal research;

• in 2023, our International Collaboration Funding Scheme – to support members in building and sustaining networks with socio-legal partners around the world; and

• in 2023–2024, a successful pilot mentoring scheme which is now an established SLSA project.

The SLSA is proud of its sustained commitment to PGR and ECR researchers through:

• organising a free two-day annual Postgraduate Conference

• offering one year’s free SLSA membership to PGRs

• running an annual Poster Competition

• offering PhD Fieldwork Grants

• appointing two PGR Reps to the SLSA Board

• using our partnerships with other socio-legal associations (eg VSR in Belgium/Netherlands and LSAANZ in Australia and New Zealand) to facilitate international mobility for PGRs and

• offer discounted rates for our Annual Conference and other events.

Our EDI work includes a pioneering focus on precarity within the socio-legal community. In meeting this growing challenge to welfare and development, we have:

• completed a survey of precariously employed members to guide our work;

• relaunched a targeted mentoring scheme;

• ringfenced awards for precariously employed members within all our grant schemes;

• engaged with the Academy of Social Sciences, ESRC, Heads of Law Schools, All Party Parliamentary Groups and others to promote these initiatives and secure influence.

Our ambitious programme, nurturing, promoting, and investing in socio-legal studies depends on the support of our community. If you would like to know more about our work, please contact SLSA Dr Smita Kheria c/o admin@slsa.ac.uk.