Support the work of the SLSA
How can you help?
You can support our annual conference bursary scheme by making:
- one-off donation; or
- a regular contribution
This will ensure that early career and other academics needing support are able to participate in our community.
Please click on the button below to make a secure donation using Paypal:
If you are a UK taxpayer, you can also make a Gift Aid declaration.
As a registered charity since 2019, we benefit from our Gift Aid status to support our important goals and initiatives. If you make a donation along with Gift Aid then it would allow us, as a charity, to claim an extra 25p for every £1 you give. It will not cost you anything extra.
Below, you can find out more about our key activities and how we make a practical difference.
Why does the SLSA need to raise funds?
With a membership of over 1,500 in the UK and 23 other countries, SLSA has an ambitious programme to represent, support, and build the socio-legal community. Our activities include bringing socio-legal scholars together through conferences and events, celebrating excellence in the field through a range of annual prizes and competitions, and supporting the socio-legal community through grants and funding schemes.
Like colleagues in other sectors, our members in the academic community are finding it more and more difficult to secure funding for their socio-legal research and events and develop their careers and skills in an uncertain world.
Our schemes offer opportunities for members to access much-needed funding 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 AHRC, the Nuffield Foundation and the Legal Education Foundation.
What is the SLSA raising funds for?
In the light of current challenges and the importance of building community in difficult times, the SLSA’s priority is to raise funds for our annual conference bursary scheme.
The scheme enables postgraduate, early career and precariously employed scholars to attend our annual conference, helping them to develop their research, build networks, and to participate in SLSA’s career development events on impact, research funding, and legal education.
UK universities are dealing with a severe funding challenge. One response has been to reduce or strictly limit support for conference attendance. With fellow Learned Societies, we have stressed the importance of gathering to exchange new perspectives and building community, to the health of our field.
SLSA is also taking practical action to ensure that our annual conference remains open to socio-legal researchers who may otherwise be impeded from joining us due to the costs involved.
We benefit from the generosity of a number of law journals and publishers. In this difficult time, we are also seeking donations, in any amount, from other members of our community.
Your contribution will help the SLSA maintain our ability to provide bursaries, and will ensure financial support necessary for members from across the range of institutions, to join the vibrant, supportive, and intellectually stimulating environment of our annual conference.
You can make either a one-off or a regular contribution through the donate button above. All donations received will be used only towards our conference bursary scheme.
SLSA’s activities
Supporting our community
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’.
We do this through:
- organising an Annual Conference, attended by up to 800 delegates from around the world
- 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
- partnerships with law journals and legal publishers.
Making a practical difference
Providing practical support for socio-legal scholars is a central goal of 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 funding
- our investment in hybrid conference formats to ensure accessibility
- our low membership fees, held fixed since July 2021.
Since 1999 the SLSA has awarded 182 research and fieldwork grants and funded 60 seminars.
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; and
- in 2023, international collaboration funding – to support members in building and sustaining networks with socio-legal partners around the world
- in 2023/24, a successful pilot mentoring scheme which is continuing in 2024/25
The SLSA is proud of its sustained commitment to PGR and ECR researchers. We:
- organize a free two-day annual Postgraduate Conference
- use 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
- offer discounted rates for our conference and other events.
Focus on EDI
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 Chair Professor John Harrington: