The CALJ annual conference organizers have made the difficult decision to make our 2024 annual conference, which was originally planned to be a hybrid in-person and virtual event, to be virtual only, via the Congress platform.

This has been a tremendously difficult decision, but it has been reached in conversation with numerous stakeholders. We are attentive to the importance that the Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) encampment in support of Palestine holds for many of our members, presenters, and attendees, and we have also taken into account concerns about the Association of McGill Professors of Law (AMPL/AMPD) strike.*

We support AMPL’s right to strike. We support SPHR’s right to peaceful protest.

This decision was also made within the context of 24 associations having already pivoted to virtual conferences and numerous associations having cancelled altogether. Alongside this, the Congress expo was cancelled, and the Canadian Symposium of Scholarly Journals, for which CALJ was a collaborator, was postponed.

We are disappointed that we will not be able to engage with attendees in person, and we recognise the difficult position this leaves our attendees in who had planned to join us in person, but we still look forward to the important connections, learning, and capacity building that we hope this virtual conference will generate.

For those of you who are participating in our conference (presenters, chairs, panelists, roundtable participants), we will be sharing further information with you asap, including registration information and details on how to participate virtually.

For those of you attending the conference, we will be sharing further information about virtual participation through the Congress platform with you asap.

Despite the change in plans, we very much look forward to seeing you all (virtually) in the coming weeks!

For any questions or concerns, feel free to reach out to us at administrator@calj-acrs.ca.

Sincerely,

CALJ

*AMPL is planning to picket all Congress events, and consider that participation in Congress is crossing a picket line (https://t.co/5G5BRZjNys). Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) McGill have also urged a boycott of Congress at McGill this year (https://www.instagram.com/sphrmcgill/p/C7UoL7YPCpU/?img_index=1).