The Legal Research Conference “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants” was held in the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) on 19 March 2010. The conference was initiated and organised by Burcu Kılıç, Marc D Mimler, Martin A Kuppers and Gaetano Dimita, current PhD students at the School of Law at Queen Mary, University of London.
The event proved to be a wonderful success and it once again highlighted the legal research excellence at Queen Mary, University of London. Apart from creating a platform for the entire PhD community to gather and discuss, the core element of the event was the interaction between researchers in the same field of law. The aim was to foster further cooperation and friendship.
The conference is the first stage of a wider project that aims to improve and foster the collaboration and the sharing of knowledge among the PhD and Master of Research student community at the School of Law.
The whole day event consisted of four sessions on different fields of law which were chaired by leading academics from the School of Law at Queen Mary. The conference attracted wide interest among students, academics and practitioners with 80 people attending and was concluded with a drinks reception.
The call for conference papers was aimed at junior researchers that had recently started their research. This attracted wide interest and the selection committee carefully chose the papers for the conference and then sought for senior researchers in the particular field of law. Their role was to review the papers in order to sit as panellists at the conference. The presenters and panellists liaised prior to the conference to discuss the paper. On the day each presenter was given 20 minutes to hold their paper which was followed by comments, feedback and recommendations by their allotted panellists. The session continued by questions from the chairing academic and the floor.
The Legal Research Conference is the initial stage in a project that will include the publishing of the conference papers in an edited collection called “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants – Volume I”. The collection of papers edited by Burcu Kılıç and Marc Mimler will be published later in 2010.
Download the Legal Research Conference March 2010 programme [PDF 486kb]