The 116th Annual Conference of the Society of Legal Scholars will be hosted by the University of Leeds.

Law has been taught in Leeds since 1899 when the Yorkshire Board of Legal Studies, which represented the local law societies, offered the Yorkshire College an annual grant of £450 a year to form a law department, which then became part of the University of Leeds on its establishment in 1904. 22 students started their course in 1899, all male, all local, and all part time and a lot has obviously changed since then.

There will be no theme for the conference in 2025; I hope this allows for real creativity in the ways we, as legal scholars, can explore our subject and the viewpoints we take on it and I look forward to a substantively and methodologically diverse and engaging range of papers across the wide spectrum that is our common subject of law. However, we will be picking up again on themes from the 2023 conference at Oxford Brookes University and explore ways in which our work and our scholarship can inform the public good, public policy and public discourse. As legal scholars none of us wish our work to disappear into the aether unnoticed. We do the research we do and the scholarship we do precisely because we want it to make some sort of difference. We will also pick up on themes from the 2024 conference at the University of Bristol and continue to explore the ways in which scholarship and legal research has become ever more interdisciplinary as we seek to grapple with ever more complex and varied local, national and international challenges. Inevitably those things are linked. We want to make a difference and increasingly that can best – or only – be done by engaging critically, even before we start, both with other disciplines and with those we hope will read and take notice of our research – the “research user” in the dreaded jargon.

Leeds is a wonderful, vibrant place centrally located in England with rail links across the country as well as its own airport with links to Continental Europe and Ireland. In accordance with the Society’s commitment to environmental sustainability we would encourage the use of public transport. I look forward to seeing you in Leeds in 2025.