Oxford Seminars in Jurisprudence began life in the summer of 2020 as a monthly online discussion series intended to help plug the gap left by the many canceled conferences and seminars in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The aim was to establish a forum in which scholars from institutions all over the world could discuss high quality work in progress in the philosophy of law, broadly construed. Seminars were open for all to attend, and we were pleased to welcome an international, eclectic mix of attendees. In selecting presenters, we alternated between a run of invited speakers and a run of presenters whose work had been chosen through a call for (anonymized) papers.

Once the pandemic crisis had settled somewhat, and in-person activities resumed, we decided to pivot the series to an in-person conference, the first of which took place in Oxford in July 2022. The conference presenters were selected via the call for papers process, which yielded an excellent array of working papers and many fruitful discussions at the conference itself. We were delighted to partner, in this project, with Legal Theory, with a view to assembling final versions of some of the papers into a special issue of the journal. The three articles ultimately selected for publication here represent state-of-the-art work in legal philosophy and about its most fundamental concepts.

Ezequiel Monti's paper asks whether there are any truly conventional obligations, meaning obligations that do not just turn out to be ‘specifications’ of our convention-independent ones. He argues that such genuinely conventional obligations do indeed exist. Julian Jonker considers the putative correlativity of claim rights with directed duties or with incidents of wronging, and offers a novel defense of the correlativity thesis against some known attacks. And Wendy Salkin poses the underexplored question of whether judges ought, in some respects, to represent litigants or even social groups when speaking from the bench. She argues that bench representation of this kind is sometimes called for, and does not necessarily undermine judicial impartiality.

We trust that these proceeds of the Oxford Seminars conference will make for rewarding reading for the journal's readership. We extend our thanks to the authors, to all of the presenters, commentators, and attendees of the conference, and to the editors of Legal Theory for being open to this collaboration.