Critical Legal Conference 2025
Critical Legal Conference 2025
*Conference programme subject to change
Following the theme, Surf ‘n’ Turf: Critical Laws of the Land and Sea, the Critical Legal Conference (CLC) 2025 at the University of Exeter offers an opportunity to interrogate the dynamic interplay between land and sea within the context of critical legal thought. Inspired by the coastal landscape of Devon and Cornwall, this year’s theme echoes the distinct cultural and geographical identity of the region, shaped as it is, by the intermingling forces of land and sea. The conference invites participants to explore the shifting boundaries and intersections of terrestrial and maritime legal regimes, focusing on how these domains reflect and reproduce power, governance, and resistance.
Land and sea, often perceived as natural opposites, are both constructed spaces subject to competing claims and governance strategies. From enclosure and colonisation of land to the exploitation of oceans and seabeds, legal frameworks have historically functioned to consolidate authority and control over these terrains. Yet, these spaces are also sites of contestation, where critical legal perspectives expose the tensions between sovereignty and commons, local and global interests, and human and ecological systems.
This conference aims to unravel how laws of the land and sea shape our political, social, and environmental realities. How do legal regimes maintain historical hierarchies of power in land-based and maritime contexts? What insights can the ocean, as an emblem of fluidity and resistance, offer to challenge the rigidity of terrestrial law? Conversely, how do struggles over land—whether involving indigeneity, property, or environmental justice—inform understanding of legal orders governing the sea?
The conference invites delegates to situate these questions within broader critical debates, including postcolonial, feminist, ecological, technological, speculative, aesthetics and Marxist perspectives. It also welcomes interdisciplinary approaches, recognising the value of insights from anthropology, geography, history, and cultural studies in deepening our understanding of law’s entanglements with the material and symbolic dimensions of land and sea.
The Surf ‘n’ Turf theme underscores the necessity of attending to the material and metaphorical borders that distinguish and connect terrestrial and maritime spaces. At a time of intensifying environmental crises, rising sea levels, and global migrations, the interplay between land and sea raises urgent questions for critical legal scholars. From the construction of “landscapes of exclusion” to the territorialisation of oceanic expanses, law functions both to delineate boundaries and to mediate interactions across them. This anniversary celebration of the CLC invites participants to rethink legal structures in light of these pressing concerns, exploring possibilities for justice, solidarity, and sustainability across land and sea.
This year’s CLC acknowledges the 40th anniversary of that first “CLC workshop” hosted by Birkbeck College “CLC workshop” in 1985 and aims to foster critical dialogues on the laws of the land and sea, reflecting on past achievements in critical legal thought while charting new directions for the future.