Symposia
Call for Submissions:
Northwestern Journal of Human Rights
Vol. 25 The Unbound Edition
We are now accepting submissions for Vol. 25 The Unbound Edition, themed around migration — broadly defined. We’re interested in work that engages forced displacement, voluntary relocation, internal migration, diaspora and identity, labor migration, climate-driven migration, return migration, and historical migration narratives.
We welcome submissions across genres:
- Academic and analytical essays
- Multimedia essays
What we’re looking for:
We want to explore the myriad of ways migration and the laws that define its condition impacts those who move: the reasons people choose to go, the challenges they face, who is granted mobility and who is denied it, whether that right is treated as universal or conditional, and what it costs to cross, to stay, to return, or to build a life somewhere new.
We’re interested in pieces that build bridges between homelands and host countries, between generations, between the people who leave and the people who stay as much as pieces that sit with rupture and loss.
We are especially committed to uplifting Black, Brown, and Migrant voices themselves, and we encourage those authors to submit.
Submission guidelines:
- Format: Word doc/ Multimedia submission
- Previously unpublished work only
- Deadline: January 31, 2027
- Submitted via Scholastica or emailed to jhr@law.northwestern.edu
We read all submissions carefully and aim to respond within 4-6 weeks.
2024-2025 JHR Symposium
Human Rights and the Criminalization of Pregnancy
February 25, 2025
12:00-1:20 p.m.
We are pleased to invite you to the 2025 Journal of Human Rights Annual Symposium!
The event will take place on Tuesday, February 25th, 2025 at 12:00 PM in MC 195 (Strawn Hall). Small Cheval will be served for lunch!
The Symposium features an incredible lineup of speakers, including one traveling all the way from Mexico! The speakers are Megan Osadzinski (Assistant Appellate Defender, Office of the State Appellate Defender), Professor Juliet Sorensen (Director of the Rule of Law Institute and Program for Rule of Law and Development, Loyola University Chicago School of Law), and Verónica Garzón Bonetti (Staff Attorney, Mexican Institute for Human Rights and Democracy (IMDHD)). They will address the urgent human rights issues surrounding the criminalization of pregnancy.
More specifically, the Symposium will explore the human rights dimensions of the criminalization of pregnancy and craft an intervention to defend persons prosecuted for pregnancy loss using international law. The speakers will describe their collaboration on a transnational and intersectional human rights strategy in the case of Aurelia García Cruceño, a Náhua Indigenous woman who was charged with aggravated homicide to a family member in Guerrero, Mexico following an obstetric emergency and stillbirth. Using this case study, the Symposium talk will outline how the criminalization of pregnancy is a violation of the right to be free from gender-based discrimination, the right to a fair trial, and the right to the highest attainable standard of health. Finally, the talk will highlight how this intersectional human rights approach can be used to defend against pregnancy prosecutions in Mexico, the United States, and beyond amidst global attacks on reproductive justice.
Please click here to RSVP. We look forward to seeing you there!
Please click here to RSVP. We look forward to seeing you there!
This symposium is supported in part by the Irving Gordon Symposia Fund, established in 1996 by the Gordon family, Northwestern alumni, and friends to honor the memory of Irving Gordon, a graduate of the class of 1947, and a beloved faculty member of the Law School from 1966 until his death in 1994.