Conference Abstracts

1.1 Introducing Econormativity

Stream: Econormativities  

Time: 10:30-12:00

Date: Thursday, 4th September 

Venue: Purple Lecture Theatre

Introduction to ‘Econormativities’ in the Future of Good Decisions project

Connal Parsley (University of Kent) Margaret Davies (Flinders University)  Conor Heaney (University of Kent)

In this presentation we will outline the Econormativities project and its origins in the ‘Future of Good Decisions’, a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship grant awarded to Connal Parsley. Conventional understandings of normativity regard it as consisting of rules or principles of entirely human origin, designed to guide or evaluate the behaviour of humans in their interactions with each other and the world. The non-human or more-than-human world figures only as an object—never as a participant with agency in the formation of normativity and its effects. By contrast, from an ‘econormative’ perspective, normativity is something inherently ecological: it is made through complex relations between co-evolving entities, encompassing all material, technical, social, and processual aspects of life, and guiding their evolution. Through a three-part collaborative presentation grounded in each of the presenters’ current research, we will discuss the orientation of the Econormativities project to key questions facing law and legal theory today, in the age of data-driven decision-making and planetary ecological perspectives.

Generative group exercise: ‘Towards a Lexicon of Econormativity’

Connal Parsley (University of Kent) Conor Heaney (University of Kent) Margaret Davies (Flinders University) 

In this session we will introduce the Lexicon of Econormativity, a collaborative multi-authored volume currently in development. The Lexicon aims to concretise emerging languages for talking across disciplines about how normativity works in evolving technosocial ecologies. The session will centre on a collaborative exploration and discussion exercise. Participants will be presented with a fictional scenario, and work together to identify the emerging concepts and vocabularies that might be necessary to address its normative features (as conceived broadly by the Econormativities project). No pre-reading is required, and all are welcome.

1.2 Econormative reframings 

Stream: Econormativities   

Time: 14:15-15:45

Date: Thursday, 4th September 

Venue: Purple Lecture Theatre

No Masters, No Money, No Markets! Rethinking Capitalism as Ecology

Esther Edelmann (Leiden University)

To rethink capitalism as ecology may sound as perverse as revaluing natural resources through speculative instruments that turn scarcity into profit. Yet this provocation opens a different logic. Capital, as David Harvey (2013) suggests, can be seen as an Earth system: like the hydrological cycle, it organizes flows, transforms matter, and loops through recursive circuits of accumulation. Niklas Luhmann (1988) similarly describes the market as an autopoietic social system—self-producing and structurally adaptive. These models suggest that capitalism does not merely exploit ecological systems; it operates as one.

Rather than accepting this analogy as an excuse for further commodification, I argue it can be turned against capital itself. Against the rise of ecotechnics—the financial governance of nature through valuation and optimization (Nancy 2007)—this paper explores an alternative framework in which nature becomes the primary site of constraint and ordering, compelling other social systems to adapt to ecological limits rather than subordinating those limits to capitalist valorization. In this context, I draw on Margaret Davies’s (2021) notion of eco-legal bonds, not only as juridical and ethical obligations to the natural world, but as a critical resource for rethinking legality in explicitly political-ecological terms.

Econormativity and the issue of play: jurisdiction’s openness and its normative closure

Frans-Willem Korsten (Leiden University)

On the face of it, econormativity aims to open up the scope of the domain of law by means of incorporating a much wider set of normativities. By implication this means that econormativity aims to broaden (considerably) the apostrophic address of law to either order or justice, or to the eternally deferred arrival of their conflation. I want to ask how all this relates to the constitutive force of play (Huizinga). My provocative case will be a recent report on how in a Panama reservation capuchin monkeys engage in abducting howler monkey infants for no reason – or as a means of play. The scientists looking at this case (Goldsborough et a.) state: “Cultural traditions lacking clear function are exceptionally common in humans, partially explained by our hyper-reliance on social learning. In non-human animals, it is unclear whether the same ecological and social conditions drive the emergence of both seemingly adaptive and non-adaptive traditions.” To put the issue more broadly, if evolution is partly or considerably driven by forms of play, the question is how play can be understood in the context of econormativity. To explore the beginning of a possible answer to this question I will first define what is playful in the creation of law (or jurisprudence) to then suggest that if the normative closure of human law is to be opened up, econormativity needs a theory of play.

“When the trees have gone” – econormativity as event, process, and matter

Stewart Motha (Birkbeck College)

In Veraibari village, Kikori river delta, Papua New Guinea, the trees are being washed away by the increasing force of tides and rising sea levels. When I visited in October, 2024, people spoke of the loss and devastation of climate destruction on many species of plants and animals, and how this undermines the forms and structures of their community. The trees have a central cosmological and ceremonial role in their lives. The spirit man who inhabited one tree, for instance, had a crucial role in babies being incorporated into the community. Once the physical tree disappears, the previously material-semiotic practices become solely stories or myths. Human cosmology then loses its materiality. Trees, mountains, volcanoes, and river deltas play a crucial role in the cosmological life of many human communities. At another normative register, this testimony and evidence of loss and damage from Veraibari was submitted to the ICJ as part of the Advisory Opinion on Climate Change, and the decision of that court is pending. How do courts and legal discourses receive and mediate the material destruction of what is called nature? I critically explore this question by drawing on indigenous perspectivism, social constructivism, and systems theoretical accounts.

1.3 More-than-human law in environmental contexts

Stream: Econormativities  

Time: 16:00-17:30

Date: Thursday, 4th September 

Venue: Purple Lecture Theatre

Norms and justice beyond the human in peatland carbon markets

Bonnie Holligan (University of Sussex)

This paper investigates how peatland carbon markets in the United Kingdom might provide opportunity for expanding our understanding of normativity and creation of just relationships with the more-than-human world. Through examination of project design documents for market-based peatland restoration schemes, the paper draws attention to the ways in which norms emerge from interaction between the material (plants, animals, soil, water, machines) and the non-material infrastructures of human legal and financial systems. It argues that our capacities to attend to and build just relationships with the more-than-human world within peatland restoration projects are limited by reliance on existing property and environmental laws. New institutions are needed that recognise the active role of the more-than-human in norm creation and provide space for the formation of multispecies publics.

Normativity and justice are explored across the dimensions of time and being. How do the differing timescales (legal, financial and ecological) involved in peatland restoration projects interact and produce norms recognised by human legal systems? How are these shaped by technologies of monitoring and measurement?

When “being” is understood in terms of relationship and assemblage at multiple scales, distinctions between living/non-living, animate/inanimate and sentient/non-sentient begin to seem less stable bases for just interaction. Environmental law determines which plants and animals may be killed on peatlands, and how ecosystems may be altered or destroyed. The paper highlights how these human norms are nevertheless shaped by what escapes and resists them. Within carbon markets, peatland ecosystems are formed, and deformed, by the needs of capital. However, there is also scope for new practices of listening, sometimes enabled by the same technologies employed for the purposes of commodification.  These may provide opening for an alternative politics and justice to emerge.

Producing protected species against property rights via species observation databases? The case of the Swedish Forests and the Species Species Information System, Artportalen’

Jannice Käll (Lund University), Cecilia Åsberg (Linköping University) Dick Kasperowski (Gothenburg University). Presenting author: Käll

With the backdrop of climate change and biodiversity loss, environmental movements, such as the Rights of Nature movement, are turning to new legal concepts to end the destruction of more-than-human ecologies. A parallel trend to this can be identified in the repurposing of digital infrastructures for species reporting and records to affect how nature is accounted for by administrative legal bodies as well as the courts. In this manner, activists seek to bypass slow democratic governance structures without altering the legal concepts of environmental legal protection for certain ecologies. (Turner & Wiber 2023). Such transformative politics of species reports in courts and in media and the environmental imaginary they produce in public society currently remain under-researched. 

Drawing upon the example of Swedish forests, this paper seeks to contribute with empirical data on how species observations are transformed in the interface between the species reporting person, the digital infrastructure, the administrative bodies as well as the courts, into what is considered a protection-worthy ecology. Furthermore, it show-cases how this transformation activates a conflict between property rights holders (of forests) and species reporting persons and how the latter are being framed as activists hindering the effective use of property rights. 

As such, Swedish forests constitute today a conflict zone of many rivalling legal, scientific, cultural and ecological interests. In the performative realms of courts, the open data-infrastructures of science, and the discursive spaces of public environmental culture – new forest futures are taking shape at the intersection of the Swedish Information System, Artportalen as the new data-driven “theater of proof” of forest biodiversity (Latour 1988; 2004).

This paper examines how the legal system carries out the balancing of interests between species and forest property right holder’s land use through the valuation of Artportalen data. As such, it contributes with an understanding of how the production of rare species through the species database produces legal effects that capture and analyse the creation and contestation of species data as a means to hinder certain forms of forest management and facilitate others. Furthermore, it suggests that the environmentalisms explored here also distributes epistemic authority, reimagines citizenship and legal rights, and re-invents notions of power and agency among humans, other species and whole ecologies. 

Tracing econormativities in Swedish forests together with wolves

Gustav Stenseke Arup (Karlstad University)

In this presentation, I explore the legal protection of wolves in Sweden through rhizomatic relations between diverse phenomena in the Swedish landscapes and beyond. What appears as legal protection of wolves is analysed as meta-stable patterns emerging from the entanglement of formal legal processes, climatological processes, social-ecological processes, culture wars, and other factors. Legal agency are understood as distributed in networks consisting of legal and human as well as non-human actors. 

With this approach, normativity or legality is not an inherent property of legislations or other human or non-human phenomena, but rather emergent patterns that appear in, and co-produce, our human-dominated landscapes. The legal protection of wolves in Sweden is hence not dependent on laws or regulations as much as on, for example, the wolf’s entanglement with toxic human discourses or its inability to dwell in Sweden’s northern part and connect to the populations in Finland and Russia. Increasing the legal protection of wolves is therefore not so much about changing legal paradigms as about utilising ways to use laws to affect the broader spectrum of anti-wolf processes in the landscape in progressive directions.

1.4 Beyond the state — and beyond

Stream: Econormativities   

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 9:00 -10:30

Venue: Purple Lecture Theatre

Sodabi, Survival, and Sovereignty: Norm-Making Beyond Colonial Law, 1920–1960

Enock Gbonsu (Independent Researcher)

This paper explores how the illicit production of sodabi, a palm-based liquor criminalised in French Dahomey, constituted a technosocial system of vernacular normativity that unsettled colonial legality. Far from being a mere economic deviation, sodabi-making forged relations between humans, plants, tools and rituals—enacting a form of ecological normativity grounded in survival, cultural continuity and autonomous world-building. Through analysis of colonial court archives, forestry regulations, and agrarian development plans, I show how palm trees, artisanal distillation technologies (alembics), female trade networks and ancestral ritual economies co-produced a normative order irreducible to colonial legal rationality. Rather than resisting law externally, sodabi distillers enacted normative practices from within ecological, spiritual and material entanglements. This case illuminates the friction between law as extractive ordering and normativity as eco-processual emergence. By foregrounding the alembic as a device of technoecological agency, the paper contributes to current debates on econormativity and challenges anthropocentric accounts of legal formation—offering a Southern epistemological intervention into technosocial normativity, law, and resistance.

Law v Algorithmic Governance? A ‘layered’ ecology of social norms, laws, numbers, and computer code

Zhenbin Zuo (University of Essex)

This paper proposes an original neo-realist framework and a ‘scaling and layering’ hypothesis to understand the emerging theoretical domain of algorithmic governance. More specifically, the paper uses preliminary case studies to substantiate a novel rationale for viewing law and algorithmic governance (i.e. code) as complements of, rather than substitutes for each other. This rationale is to be found in the inherent trade-off which exists between ‘scaling’ and ‘layering’ in complex forms of legal and algorithmic governance, i.e. a layered ecology of normativities, across extended geographies and populations. 

Modern governance is revealed to have become increasingly algorithmic and formalised in its reliance on computation, and now machine learning (or AI), while expanding its scale effects over populations and territories. However, this ‘scaling effect’ is countered and constrained by a ‘layering effect’: each successive layer of governance/normativity is conditioned by those preceding it, from social norms to laws, to numbers and to (computer) code. Thus today’s code, that is algorithmic governance, is cognitively layered by reference to statistics, laws and social norms, thereby exhibiting institutional path-dependence. ‘Learning’/AI code can only function by using statistical analysis; statistics, in turn, is defined by reference to non-computational frames, including those of laws and social norms. To achieve complementarity and overall effectiveness in governance, lawmakers should be aware of the different nature and limitations of each mode within the ecology of norms, and consciously avoid potential freezing or lock-in effects induced by over-reliance on just one, in particular ‘code’ and ‘numbers.’ 

Superseding the State?

Scott Veitch (University of Hong Kong)

Foucault claimed that with the emergence of ‘governmentality’ in modernity, the power, and even the idea, of the state needed reassessment. For it may not, he wrote, have the “unity, this individuality, this rigorous functionality, nor, to speak frankly, this importance; maybe, after all, the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction, whose importance is a lot more limited than many of us think.” This presentation asks whether, or in what ways, this might be equally true with respect to eco- and techno-normativities.

1.5 Theorising ecologies for normativity

Stream: Econormativities   

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 13:30-15:00

Venue: Purple Lecture Theatre

Revitalising Health with Canguilhem? Between Biological Normativity and the Biopolitical

Conor Heaney (University of Kent)

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis famously noted that the history of science is not only science’s memory but also epistemology’s laboratory. In the same way, the history of medicine is not only medicine’s memory but also normativity’s laboratory. The health and medical sciences by nature live on that edge where description and prescription blend. Indeed, experimental results are particularly meaningful precisely when they support normative conclusions.

In The Normal and the Pathological (1943; 1968), Georges Canguilhem critiqued the extent to which this quest for meaningful data had resulted in a quantitative subsumption of the concepts of health (as statistical normality in this or that biomarker) and pathology (as excess or deficiency). Canguilhem contested this scientistic and quantitative subsumption with a functional and qualitative holism which gave priority to the individual biological organism. For Canguilhem, health and pathology are indexed to quality (feeling) and to biological normativity, not one’s location in relation to a statistical frequency distribution. To be healthy is not to obey norms, instead, it is the feeling of and ability to create new norms if the milieu provokes it. Pathology is not at all for Canguilhem a non-normative condition: disease is a qualitatively distinct experience with its own biological creativity, marked by a smaller range of creative responses if provoked by the milieu.

Canguilhem’s critique of biomedical reductionism remains trenchant, always placing the question of health in an ever-evolving milieu; his elevation of qualitative feeling over quantitative biomarkers places the individual organism’s experience as indispensable in any medical judgment; and his account of biological normativity as norm-creation still chimes as a vitalist corrective to overly mechanistic accounts of life. Could Canguilhem not therefore be a perfect candidate for a revitalised notion of health in the context of interdisciplinary ecological thinking? Perhaps not: he was both a health individualist, and an opponent of the notion of public health (a term he called “contestable”), critiquing World Health Organization as a body of politico-administrative control.

This paper will critically engage with Canguilhem’s account of health and pathology, asking what it is able to offer (or not offer) in the rethinking of health in the context of interdisciplinary ecological thinking. Canguilhem can help us ground a revitalised approach to health, I will argue, but only with important attenuations.

Aesthetics and the Order of Nature

Swastee Ranjan (University of Exeter)

Addressing Lorraine Daston’s claim that ‘nature is the repository of all order’ (Daston, 2019), this paper concerns itself with visibilizing the role that aesthetics play in explicating the structure of norms that emanate from nature. For Sylvia Wynter, aesthetics, are the system stabilising rules that govern the behaviour of both human and nonhumans. The function of aesthetics, accordingly, is to provide coherence to species (both human and nonhuman). In this system maintaining function, aesthetics, becomes the grounds through which cognitive reality can be deciphered. Writing within anti colonial and anti-black tradition, Wynter’s work illuminates the underlying assumptions of epistemological context, whether scientific or perceptual knowledge, to show how antiblackness is an ontological reality. Building on this framework, my concern in this paper is to show how Wynter’s work can be extended to understanding our present practices of ecological sense perception particularly those that is acquired through the encounter with nature. I argue that when thinking of nature, it is not merely the concern for “access” that is important but in delineating the conditions that makes representation of nature possible, and therefore about the relationship between human and nature.

Cybernetics in the Epistemology of Environmental Law

Andreas Kostaskis (University of Kent)

We still live in a modern world where the Cartesian epistemology of transcendence dominates our perception of the self, nature and society. The current planetary environmental crisis is attributed to this epistemology’s foundational idea of an absolute, independent, and autonomous ‘self’ able to understand the ‘real’ world of which that self is distinct, which anchors the generalised separation between the human and non-human as a necessary step to the latter’s continued exploitation. Despite such consensus, mainstream environmental law does not represent a rupture with this epistemological regime, because of its own epistemological commitments, namely to techno-scientific rationality as the primary source of normativity and by extension its authority. The field requires the invocation of scientific truth claims regarding ‘nature’ mediated precisely through such an epistemology in order to survive. It is becoming clear, however, that this survival, normativity and authority has come at the cost of the inability to achieve environmental protection or justice. Building on existing work on ecological jurisprudence, wild law and related concepts, and focusing on the production of normativity, this paper examines how a different epistemology of immanence can be structured, using Gregory Bateson’s particular systems theory of cybernetics. This form of cybernetics starts from a techno-social understanding of thoughts, actions and decisions as an exchange of information within a human/environment network and can be developed into a theory of regulation and control, where any ‘governors’ are part of this network.

1.6 Problems – past and future

Stream: Econormativities   

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 15:30-17:00

Venue: Purple Lecture Theatre

The Underlying and Wishful Times

Jeremy Pilcher (NYU London)

The Underlying by Ami Clarke is a multimedia work that engages with the impact on the environment of organisations of capital accumulation through the way in which the relationship of the past to the future is constructed and deployed in contracts in both the insurance and derivatives markets. The installation opened an encounter with the “complexities, multi-temporalities and scales, that coalesce around new and old power relations” (Arebyte Gallery). The law promotes a certain perception of time, which privileges certain moments (e.g. company formation; time of registration) and scales of time (e.g. foreseeable consequences) that disavow the non-originary origin as the condition of their possibility. Understood in terms of the performative, works that appropriate and transfigure everyday data may invite a response from those who encounter them to respond to the world in acknowledgement of différance (Derrida, 1988). This enables challenges to the perpetuation of fundamental concepts of time that perpetuate binary thinking that creates oppositions such as, for example, agency against structure (Barad, 2007: 26). Through such work encounters are opened with time scales and the oscillation across time-place boundaries with which the law is complicit in constructing and perpetuating (Marks, 2009; Barad, 2007). In the process, attention is drawn to conceptions of time(frames), which may (need to) be redrawn in the future.

The Humanity Archive: Can AI turn outlaw?

Adimaya Keni (Birkbeck College)

This paper considers the digital world as a constantly developing ecology of criminological potential, with AI algorithms themselves as fledgling actors. It explores the challenge to traditional morality-based jurisprudence through the archive of humanity that is currently the internet, using the metaphoric value of the outlaw in history, and applying the humanity archive as a form of pre-history for AI. By understanding the law as a technology of disruption in the colonies of Empire, this paper explores the term ‘normativity’ in the digital ecosystem through the developmental perspective of AI itself. It raises questions of whether terms such as archive, normativity, and jurisprudence should be reconsidered to reflect the changing paradigm towards AI technology. Ultimately, this paper aims to start a discussion around whether AI algorithms themselves should be considered as the personhood, potentially responsive to nurture and control, and capable of disruption and decision making that is outside of the recognised legal boundary. Thus, it presents the argument for redefining the term ‘outlaw’ to encompass the possibility of future outlawry as non-human and digital.

Who Gets the Resources and Who Gets to Decide: a Treatise on Agricultural Ecology and Technological Ecology

Michael Wallace (Independent Researcher)

In rural Morrow County Oregon, USA lies the town of Boardman. Moderate to large commercial farms dominate the local economy, with one major Interstate exit that facilitates an exchange of goods. Located in the rain shadow of the Cascades, the climate here tends to be a drier. Thus, major and minor open canal systems help spread out the water here to support crop production. These canals get the water from aquifers fed by the Columbia River.

The denizens in this region participate and interact within the agricultural ecology that encompasses farm equipment production, sales, and maintenance, soil and resource management, and farm labor. To ensure that the denizens can thrive in this region, the necessary accoutrements are also overlaid with their own unique systems and infrastructures, such as educational systems, healthcare systems, law enforcement systems, and commercial systems.

Electricity for this region comes from two natural gas-fire plants operated by Portland General Electric. Both of these facilities are located in Boardman – the Carty Generating Station and the Coyote Springs Plant. The proximity to both manmade and natural resources has made this area ideal real estate for data and technological infrastructure, which has led to a boom in data centers in this area. Namely, one of the largest is Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Data centers like AWS typically deploy evaporative cooling systems to maintain operating temperatures within the server racks and internal computer systems. These systems are powered by tapping into the electrical grid powered by burning natural gas, with the data centers deploying n +1 gas powered backup generator systems in case of power lapses in the main power system.

A 300,000 square foot data center can house well over 500,000 individual servers, increasing or decreasing in quantity depending on how the servers are arranged within and how much power is needed to operate each server unit. Server units are comprised of a variety of different internal processing and data storage technologies, creating further variability in resource requirements. To further conceptualize, one server typically can process 128 gigs of data, thus one data center with 500,000 servers can process upwards 64,000,000 gigs of data at any given time. Often, these systems are automated so that the supporting infrastructure can toggle more or less cooling and power usage as needed to maintain optimal performance.

Often overlooked, the user-facing end of digital spaces, such as apps, websites, and related tools users can interface with, all exist within the physical spaces of these data centers. As demand continues to increase for expansions in the technosphere, the physical requirements needed to operate these digital spaces will continue to encroach on existing ecology, such as the agricultural ecology in Boardman.

The resources used by both ecologies provide each to scale usage similarly. For example, water resources can only be stretched so far, thus providing limit on how large farmland can be, which limits how much can be provided from each farm. The water is further shared with households, livestock, and other industries within the agricultural ecology. Within the technological ecology, requirements scale with the size of the data center as well, thus limiting the size of and quantity of data centers in the region.

With unprecedented temperature increases, unpredictable rain and other factors driven by rapid climate changes, the risk to both ecologies is ever present. I posit that the juxtaposition of these two ecologies creates a dilemma in how resources get allocated between the physical denizens living and working in the area and digital denizens also utilizing the local resources to access the information at the data centers from around the world in the technosphere.

Both ecologies play vital roles in regional and global economies. Agriculture nourishes bodies; the technosphere sustains commerce, communication, and computation. Yet as resource demands grow, the tradeoffs between them become more than economic—they become ethical. How we choose to allocate resources in places like Boardman reflects what we value, what futures we imagine, and whether we pursue technological growth with an ethic of care or one of unchecked expansion.

2.1 Resisting Technological Extractivism in Arctic

Stream: Freeze ‘n’ Seize: Polar law, extraction and resistance  

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 10:30-12:00

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.1

The Arctic, Underwater Noise Pollution and Post-Anthropocentric Modalities of Relation between Western Science and Traditional Indigenous Knowledge

Tommaso Gerardini (Leiden University)

Recent developments in the international legal framework addressing underwater noise pollution (UNP) increasingly reference both Western Science (WS) and Traditional Indigenous Knowledge (TIK) as basis for shaping mitigation strategies. However, the relevant legal instruments remain inconsistent in defining the relation between these distinct epistemologies. This contribution proposes a novel post-anthropocentric approach on how public international law can structure the relation between WS and TIK. 

The analysis begins by framing underwater noise as a byproduct of the ‘Anthropocene’, where the natural marine soundscape has been replaced by a human-induced cacophony. The ecological impacts of this acoustic domination on marine biodiversity, as well as the cultural and subsistence practices of coastal Indigenous communities, are examined with particular attention to the Arctic region. Indeed, the Arctic serves as a critical case study, as it is particularly affected by underwater noise pollution due to increased shipping traffic resulting from sea ice retreat driven by climate change, which also diminishes the ocean’s capacity to absorb sound. Against this backdrop, this contribution critically examines the current international legal framework governing UNP in the Arctic, including the Agreement on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement), the 2023 International Maritime Organization (IMO) Revised Guidelines on Underwater Noise Pollution, and the 2023 IMO Supplementary Guidelines on the Reduction of Underwater Noise Pollution in Inuit Nunaat and the Arctic. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between ‘arborescent’ and ‘rhizomatic’ forms of knowledge, this contribution argues that international law presently structures the relationship between WS and TIK through three arborescent modalities: exclusive reliance on WS, formal horizontality, and parallel separation. These modalities perpetuate the dominance of WS, reinforcing anthropocentric patterns of commodification towards non-human entities and colonial dynamics over Indigenous communities.

In contrast, this contribution suggests that a post-anthropocentric approach to international law can support rhizomatic modalities of relation between WS and TIK. By overcoming the binary distinction between what counts as “science” and what counts as “knowledge” and focusing on epistemic insights rather epistemic silos, international law can overcome tree-like structures and foster relationships between epistemic systems based on the rhizomatic fabric of interconnection. Finally, this contribution argues that reframing the way international law determines modalities of relations between WS and TIK is a crucial step to overcome the commodification of the Arctic environment.              

Cryopower Unfrozen: Revisiting the The Role of International Law in Arctic Sea Ice Geoengineering

Apostolos Tsiouvalas (NCLOS, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway)  and Manon Rosenthal (University of Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne)

To address the unprecedented environmental pressures on the Arctic marine cryosphere, sea ice geoengineering (SIGE) has increasingly been explored as an enticing strategy for climate mitigation in the Arctic. The project of manipulating and preserving Arctic sea ice through intensive geoengineering techniques—framed as a pursuit of “climatic salvation”—calls for critical reflection on the regulatory environment of SIGE, which can be understood as “cryopolitical.” Cryopolitical power, as enacted through SIGE, constructs a sphere of existence where the Arctic marine cryosphere is “made to live” but is “no longer allowed to die” in the shadow of anthropogenic climate change.

What, then, is the role of international law in navigating cryopolitics? Have new technologies perhaps assumed a life of their own, becoming increasingly unpredictable within what is perceived as a legal void surrounding SIGE? In this context, we interrogate the deep cryopolitics that underpin the (un)regulation of frozen states, where sovereign power, technological interventions, and the material cryosphere converge to shape the unfolding agendas of SIGE. We argue that international law operates as a vessel for cryopolitical power, offering the conditions for its emergence and expansion icewards. Yet, at the same time, it holds the potential to act as a resistive force that channels and constrains the boundless unfolding of cryopower in the Arctic Ocean.

Arctic Ice as Home: Breaking, Refreezing, and the Troubles of Techno-Care

Romain Chuffart (University of Akureyri)

With a disappearing cryosphere whose fragmentation foregrounds the material expression of broader planetary unravelling(s), legal and ethical frameworks remain anthropocentric where sea ice gains its meaning as backdrop rather than as an active participant in ecological and geopolitical processes; its matter and being yet just another passive object. Ice does not melt uniformly; its retreat is shaped by asymmetrical power relations, capitalist temporalities, and shifting multispecies dependencies. It is patchy, discontinuous, and shaped by intersecting political, ecological, and material contingencies. This patchiness complicates linear narratives of environmental crisis and governance. It asks us to think through legal frameworks that are responsive to localised variations and relational interdependencies.

Thinking through the law-extraction-resistance typology, I analyse two different phenomena: the restoration of sea ice through geoengineering in tandem with the [com]modification through care of the planet’s frozen spaces. I ask whether and how law might function as a structuring force in shaping the governance of sea ice as more than frozen water within the techno-ecological assemblages of the current the-planet-is-fucked-o-cene. With that, I contrast ice in all its multiplicity: as a naturally occurring phenomena, a more-than-human entity itself, a multispecies habitat, a cultural element and a planetary life support against the socio-political ramifications of positioning its restoration through heavy technological deployment as a (controversial) instrument of care.

2.2 Antipodal Stories of (non)extractivism

Stream: Freeze ‘n’ Seize: Polar law, extraction and resistance  

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 16:00-17:30

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.1

Antarctic Governance: Feminist and Plural Legal Perspectives

Gina Heathcote (Newcastle University)

Feminist analysis of the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) interrogates the forms of knowledge and the structural bias of legal tools. This paper examines the ways in which the commitment to scientific research and peaceful purposes within the ATS embeds gender into the status quo of legal regulation. I examine the possibility of feminist legal theories as a mechanism to shift dialogue beyond “women in Antarctica” and away from gendered representations and frames of encounter. Understood from a feminist perspective, the capacity for geopolitical change raises questions regarding whose knowledge is valued and investigates how that knowledge manifests in the ATS. In undertaking a plural feminist analysis, I think through legal pluralism as a tool for Antarctic governance, where Indigenous and postcolonial legal agendas might direct Antarctic futures beyond extractivism and toward living peacefully with the nonhuman.

Territory, Presence, and Ecocentrism: Towards a Governance of and by Human Absence in Antarctica

Jordane Liebeaux (Bristol University)

Antarctica is one of the four global commons, which are areas and resources beyond national jurisdiction. It is governed by a group of States as part of the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) and is the only continent without a permanent human population. However, the ATS has been built on narratives and demonstrations of human presence through practices of territorialisation, from early commercial industries to scientific research and cultural heritage today. While there have been several contestations of this human presence in the past, the draft Declaration on the Rights of Antarctica, released in 2023, is the most recent attempt. However, rights of nature models are limited beyond national jurisdiction, for instance regarding the difficulty of designating representatives for a global commons. Meanwhile, human activities in Antarctica are increasing and diversifying. There have also been discussions of mineral exploitation in the future, as well as potential use of scientific activities for prospecting and asserting sovereignty in the region. While there are attempts to rethink how human activities should be regulated in a more environmentally friendly manner, another question should come first: should humans be in Antarctica in the first place? This presentation argues for a model of ecocentric governance that would rely on human absence, rather than presence and intervention, beyond rights of nature. Building on Elden’s theories of territory, this research questions the traditional governance approach to Antarctica and its territorialisation. An ecocentric and multispecies governance model of Antarctica would use absence as resistance against human exceptionalism and resource colonialism in Antarctica, rethinking relationality at the end of the world.

Geo-materialising Legal Imaginary through Antarctic Materialities within Geopower

Rana Göksu (Kassel University)

Antarctic geography has revolved around a pre-political backdrop, devoid of historical significance, serving as a container for valuation, knowledge production, and expert-driven concerns. The absent Antarctic materiality or Antarctica’s presence as a scientific hub emerges as an ideological construction within our epistemology. The law, within the same paradigm, operates as autonomous expertise and authority, imposing this ideological and abstract epistemology on Antarctica as if it is meant to be passive and easily legible. Despite efforts to halt and/or regulate violent contradictions or “disastrous collapse” in Antarctica and seemingly objective expressions concerning the continent’s materiality, my arguments prioritise learning from Antarctic materialities to shift our collective imaginary on societal organisations from clinging to the enduring imaginary of colonialism and capitalism towards situating Antarctic materialities. My analysis examines states’ techniques to deliver Antarctica to expertise and the nation-states’ wealth accumulation. The significance of Antarctica in capitalist production helps me formulate the prevalent socio-spatial relationality. I introduce “geopower”, the state–capital–geography prism, to argue Antarctic geography as an actor in power relations. Drawing on geopower, I propose an interpretation of Lefebvrian space production in the context of Antarctica. I identify the prevailing relationality in capitalist state space (abstract space) as a value-producing relation, fostered by statecraft, emerging from colonial practices. This enables me to elucidate that value-producing relations are characterised by violent contradictions, while revealing the dependency of state and capital on geography. To propose a geo-materialised imaginary through Antarctic materialities, I frame Antarctic forms and forces in relation to Lefebvre’s “lived space” and “differential space” to conceptualise the ontological significance of Antarctica within geopower and, in turn, disclose Antarctic forms and forces that potentially give rise to a re-/organised space. Stretching “land users” towards Antarctica’s relational ontologies, hopefully, affirms their active becoming and participation in political and legal domains.

2.3 “Hydrojustice” Book Launch and Workshop

Stream: Freeze ‘n’ Seize: Polar law, extraction and resistance  

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 17:30 – 19:00

Venue: Collaborative Lecture Theatre

Polar x Process x Hydrojustice: Book launch with(out) Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and collaborative workshop, co-organised by the Freeze ‘n’ Seize and the Law and Process streams

3.1 Disruptive Technologies 1

From Aerial Warfare to the Use of AI: A Tale of Exclusion and (in)Humanity

Andrea Farres Jiménez (University of Barcelona)

Contemporary international humanitarian law (IHL) aims at alleviating humanity’s suffering caused by destructive conflict. At least at a formal level, it contains no explicit exclusion of ‘natives’ or ‘non-civilised’ people from the category of ‘humanity’ worthy of such protective measures. However, through the study of three technological developments, using Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and Critical Legal Studies (CLS) methodologies, this paper demonstrates how an exclusionary understanding of the concept of ‘humanity’, engrained in racialised and gendered exclusions, persists in the application of this branch of law.

Starting with aerial warfare, the paper discusses its use in imperial wars and its subsequent legalisation during the 1920s. Despite being employed in colonial warfare, the attempts to regulate aerial bombardment envisioned the ‘civilian’ as white and European, excluding the local population affected by imperial wars outside of Europe. The inapplicability of any IHL protections to the native populations, usually the targets of such aerial warfare, meant that they were excluded from the realm of humanity altogether. The second case is the use of drones in the 2000s. Similarly to aerial bombardment, it is a technology mainly developed by Western states to be used in non-Western countries in contexts such as the ‘war on terror’. The paper focuses on the use of drones by the US as this scenario exemplifies how this technology constructs an image of the people in the Global South as inferior, objectified, and falling outside of the law’s protective scope because the states that use this technology challenge IHL’s application in its totality.

The last scenario is the contemporary use of artificial intelligence in the battlefield. As a technology developed mostly in the Global North containing racist and sexist biases, its modus operandi relies on the ‘datafication’ of the people upon whom this technology operates, who is generally not from that part of the world. Using the example of the Israeli employment of artificial intelligence in Gaza, this case illustrates how, by turning civilians to quantifiable data, their humanity is erased. The paper’s final section re-reads IHL’s foundational principle of humanity using a TWAIL and CLS’ approach. This allows us to take this principle seriously and interpret it as an overarching notion through which the urgency to reconceptualize Western technological developments is underscored. This is so because this principle reinforces the relevance of human dignity in armed conflict, which includes each and every human being for the sake of belonging to humankind.

4.1 Carl Schmitts’ Land & Sea on the Shores of the Postcolony 1

Stream: Carl Schmitts’ Land & Sea on the Shores of the Postcolony

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 14:15-15:45

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.3

The Desire of Land & Sea

Jaco Barnard-Naudé

Eduardo Mendieta (2011) has suggested that: 1.) ‘if there is a book that contains Schmitt’s philosophy, it is [Land & Sea)’; and 2.) that Land & Sea marks a ‘major theoretical shift’ in Schmitt’s thought, moving away from decisionism to spatiality as the ground of the sovereignty of the state and thus its law(s). The proposed paper is a provocation in psychoanalytic terms. It asks, first, after the ‘philosophy’ that is contained in Land & Sea if it is also the case that the book marks a shift away from decisionism. Is Land & Sea, then, as such the rudiments of a legacy decisively animated by the philosophy of law’s spatiality exclusively. In other words, to what extent is the prior philosophy of decisionism displaced (verschieben) and to what extent is the philosophy of spatiality condensed (verdichten) in Land & Sea?

I am, of course, invoking the Lacanian categories of metonymy and metaphor by formulating the questions in this way. I will suggest that the metonymic displacement of decisionism in Land & Sea turns on the more than somewhat romantic verdichtung of nomos. The book is, in other words, as much an articulation of (Schmitt’s) desire as it is an attempt to arrest that same desire’s incessant metonymic drift in the eventual figure of nomos. If this is the case, then one might ask anew after the implications of such an attempt to arrest a particular desire (with)in the law. Of course, for Lacan desire is the law. But the law’s desire, at least in the way that I will argue Schmitt to be apprehending it from 1942 onwards, is a different question altogether.

Abstract To follow

Julia Chryssostalis

4.2 Carl Schmitts’ Land & Sea on the Shores of the Postcolony 2

Stream: Carl Schmitts’ Land & Sea on the Shores of the Postcolony

Date: Saturday 6^th September

Time: 12:00-13:30

Venue: Purple Lecture Theatre

Thermodynamic Appropriation: Sea-level Rise and International Legal Order

Nico Buitendag

The gravity of the threat posed by the complete submersion of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) has prompted the International Law Commission to establish a Study Group on its legal implications. With the Group’s work ending in 2025, the final report advocates for the continued recognition of statehood even when a state no longer meets the territoriality requirement. This contribution argues that such a change to the doctrine of sovereignty constitutes what Carl Schmitt called a legal reordering. More specifically, he suggests that every legal system presupposes a spatial order created through appropriation. While it is not accurate to claim that SIDS’s territory is spatially appropriated (Landnahme), the concept of ‘thermodynamic appropriation’ is developed to describe the uneven distribution of benefits from carbon energy, while displacing its costs. Using the recent Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union as a case study, it is further argued that the insistence on continued sovereignty is not merely a noble gesture but also harbours the potential for further appropriation.

The Plantation, Spatial Afterlives and Decolonial Constitutionalism in the Commonwealth Caribbean

Ronnie Yearwood

This paper will explore the enduring spatial and juridical “plantation” as total institution in the Commonwealth Caribbean (neo)colonial experience. Despite a wave of constitutional reform—includes transition to republicanism in acts of removing the British monarch as Head of State—the plantation form appears to persist in current governance systems. These reforms continue to reproduce spatial hierarchies and exclusions of the People, as they claim to advance decolonial constitutionalism. The paper explores how constitutional reform under the guise of decolonial constitutionalism reform may reproduce the plantation.  It will ask: In what ways do current constitutional reforms in the Caribbean attempt to spatially and symbolically displace the “plantation”? How does the “plantation” form persist in Caribbean legal and constitutional structures? The (neo)colonial plantation Westminster systems can be read as representing the land and offshore finance, a new maritime logic exploiting the sea through financial abstraction. Both can be seen to reproduce/continue the plantation’s juridical and symbolic order of spatial and legal control by an elite, and economic dependency. The paper therefore considers the Caribbean post-colony or rather (neo)colonialism within Schmitt’s spatial ordering of land and sea, but also as a space of insurgency, to propose a reimagined constitutional space. The paper ultimately argues for a radical transformation of Caribbean constitutionalism that dismantles the plantation afterlives and places the People at the centre of their constitutional and political space.

Law’s Commissaries? Irregular Fighters and their Relation to the Laws of War

Juan Diego Dimaté

Chapter twenty of Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea (1942) remains one of the most accurate descriptions of the twentieth century. Reading it as part of his broader work in the Nomos of the Earth (1950), and Theory of the Partisan (1962), this presentation explores certain outlaws’ (pirates, corsairs, and partisans) relation to international humanitarian law. In particular, the partisan or guerrillero remain a key figure in Schmitt’s history given its close relation to land –their so-called telluric character in contrast with the pirates and corsairs’ relation to water. However, it is usually neglected how Schmitt opposed to the inclusion of partisans and guerrilla-fighters in the laws of war, as this would imply a transition from a relative to an absolute enmity. The presentation questions one his presuppositions: one that declares the radical incompatibility of the laws of war with guerrilla warfare. Part of my doctoral dissertation, the hypothesis so far is that guerrillas were more regular than what Schmitt was willing to recognize and that they considered, in principle, the laws and costumes of warfare –despite in practice frequently infringing them. Part I of the text compares the role and function of pirates, corsairs, and partisans. Part II explores Schmitt’s texts and the secondary literature connecting the inclusion of irregular fighters in the laws of war as tantamount to absolute enmity. Part III challenges Schmitt’s critique to the inclusion of that warfare in the laws of war by showing via three scenarios of guerrilla fighting in Latin America their complex relation to law. In key literature of revolutionary guerrillas in the Cold War period there seems to be a proclivity to refer to the laws and customs of war. The presentation concludes insisting on guerrilla warfare as a method of war that challenges air as the dominant element in which war is fought and call for a revision of the laws regulating it, as will later happen in 1970s, including irregular fighting and thinking contra Schmitt.

6.1 Revolutionary Constitutionalism 1: Constituting Utopia, Instituting Revolution

Stream: The Revolutionary Constitution of Community on Land, Sea and Beyond 

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 16:00-17:30

Venue: Red Lecture Theatre

Anarchy vs. Sovereignty in the Classical Anarchist Tradition

Prof. Alex Prichard (University of Exeter) Prof. Ruth Kinna (Loughborough University)

All constitutional theory grapples with the problem of sovereignty, but only the anarchist tradition has a constitutional political theory of anarchy to replace it. This presentation will summarise the second chapter of our forthcoming book, entitled Constitutionalising Anarchy. The book recovers the anarchist constitutional tradition from its first conception through to its most recent global expression in the Occupy Wall Street movement and beyond. Chapter two, the focus of this presentation, recounts the social theory and social ontology of anarchy that underpins the decentralised federalism that we see across this historical tradition. Contrary to contemporary mischaracterisations of this tradition, the social theory and ontology of anarchy in the classical tradition is extensive and persuasive. To substantiate this claim, the presentation will focus on the link between culture and anarchy. Culture, for anarchists is both the normative collective self-expression of every group through the myriad practices they enact, and it also underpins the constitutional expression of the collective power of those social groups, making up the rich tapestry of global society. Because groups overlap and we can be members of more than one at a time, their authority is always already contingent and anarchy is the ontological norm, and ought to be the normative one too: only then can the promise of constitutional decentralised federalism be realised, the anarchists argued. The paper will summarise the claims made about social power and the anarchist constitution by Proudhon, Kropotkin and Bakunin, and contrast these with those of Gunther Teubner, James Tully and the postanarchism of Saul Newman and Catharine Malabou. The claim will be that we find a full and long ignored reconciliation of anarchy with the constitution in the classical anarchist tradition, and one that has significant value for thinking about constitutional politics in the current moment.

Ernst Bloch, Utopia, and Gerrard Winstanley

David Thomas

Ernst Bloch in The Principle of Hope cites Marx: ‘“In bourgeois society,” says the Communist Manifesto, “the past rules over the present, in communist society the present rules over the past.” And the present rules together with the horizon in it, which is the horizon of the future …’

Bloch believes that there is a becoming, whose central characteristic is concrete possibility or concrete utopia, namely the emergence in the present of contradictory forms and ways of life that make the impossible possible. The idea of concrete Utopia means that which can be approached by reflection and action such that eventually it will become reality; it is an ongoing process of growing together and condensation. Abstract utopias are the extraction of a moment from the ongoing process and thus their truth is limited to themselves. The vast majority of utopian thinking consists of abstract utopias.

Concrete utopia both exists and does not exist at the same time, because it is in the process of its own creation. It contains the shards of past and present utopian images that we carry forward with us on the journey but that also carry us forward, giving us the will to keep pushing forward and to become what we might be.

This paper looks at Winstanley and the Diggers as presenting an abstract utopia that is a shard carrying us forward, making use of religion as a holder of the utopian drive and a sense of light against the darkness of the lived moment. It will ask how Bloch and Winstanley can help us in our present dark moment, in which, Bloch tells us, it is our duty as Marxists to believe in the principle of hope embodied in utopia.

Prefigurative Constitutionality: Organisational Means and Constitutional Ends

Simon Thorpe

The paper proposes the concept of prefigurative constitutionality, which defines the constitutional dimension of grassroots politics as the strategic connection between present organisational means and future constitutional ends. Such a perspective disrupts traditional state-centric approaches to constitutional theory, and enriches understanding of political strategy, allowing for a broader conception of possible constitutionalities, and of strategies for their realisation. By defining prefiguration as the political effects of path dependence (a broader definition than narrowly anarchic understandings of ‘means-ends unity’), prefigurative constitutionality can be applied both to explicitly ‘prefigurative politics’ as well as to instrumentalist politics, insofar as every politics lays down ‘historical paths’ through its organisational means which, deliberately or accidentally, make some futures more likely than others. By defining constitutionality beyond the sovereign confines of constitutionalism, prefigurative constitutionality is able to grasp radical forms of non-sovereign democracy that go beyond sovereign constitutionalism. Prefigurative constitutionality establishes a much-needed conceptual tool for conceiving the generative force of constituent power as concrete, strategic constitutional practice.

Revolution as Institution: Legal Theory, Conflict, and Normative Project

Pier Giuseppe

This paper aims to discuss the significance of revolution as a legal category, simultaneously inseparable from the genetic and transformative process of law, and tightly connected to the social processes through which a specific order of meaning is established or removed. As a matter of fact, most legal theorists – e.g. Kelsen, but also Bobbio, as will be argued – have depicted revolution as a ‘negative’ moment of complete absence of the juridical, for the law is either that which is demolished or the normative outcome of revolu-tionary acts. What might be called a positive, non-dichotomous interpretation of the law-revolution inter-action can be attempted by regarding the juridical as the transformative process itself, rather than merely its result.

Such a perspective seems capable of encompassing the law in its historicity, as a dynamic practical expe-rience which unfolds differently in various contexts of human action. This reading is brought about by con-ceiving revolution as part of the notion of legal institution, which identifies not only the product of legal institutionalisation, but also the process of institutionalising itself. ‘Institution’, addressed by the meaning of concrete generation of the legal order, was discussed especially by the early 20th-century continental ju-risprudence (Hauriou, Santi Romano, Schmitt), as well as, most recently, by the so-called Italian theory in political philosophy (Negri, Esposito, Agamben).

As will be shown, such a concept is close to that of ‘constitution’: indeed, both have to do with the con-struction of a normative framework in a specific context – namely, the social group characterising any regu-lation by a particular locale and set of values. Employing the category of institution, however, allows con-sidering a variety of movements within that social context, even when they are idiosyncratic and contradict-ing the established system of power, producing new potential normative meaning incompatible with the present constitution. As a consequence, it will be argued that this theoretical framework identifies revolu-tion as a legal process with respect to the normative project which is conceptually inherent to it.

6.2 Revolutionary Constitutionalism 2: State, Revolution and Constituted Power

Stream: The Revolutionary Constitution of Community on Land, Sea and Beyond 

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 9:00-10:30

Venue: Peter Chalk 2.5

State Violence and Legal Accountability: The Wait for Justice

Dr Ceylan Begüm Yıldızi

What happens after state violence? Can organised demands and revolutionary acts bring justice? In her recent book, State Violence and Legal Accountability: The Wait for Justice, Dr Yıldız, explores the revolutionary potentials of justice while tracing the political and legal aftermath of the police killing of a 14-year-old boy, Berkin Elvan, during the nationwide Gezi protests of the summer of 2013 in Turkey. The book discusses the concepts of justice and accountability through the dichotomy of the state law’s waiting game and the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front’s (People’s Front) hostage-taking action in response to the stalling legal process of accountability. Juxtaposing the state legal system’s and the People’s Front’s promises of justice, the book talk inquires into the mirroring claims on violence, law, and justice to discuss the possibility of a revolutionary constitution.

Between reform and grassroots revolution: the constitutive paradoxes of liberal constitutionalism in the constituent experience of Benedita da Silva and Ailton Krenak.

Marcus V. A. B. De Matos

This chapter will look into constitutionalism and the practice of constitution-making from the perspective of two grassroots political leaders in Brazil. The first, Benedita da Silva, the first African-Brazilian woman to be elected for the Local Council and later as Senator and Vice-Governor in the State of Rio de Janeiro. She was the only black woman elected for the 1987-1988 National Constituent Assembly – which approved the current democratic constitution. The second, Ailton Krenak, who became famous for his iconic speech in defence of Indigenous peoples in Brazil, and the first Amerindian to be elected for the Brazilian Academy of Writers. Since its independence in 1822, Brazil has had 200 years of constitutional experience, underlined by different political ideas and conflicting legal hermeneutics. However, what they all had in common was living with the exclusion of many social groups from the country’s wealthy and colonial structure. The hypothesis I would like to put to the test here, is that constitutional concepts and theories have never fully approached the challenges they have faced from a class-struggle perspective. I propose that without changing the constituent subject, without electing representatives who are detached from historical and colonial elite interests, it is almost impossible to achieve material, institutional, structural transformation – no matter how transformative our current constitutional and human rights ideas intend (or pretend) to be. To prove my point, I will engage with what feminist methodology has called life-story research.

‘We are building a communal state from below!’ Exploring constitutions designed to stimulate revolution, through a study of the Bolivarian process

Carys Hughes, University of East London

Can a constitution help drive a revolution? There is a strand of revolutionary constitutionalism which has been distinguished from the broader phenomenon, on the basis that the new constitutional charter itself, along with the constitution-making process, is intended to have a revolutionary function, initiating or significantly deepening a revolution (Gardbaum, 2018). This paper aims to advance our collective understanding of this strand of revolutionary constitutionalism, and of this as a dimension which is relevant to all revolutionary constitutional processes.

I use a paradigm example of this type of revolutionary constitutionalism – the 1999 Venezuelan constitution and the Bolivarian process – as a case study to explore the phenomenon in more detail. And I suggest that the concept of ‘governmentality’ (Foucault, 2008) and more specifically a nascent strand of scholarship focused on ‘left governmentality’ (Dolenec & Zitco, 2016; Gourgouris, 2018; Karitzis, 2017), is the way to think about and understand the idea of and potential for constitutions as vehicles for revolutionary change.

Looking at the Venezuelan constitution and the Bolivarian process through a governmentality lens, I explore several of the more fundamental theoretical questions which arise in relation to this revolutionary constitutional strategy: How can a constitution help to initiate and deepen a revolution? Isn’t this attributing a constitution causal powers or ‘using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house’?  Isn’t this idea paradoxical, contradictory and therefore doomed to failure? Or, at the very least, aren’t there inherent limits to this strategy which fall far short of its proponents’ revolutionary aspirations?

From the early experiments in participatory democratic design led by the state, to the current far more conflicted and complex social reality in which a network of communal institutions exists in ambiguous, often antagonistic relations with the state: the Venezuelan experience allows us to explore the potential, the challenges and the limits to designing a state in aid of revolution.

Constitutionalism and Dual Power in Authoritarian Brazil: Juvenile Law, Reactionary Ideology, and the Governance of the Minor (1964–1985)

 Alexander de Castro (University of Warsaw UniCesumar)

 This paper examines how juvenile law in Brazil during the military dictatorship (1964–1985) functioned as a tool of reactionary constitutionalism, embedding a dual legal regime within the broader architecture of the authoritarian state. Following the 1964 coup, the regime implemented a series of Institutional Acts and enacted the 1967 and 1969 constitutions, all guided by the National Security Doctrine. This doctrine reframed national security as the total mobilization of state power to preserve social and moral order. Within this context, the state established FUNABEM (National Foundation for the Welfare of Minors) to address the socalled “minors problem,” inaugurating a bifurcated legal framework: the Direito do Menor (Law of Minors) applied to poor and racialized youth under tutelary control, while the Direito da Criança (Law of Children) implicitly protected privileged children as rights-bearing individuals. Under FUNABEM’s guidance, juvenile deviance was understood through a medicalized and biologically determinist lens, justifying therapeutic interventions to normalize behavior and suppress dissent. This culminated in the 1979 Code for Minors, which formalized the category of the “minor in an irregular situation” and expanded state authority to intervene in cases of “behavioral deviation.” In doing so, the regime used juvenile law to contain cultural transformation and enforce moral conformity. By constructing a dual constitutional logic that disguised repression as protection, the Brazilian state asserted control not only over the marginalized youth of its present but over the political futures they embodied.

7.1 Law and Process 1

Stream: Law and Process

Date: Saturday, 6^th September

Time: 12:00-13:00

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.3

Chair: Clair Quentin

Stiegler’s Process Philosophy of Technology & the Automation of Liberal Institutions
Conor Heaney & Connal Parsley

The work of Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020) attempts to formulate a systematic philosophical
vocabulary with the inseparable relationship between the human and the technical at its core. Stiegler is well known for his philosophy of technology—and beyond this, for his demonstration that techne, technique, and technology are themselves conditions of thinking and of the elaboration of a philosophical tradition. However, his place within the history of process philosophy remains to be clarified, and its potential explored. This is surprising, given not just the processual and dynamic nature of his concepts, but also his deployment and development of concepts from other process thinkers. From his historical characterisation of the human’s constitutive technicity and his reading of Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance alongside technics, to his processualisation of Simondon’s notion of the transindividual (which Stiegler renders as transindividuation), to his continuous reference to Deleuze and Whitehead (not to mention the decisive influence he has had on the work of Yuk Hui) – the place of Stiegler’s thought in the tradition of process philosophy requires elaboration. 

This paper has two main aims. First, we will respond to the question of how Stiegler can be situated as a process philosopher of technology. Given his extensive conceptual vocabulary, for the purposes of his chapter we will focus on constitutive technicity, general organology, and pharmacology. Second, we will explore the political potential of a Stieglerian process philosophy as a critical resource for analysing the political valence of our evolving sociotechnical systems in specific contrast with liberalism. Automated decision-making has disrupted the processes and proceduralism that underwrite the legitimacy of public sector decision-making in the liberal state. Liberal institutions and liberal political philosophy are replete with processual notions (democratic process, procedural fairness, reflective equilibrium, the rule of law). We suggest that their disruption by automation technology—their poor capacity to accommodate such technology qualitatively—stems from liberal governance’s commitment to media-neutrality. It lacks a coherent, substantive account of the connection between techne/technology and political value. A Stieglerian process philosophy, we suggest, reveals the untenability of the liberal institutional conception of process. But further, in reformulating the relationship between techne, process, public institutions and political value, the normative-evaluative dimension of Stiegler’s thought also suggests new ways to imagine political belonging, participatory democracy, and the normative presumptions that are structured into our public institutional design.

Law Unstill | Mycelium, Trans-Dividuation, Process-Oriented Ontology

Korina (Kyriaki) Pavlidou

 This paper locates the roots of legal ontologies in a substance-based, numerical, and thinglike perception of the world. Within the ‘paradigm of number,’ life has been comprehended by measuring and scaling the entitative world through geometrical objects, points, lines, and absolute standards. Geometric construction has been central to political and legal theory, where conceptions of nature saturated with metaphysical, geometric, and teleological assumptions have reinscribed the passivity, uniformity, and inertia of matter into linear, fixed, and hierarchical structures of laws. Against this backdrop, legal ontology examines what is to be legal and the structured relationships of those entities to others, articulating the ontological commitments within legal frameworks, whether social reality is conceived as static or dynamic, and whether humans are understood as things or processes. In this regard, the plural form ‘legal ontologies’ underscores the challenge to the assumption that law merely describes the nature of a thing at an ontological and epistemological level. Engaging with John Dupré’s and Daniel Nicholson’s processual philosophy of biology, and Bruno Gullì’s ontology of unrest and notion of ‘trans-dividuation,’ the paper proposes ways of understanding individuality, not as the ontological closure of individuation, but as trans-dividuation, and social reality as fluid, indeterminate, and relational — more akin to the restless, interlacing, and continually forming strands of mycelium — without grounding it in thing-resembling premises or substance-based principles. In this context, the paper advances process philosophy in legal thinking, calling for a shift from a ‘thing-oriented ontology’ or ‘thing-power materialism’ toward what I frame as a process-oriented ontology (POO) of law

Legal Categories in Flux: Rights of Nature and the ‘Ratio’ of Western Law

Iris Pitkänen

The Rights of Nature (RoN) is a diverse group of legal approaches that have in common an aim to redefine the relationship between the human and the more-than-human by extending legal rights and/or legal personhood to entities such as rivers, ecosystems, and nature as a whole. In this paper, I look at RoN through the lens of Kaarlo Tuori’s framework of the layers of the modern Western law and its multi-paced dynamics, using the predominant critiques of RoN as a starting point for my analysis. The first form of critique concerns the incompatibility of RoN with prevailing conceptions of rights and legal subjectivity, concluding the idea of RoN to be theoretically incoherent. Another line of critique contends, conversely, that RoN are not radical enough, as the approach remains anchored in problematic (neo)liberal legal categories, and thus tightly linked to extractivism and colonialism. Drawing from Tuori, I argue that the categories of rights and subjectivity are not immutable or essential but are instead in slow yet constant flux. On the other hand, legitimacy and validity of the modern Western law rely on its deep cultural categories, engrained in what Tuori calls law’s ratio, making sudden revolutions unlikely. Rather than dismiss RoN for engaging with these categories, I suggest that RoN could have potential as a tool for the deep transformation of the modern Western law, providing avenues to reinterpret and renegotiate the meanings of its foundational concepts.

7.2 Law and Process 2

Chair: Jessica Elias

Stream: Law and Process

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 13:30-15:00

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.1

Fear of The Flood: reading legislation through process theory

Stephen Connelly

The paper analyses the Platonic theory of the legislative act through the lens of process theory, arguing doing so offers powerful tools for exploring the limits of legislation as conceived within the ‘tradition’. Particular reference is made to the use of the (virtual) power of myth within legislation, including the myth of The Flood. The paper argues Plato wages philosophical war on certain Near Eastern mythopoetic practices in order to set limits on the possibilities of process – limits explored by philosophers as diverse as Epicurus and Gershom Scholem.

Stranger Things: real abstraction, real hypostatisation and legal personhood’ 

Clair Quentin

This paper draws on (i) Alfredo Sohn-Rethel’s critique of epistemology, (ii) the Marxist legal theory of Evgeny Pashukanis, and (iii) my own work on the self-valorization of value as a materially embodied process. From Sohn-Rethel is drawn the concept of ‘real abstraction’ i.e. the abstraction that exchange places on things, not in that abstracting organ the human mind, but in ‘the spatiotemporal sphere of human interrelations’. In common with Gian-Giacomo Fusco’s work on the legal person, this paper draws parallels between ‘real abstraction’ in that sense and Pashukanis’s commodity-form theory of law, at the core of which is a conception of the rights-holder as a structural phenomenon that is coeval and coextensive with the thing over which the rights-holder has rights i.e. (paradigmatically, under capitalism) the commodity. These analyses may be characterised as process-ontological, in that real abstraction arises from the ‘spatio-temporal activity’ of exchange relations, and by the same token ‘[o]nly the continual reshuffling of values in the market creates the idea of a fixed bearer of [legal] rights’. That processual being stands in contrast to the seeming substance of commodities as concrete and heterogeneous use-values. But even on a concrete level commodities take on a distinct existence pursuant to that reshuffling, in the form of the physical surplus that the self-valorization of value brings into being. This distinct existence, a ‘real hypostatisation’ that is (like living matter) both concrete and processual, arises because outputs do not physically coexist with the inputs that they are net of. The relation between real abstraction and real hypostatisation may be understood as corresponding to the relation between, on the one hand, socially necessary labour time and, on the other, the reorderedness of matter that is the concrete form taken by value in those portions of circuits of production that take place between instances of exchange. And indeed, so this paper claims, any structural phenomenon under capitalism has an ‘upside-down’ that is materially embodied not in the spatio-temporal sphere of human interrelations but in commodities in circulation. And accordingly the legal person, too, has such an ‘upside-down’ form.

Dialectis of Juridification: Reading Pašukanis’s 100 Years on

Rafał Mańko

The goal of my paper is to contribute to the discussions of the Law and Process stream by offering a new reading of Evgeny B. Pašukanis’s classic General Theory of Law and Marxism in the light of Hegelian Science of Logic. Pašukanis’s main theoretical achievement was the construction of the concept of “legal form” as a hylomorphic concept of law. However, he was relatively reticent about the conceptual corollaries of form beyond generally opposing legal form to the “economy.” In my paper, I will use Hegel’s understanding of the dialectics of matter, form and content, as developed in the Science of Logic, to construct a dynamic understanding of dialectics of juridification, conceived of as a processual, rather than static, account of juridical form.

7.3 Law and Process 3

Chair: Korina Pavldou

Stream: Law and Process

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 15:30-17:00

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.3

Institutions in Motion: Applying Maurice Hauriou’s Sociolegal Theory to International Organisations

Matilde Masetti Placci

The paper explores the potential of using 19th century French theorist Maurice Hauriou’s (1856-1929) legal theory as the basis for a more nuanced analysis of the largest sites of legal production: international organisations. The paper begins with an outline of his sociolegal methodology, highly influenced by the works of his contemporary and close interlocutor, Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904). Hauriou was interested in how interindividual communication and relationships emerge and consolidate to produce social facts and, more importantly, social (and eventually legal) organisation. His sociology, which understood temporal and spatial impermanence as the baseline for social life, influenced his highly dynamic account of law. His fluid approach to perspective, wherein social relations could be observed from both outside and within the individuals that composed them, wherein multisubjectivity was a given and inter-individual connections were made and remade over time, was crucial to his legal theory, which revolved around the institution. An institution concretised a shared idea (the management of an international watercourse, for example) that tied members to each other and provided a structure for members to both consolidate and execute the idea. Where individuals came together to organise socially with a view to executing the idea, institutions would be born, and where institutions existed, so did law. There were as many legal orders as there were institutions. This plurality was bolstered by the social, inter-personal dynamics within and between institutions, which Hauriou consistently described as ‘living things’. It is these dynamics which render institutions flexible, able to adapt in challenging times, yet also susceptible to weaknesses and eventual ‘death’. As institutions were steeped in complex, criss-crossing social dynamics, their legal status was vulnerable to the same forces. The paper concludes by arguing for the potential utility of bringing Hauriou’s account of the institution to bear on the present, specifically in the context of international organisations. Seeing ‘collective difference’ as the primary form of organisation, Hauriou’s theory gives us an example of how ‘the impossibility of stasis’ is indeed indispensable to understanding how international organisations maintain themselves and adapt to challenges and change over time.

International Law is not a thing. Justice becoming law, law becoming justice

Jessica Elias

The current crisis of international law is its failure to speak justice to power. The current regime of international law was forged from imperialist power relations which themselves resulted from euro-centric ideas of law and justice. An underappreciated aspect of these euro-centric assumptions is that they tend to presume (a variety of) substance ontologies: those that give ‘thingly’ accounts of the fundamental nature of the world. While there have been various attempts at non-substantive ontologies within and beyond the Western tradition, there is a renewed interest in ontologies that prioritize processes over things. One of the key thinkers in this respect is Gilles Deleuze. Yet, there has been relatively little work on how the process philosophical assumptions of Deleuze can be incorporated into a jurisprudential idea of the relationship between law and justice. In this presentation, key concepts within Deleuze’s process philosophy will be deployed to bring to light phenomena in international law that existing substance-oriented accounts keep in the dark. To this end, I will present aspects of the Bandung Conference of 1955 which can only be understood through process-oriented concepts such as ‘multiplicities’, ‘bodies without organs’ and ‘events’. The presentation will conclude that the relationship between international law and justice can and should be understood as a process of deand re- territorialisation

Utilising a process-oriented approach to climate constitutionalism

Gustav Stenseke Arup

As fundamental components of legal systems, constitutions play a vital role in society, and their provisions hence have a strong potential to contribute to transitions into climate-neutral societies. However, as most Western countries’ constitutions were developed before the extent of human-induced climate change was widely recognised, the legal systems of these countries have been built on foundations that do not acknowledge human impact on the atmosphere. Although constitutional provisions related to the environment have increased internationally over the last 50 years, including a rise in constitutionally inclined litigation over climate change, using constitutions as a tool in the transition to a climate-neutral society is still underexplored. In this presentation, I utilise a process-oriented approach to climate constitutionalism, grounded in the concepts uncertainty, relationality, and process. Focusing on the situation in Sweden, I picture how constitutional climate provisions emerge in clouds of uncertainty through relations of diverse processes. As this approach better aligns with the evolving nature of constitutional law, it is well-suited to contribute to a progressive climate constitutionalism.

8.1 Hope from the Margins 1

Stream: Hope from the Margins

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 15:30-17:00

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.3

Pluriversal Consciousness: In the Borderland: The Non-Male Experiences of Law in Postcolony

Arpeeta Shams Mizan

In this paper I locate law in the everyday life of the cis and transwomen in Bangladesh, to see how the ‘complex and contradictory fabric’ of law signifies different ontologies underpinning the postcolonial legal imaginations (Ewick and Silbey 1998; Porter 2020). Analysing the Bangladeshi urban women’s legal consciousness implies acknowledging how they occupy many different, coexisting realities, each with its own distinct perspectives, values, and  epistemology. Using thematic analysis of data from 30 interviews and two focus group discussions, I show that not only do women understand law and legality differently than men in Bangladesh, but they constantly construct legalities and norms to survive, adapt and challenge the patriarchal structures all around them. 

This brings me to the contention, that is the existing scholarship on legal consciousness an appropriate tool to study Bangladeshi women inhabiting different temporalities and ontologies, such as religious, social, and community-based practices -most of which do not conform to global north reality or the European modernity. In that premises, I argue that the modernist epistemic approach falls short of capturing the nuances of border thinking.  ‘Third World Women’  (Mohanty 1991) have been often homogenized, othered and depicted through a lens of Western-centric assumptions.  I counter that narrative by adopting a postcolonial lens to understand how these women’s understanding of self as citizens, as legal subjects, of their agency- everything becomes multiple. To fully appreciate this complex experience, I propose, we need a pluriversal and postcolonial ontological approach to study legal consciousness.

Law as resistance: Reimagining digital health data commons from the margins

Tatenda Chatikobo

Health data has become a marketable commodity, leading to multiple and often invisible forms of harm. As a response, there have been calls to consider how community-centred platforms, such as health data commons, can serve as infrastructures for a more equitable benefit sharing as well as a resistance to extractive models. Yet, such data commons infrastructures, imagined or in practice, remain entangled in colonialities of power in socio-technical and legal systems, and persistent economic rationales that shape ownership, access, control and use in ways that are in tension with the collectivist imperative. These complexities are especially pronounced in low and middle-income countries where state obligations to protect citizens’ rights often intersect with the burden of fostering innovation and economic growth. Drawing from decolonial theories, socio-legal theory and science and technology studies, I begin from a critique of how claims to ‘public’, ‘benefit’ and ‘good’ are more fluid, dynamic and contested in light of broader socio-technical actor-network relations where technological, legal and economic infrastructures are shaped by diverse influences. Embracing the margins as spaces of radical possibility, I reflect on the ways law can support health data commons as a resistance infrastructure in marginalised contexts through (i) visibilising the elusive colonialities of datafication even in community-centred models and (ii) affirming the commons as a space and project of solidarity, belonging and epistemic justice.

Performing the Margin: (Neo)Colonial Realities in Global Biosafety and Biosecurity Governance

Vorathep (Dev) Sachdev

In this paper, I focus on international governance in the context of laboratory biosafety and biosecurity within life-science research (LBBLR) in the Global South (GS), such as gain-of-function research that genetically enhances the virulence of potential pandemic pathogens. I examine the role of normative instruments published by the World Health Organization (WHO) such as its published guidance documents which are often framed as neutral and technical recommendations. I argue that the WHO documents on LBBLR actively produce (neo)colonial realities by drawing on theories of performativity and mimicry. Drawing on Butler’s performativity and Bhabha’s mimicry, I analyse key WHO publications on laboratory biosafety and biosecurity thematically and through framing and discourse. My analysis also builds upon previous literature that has analysed health security as a largely colonial endeavour. As such, my analysis reveals how the WHO documents produce particular realities by constituting Global North Member States as experts against a constructed Global South Member State as lacking or in need. The WHO also productively constitutes its own authority through which it creates a veneer of consensus that can mask Norther dominance. Finally, I analyse the framing of problems and solutions by using the example of capacity gaps/building, thereby stabilisng a (neo)colonial asymmetrical relationship. By deconstructing these performative mechanisms, I hope to make these institutional practices visible. My analysis seeks not to undermine the WHO’s, or funders’s, critical work but to illuminate the reproduction of historical hierarchies, thereby opening a reflexive dialogue to forge more equitable modes of governance.

8.2 Hope from the Margins 2

Stream: Hope from the Margins

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 15:30 -17:00

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.1

Storytelling From the Margins

David McKeown, University of Bristol

Reframing law from the margins requires new stories. To capture decolonial possibilities, these stories must challenge accepted narratives, characterisations, and themes within law to speak with worlds otherwise to the singularised world presented by colonial modernity. For environmental law scholars, a story that has long called for disruption is the fragmented relationship between law, society, and nature. Yet, despite the need for a redraft, the Western tradition of environmental law scholarship has struggled to address the fragmentations between these categories. Recent trends in critical environmental law and third world approaches to international law, however, have gestured toward the complex and pluralised possibilities of legal relationality across society-nature relations. They speak to stories that indigenous legal traditions have carried through generations – stories that fundamentally challenge laws disembodied character within Western legal theory and practice. Stemming from my fieldwork with communities engaged in satoyama revitalisation in Japan, I want to reflect on the story telling capacities of lawyers. To do this, I discuss my collaborations with a visual anthropologist at goldsmiths on a short film project that tries to make sense of audio-visual data collected during my fieldwork, but not directly used in my thesis. Reflecting on this, I identify how diffusing our storytelling into different outputs can help reconnect law to place and resituating the meaning of legal relationality beyond the written word.

Protection from Below: Reimagining the Climate Refugee Subject Through Local Solidarity and Sanctuary Practices
Irene Sacchetti

This paper reimagines the figure of the climate refugee by proposing a radical departure from state-centric paradigms of protection toward grassroots models of solidarity, care, and collective agency. Drawing on critical legal theory, it critiques the dominant logic of refugee law—exemplified by the 1951 Refugee Convention—which frames displaced persons as passive victims in need of protection conferred from above. Such top-down approaches entrench exclusionary labels and rigid categorisations, reinforcing binaries like deserving/undeserving and visible/invisible, while perpetuating racialised hierarchies of vulnerability.

Against this backdrop, the paper argues for a shift from sovereignty to solidarity, centring localised, bottom-up practices that redefine protection as a co-produced, relational process. Through case studies of sanctuary cities and grassroots solidarity networks, it explores how community-led initiatives provide meaningful protection—not through legal recognition, but through everyday acts of hospitality, mutual aid, and resistance. Within these spaces, protection is not conferred from above, but co-produced through grassroots mobilisation that centres agency over status, presence over categorisation, and care over control.

By reframing the climate refugee not as a problem to be solved by states, but as an active subject embedded in a web of grassroots solidarities, this contribution directly addresses the call for novel narratives of climate mobility. It proposes that meaningful protection does not emerge from legal categories or humanitarian discourse, but from political practices that challenge exclusion, recognise agency, and redress historical harm. In doing so, it offers a critical yet hopeful vision for climate mobility—one rooted in solidarity, not sovereignty; in justice, not charity.

In the cracks of dominant legal systems, these local solidarities are already building alternative futures—where protection begins from below.

Reframing marine sacrifice zones as spaces of hope? Law and struggles for marine and coastal spaces in Chile

Sofie Elise Quist

In the south of Chile, industrial-scale salmon farming was introduced during the Pinochet dictatorship and the subsequent years of trade liberalization. Helped by the powerful imaginary of development, neoliberal legal frameworks, and transnational support from Norway and Japan, the industry rapidly turned the fjords and channels of Mapuche Williche, Kawesqar, and Yagan territory into marine sacrifice zones. Today, the global salmon farming industry has become the symbol of a “Blue Revolution” where farmed salmon feeds a growing population amidst climate and biodiversity collapse. Despite the unregulated façade of the salmon farming boom, law plays a crucial constitutive role in the resulting contamination, privatisation, and financialization of the sea, as portions of water a delimited, licenced, mortgaged, and pollution permitted. Refusing such marine sacrifice zones, the Indigenous Peoples of the littoral territories in southern Chile have mobilised a legal framework establishing “Marine and Coastal Spaces of Indigenous Peoples” (law no. 20.249) adopted in 2008. The potency of recognising coastal and marine Indigenous territories is powerfully illustrated by concerted efforts by the salmon farming lobby in recent years to curtail this law.

Based on fieldwork undertaken in Chile during spring 2025, this paper explores how ocean law is contested, reframed, and reconfigured in the struggles of Chile’s Indigenous Peoples for their marine and coastal spaces. Drawing on decolonial legal scholarship, I first reframe the encounter between salmon farming and Indigenous Peoples as a legal encounter, demonstrating how law saturates what is usually characterised by its absence. Second, through a combination of interviews, photo stories and a short documentary, I explore how the process of recognising marine and coastal spaces of Indigenous Peoples reframe marine sacrifice zones into spaces of hope. The paper thus contributes to the theme ‘hope from the margins’ by showing how invoking state law to redress of the violence of neoliberal ocean governance combines with the potential flourishing of marginalised practices and legal relations in the coastal zone.

9.1 Treasures found on Land , Treasure Lost at Sea: From Mining regulations to Laws of Salvage

Stream: Treasures found on Land , Treasure Lost at Sea: From Mining regulations to Laws of Salvage

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 13:30-15:00

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.5

The Unobvious ‘Treasure Trove’ of Piracy: What can Pirates Teach us about Legal Theory?

Mirosław M. Sadowski

While pirates are typically associated with more tangible treasures – even though this perception is, for the most part, incorrect – in recent years their social organisation on and off board has been rediscovered as a veritable treasure trove of early libertarian and even proto-communist ideas. Far from being mere outlaws, pirates developed sophisticated systems of governance that challenge conventional historical narratives. Iconic pirate havens such as Tortuga, immortalised in popular culture, stand alongside other significant strongholds like Port-Royal, Jamaica, the Republic of Salé, and the legendary utopian enclave of Libertalia. These settlements, often dismissed as lawless, operated under intricate internal rules that governed communal life and resource distribution, notably through mechanisms like the Chasse-Partie agreements. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive legal-theoretical analysis of the governance structures within pirate settlements and their maritime operations. By examining the social and legal norms that shaped these communities, the study draws parallels and contrasts with the regulatory frameworks imposed by colonial authorities in their settlements and naval practices. Through this comparative lens, the paper explores how pirate societies balanced individual autonomy with collective responsibility, offering insights into their contributions to early modern political thought. By revisiting these overlooked systems, this work seeks to reframe pirate communities as dynamic laboratories of social experimentation, challenging traditional assumptions about law, order, and governance in the early modern world.

Digging for Trouble: Striking the Balance between Mining Profits and Indigenous Rights under Indian Law

Satvik Sindhu and Ankit Malhotra

India’s mining sector is a case study in the perils of short-term profit over long-term prudence, where every “dig” into the earth risks “digging deeper” into legal and ethical quagmires. At the fulcrum of this balancing act are statutory frameworks that, on paper, champion both economic development and the constitutional rights of indigenous peoples—yet, in practice, frequently collide. The Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957 (MMDR Act), and state-level codes such as the Chhattisgarh Minor Mineral Rules, 2015, have accelerated resource extraction and opened the sector to private and foreign investment. Yet these gains come with legal landmines: the procurement and acquisition of land for mining, often undertaken under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (LARR Act), remains fraught with procedural lapses and poor community engagement. The Indian Constitution enshrines the principles of social justice, protection of Scheduled Tribes, and the preservation of culture and livelihood in Articles 244, 243, and 46. The judiciary has routinely underscored these guarantees, most notably in Samatha v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1997), where the Supreme Court invalidated mining leases in Scheduled Areas that did not comply with protective legislation. Similarly, in Orissa Mining Corporation v. Ministry of Environment & Forests (2013), the Court made it clear that no mining could proceed on the sacred Niyamgiri hills without the free, prior, and informed consent of the local Gram Sabha, recognizing their rights under the Forest Rights Act, 2006 and the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA). Despite this judicial clarity, business practices often lag behind statutory mandates. The Chhattisgarh government’s mining code, though progressive in mandating social audits and environmental safeguards, is frequently sidestepped in the rush for commercial expediency, as documented in policy reviews and CAG audits. Land acquisition processes, under the LARR Act and state amendments, are still marred by non-transparent compensation, involuntary displacement, and procedural irregularities. Gram Sabhas are too often reduced to rubber-stamp exercises, in direct contravention of both the letter and spirit of PESA and the Forest Rights Act, which require meaningful participation and recognition of community tenure. Recent policy updates, including amendments to the MMDR Act (2021) and increased scrutiny of environmental clearances, signal a growing recognition of the business risks of non-compliance. Investors and operators now face litigation, project suspensions, and reputational backlash when legal safeguards for indigenous and forest-dwelling communities are ignored. The lesson from recent jurisprudence and regulatory trends is clear: in India, the path to sustainable and profitable mining runs through robust consent procedures, transparent procurement, and a genuine partnership with local communities. Only by “thinking deeper” about constitutional duties and statutory obligations can mining enterprises hope to reconcile the competing demands of commerce, law, and justice.

Treasures of Law after Death: Preliminary Reflections on the ‘Death and Law’ Project

Nevena Jevremović (University of Aberdeen)

The German Civil Code, Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, or BGB, is said to be the companion of every German “from cradle to coffin.” It is true that law regulates the multitude of issues that arise in the aftermath of a person’s death – law and death’s intersections go far beyond the civil law aspects, however. In 2024, a group of researchers from the School of Law, University of Aberdeen launched the ‘Death and Law’ Project to investigate the legal perspectives on death using insights from other disciplines. It includes consideration of dignity and personality after death (extending to digital afterlife), posthumous ownership issues (e.g. buried goods), and wider non-anthropocentric concepts of death. The project aims to reassess existing legal concepts and boundaries, e.g. delict/tort, succession, property, and data protection, and to incorporate diverse views from anthropology, philosophy, theology and beyond. Over 20 academics with a variety of disciplinary backgrounds are contributing to Death & Law – Interdisciplinary Explorations. The project extends to several activities, including interdisciplinary workshops, a podcast series (with funding from the Aberdeen Humanities Fund), consultation responses, public engagement and publications. This paper offers preliminary reflections on the project as it approaches its first year.

10.1 Dance/Law 1

Stream: Dance/Law

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 13:30-15:00

Venue: Peter Chalk 2.5

Dance/law as a performance by a body that remembers: Everyday legal mobility, dance, and the city 

Jess Connolly-Smith (University of Lincoln)

Dance/law as a performance by a body that remembers: Everyday legal mobility, dance, and the city Jess Connolly-Smith University of Lincoln This paper responds to a question posed by the guest editors: What can dance do for law? Developing work on movement as socio-legal method (Smith, 2021), I consider how we might consider draw on dance to better understand everyday legal mobilities. Drawing upon literature on dance and memory and legal geography, I draw parallels between the movement of dance and law to explore the embodied legacies a body holds onto when it is set in motion. Developing an understanding of dance/law as a performance by a body that remembers, the essay weaves together autoethnographic accounts of walking, dance literature, and a reading of law’s text. The paper illustrates pavement walking as an everyday dance with the law. To provide an example, I turn to I recent updates made to the UK Highway Code, drawing out themes of responsibility, order, care, hierarchy, hesitancy, consent, gesture, and precarity. As a performance by a body that remembers, dance/law offers a way of illustrating the layered, embodied, spatio-temporality of everyday legal mobility.

From techno to tekno, from law to nomos: How free parties are the new frontier of legal imagination

Vittoria Becci (European University Institute)

In the early 1990s, the British government responded to the rise of unlicensed rave parties with the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. Castlemorton Festival became the symbol of this crackdown, marking a pivotal moment when techno became tekno, a cultural and political shift that crossed the Channel and took root across Europe. Nearly three decades later, similar legislative responses, such as Italy’s Law no. 199 of December 30, 2022, introduced after the Witchtek free party in Modena, have aimed to suppress these gatherings under the banner of public order. Yet, free parties persist.

This endurance is not just a matter of subcultural resilience but points to something deeper: a form of legal resistance and reimagination. Tekno, with its harder, faster sounds and its intentional deviation from commercial “techno”, becomes a site where law, space, and body converge. The shift from “ch” to “k” signals more than a genre change, it marks the emergence of a counter-narrative. Here, dancing is not just bodily expression but spatial and political occupation. It is a movement through territory and meaning. As we know, the function of law is aspiring to make justice in giving meaning to spaces, things, and people. However, these laws such as the 1994 Public Order Act and Law no. 199 of December 2022, demonstrate how political power is using the legal system to serve other purposes. In this way, law is becoming arid and is moving far away from creating culture, communities, rights, therefore justice.

The space of free parties, based on stories about drug experiences, dancing, political activism create a cosmos of narratives that shift many paradigms in defining what “the social” means. The reactive nature of legislation aimed at suppressing free parties reveals how law increasingly serves power rather than justice, losing its meaning in the process. With this paper I want to show firstly how dance, law and power are very much related, and secondly how these movements of resistance offer an alternative legal consciusness –rooted in community, space, and bodies – that should help reorient the language of law toward new paradigms of justice. As a final point, the paper argues that the dancing scene is a fertile ground for legal imagination, redirecting the discourse from law to nomos.

Contact as property 

Chrys Papaioannou (Independent scholar)

This paper critically engages with the question of property, epistemic whiteness and racialised subjectivation in the contemporary dance form Contact Improvisation (thereafter ‘contact’) by adopting an interdisciplinary perspective that combines autoethnography, dance historiography and oral history, critical legal theory, and continental philosophy (in the lineage of Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi). ‘Contact as Property’ argues that the seemingly deterritorialised and fluid social relations that emerge in the haptic encounters of the movement vocabulary of contact are underpinned by what legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris has famously called ‘Whiteness as Property’ (1993). While recent scholarship on racial exclusion in Contact Improvisation has foregrounded the epistemic violence of ‘neutral touch’ (see, most prominently, Royona Mitra, 2018; 2022; 2025), this paper expands on the author’s own research on the whiteness of flow and fluid relationality in contact (Papaioannou, 2025) to demonstrate that the hagiographic dance historiographies of Contact Improvisation – which valorise a decentralised copyleft culture of aesthetic and pedagogical global commoning – must be redressed by attending to the epistemic violence enacted in the name of watery fluidity. Dr Chrys Papaioannou (they/she) is a critical theorist and activist living in London, working in the tradition of autonomist Marxism and queer-feminist biopolitical thought. Their writing has appeared in Radical Philosophy, New Formations, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, Maska and Performance Research. Papaioannou is currently developing a Spinozist analysis of ‘consent’ in ecosexual performance rituals

10.2 Dance/Law 2

Stream: Dance/Law

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 15:30-17:00

Venue: Peter Chalk 2.5

Chemsex and the law: Exploring the legal borderlands and narco-frontiers in the justice system’s response to drug-related sexual offences
Sean Mulcahy (La Trobe University)

Queer sexual practices have long fallen foul of the criminal law. Practices like cruising, beat sex, sexting, and BDSM, among others, raise complex issues and have thorny histories when it comes to law reform. ‘Chemsex’ – sexual activities engaged in while under the influence of stimulant drugs – raises particularly challenging questions regarding the law of consent.
Notably, the law in the Australian state of Victoria does not allow voluntary drug-sharing where that drug will affect consent. Section 46(1) of the Victorian Crimes Act stipulates that a person commits an offence if they give a substance to another person that would affect that person’s capacity to give, withdraw, or withhold consent to sex, even if the other person consented to taking this substance.
Many people manage their drug use safely and can negotiate sex in a way that works for them. Some undertake risk-reduction activities, such as attending chemsex sessions with friends or discussing safer-sex practices with other participants. However, a recent survey found that one in ten men have reported being sexually assaulted during chemsex sessions. When people experience sexual assault, they may also be reluctant to label it as such due to complexities around consent norms and assumptions of consent in these settings. How the law should intervene remains a tricky question.
The law also perpetuates a problematic distinction by treating alcohol and other drugs quite differently, as the explanatory memorandum for section 46(1) states that it ‘is not intended to capture someone who seeks to get [their] desired sexual partner “into the mood” with a few drinks’.
In this paper, we consider chemsex as operating in a legal borderland and narco-frontier that challenges the justice system’s response to sexual offences, its differential approach to alcohol and other drugs, and the heteronormativity underpinning the legal regulation of sex and drugs.

Between a glissade and a swim at Li Galli: a performance lecture on Dance/Law and the Sea

Maria Federica Moscati (University of Sussex)

Through a combination of spoken words and audience-participatory dance, this performance lecture will investigate the dynamic relation between dance/law and the sea. The sea (and islands) offer dancers and choreographers inspiration, a stage, or a space for creative exploration. Like other dance sites, the goal is to harmonize movement and environment. It is this kinaesthetic negotiation between the moving bodies and the space, that is productive for the law. The presentation draws on the case study of Li Galli, an Italian island once owned by Léonide Massine and Rudolf Nureyev, alongside sea-inspired choreographies including Frederick Ashton’s Ondine, Wayne McGregor’s Deepstaria, and site-specific works such as Grief Floats, and will involve audience in dance maritime-inspired movements, exploring and re-imagining themes like sovereignty, boundaries, and fluidity.

10.3 Dance Session

Stream: Dance/Law

Date: Saturday, 6^th September

Time: 12:00 – 13:00

Venue: TBC

Maria Federica Moscati and Sean Mulcahy

This dance-based session will involve participants in a dance class and impro choreography on the themes of the conference. The session is framed within the intersection of dance/law discourse, and draws upon the Dance in Law, Politics and Sociology teaching initiative launched at University of Sussex and the Legal Scholars at the Ballet Barre practical dance session at SLSA 2025. Although discussed, analysed, and used as metaphor, the practice of dance – or a body that dances the law – is nevertheless still uncommon during legal academic conferences. Thus, to culminate the Dance/Law stream, we will turn to dance. Participants in this session will start with warm up at the barre and then will be invited to create their own choreography by translating into movement their individual embodied ideas of the dynamic interplay between land, sea and the law.

No previous experience of dance is required; you can wear everything makes you comfortable.

11.1 Exception as Order – The Rule of Law and the Normalization of Emergency

Stream: The Rule of Law, Colonialism, and Legal Silence: Rethinking Exception Across Land and Sea

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 13:30 -15:00

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.3

Chair: Kiwako Murata (Kyoto University)

This panel investigates how exceptional modes of governance are normalized and integrated into the ordinary legal order under the guise of the rule of law. While the rule of law is often understood as a principle that restrains arbitrary power, it can also serve to legitimize specific forms of domination and exclusion by framing which issues are legally contestable.

Focusing on three distinct contexts—the Okinawa Henoko landfill litigation, land expropriation in the occupied West Bank, and the legal denial of rights to the Cham people in Vietnam—this panel analyzes how specialized legal vocabularies, such as “public purpose,” “standing,” and “administrative discretion,” function to absorb exceptional situations into a framework of legality. The papers collectively explore how the state of exception is normalized and the discursive and institutional conditions that make this normalization possible.

Legal Silence and the Violence of the Rule of Law: The Okinawa Henoko Landfill Litigation in Colonial Structure

Kiwako Murata (Kyoto University)

This paper reconsiders the ideal of the rule of law through the lens of colonialism, focusing on how exceptional forms of violence are normalized and legally embedded within institutional structures. Theoretically, the analysis draws on Critical Legal Studies (CLS), especially its critique of law’s purported neutrality and universality, and its emphasis on the legitimating role of law in sustaining dominant social and political orders. This paper also engages with Nasser Hussain’s The Jurisprudence of Emergency (2003), which demonstrates that the concept of the rule of law itself was formed in colonial contexts. For Hussain, the state of exception is not something outside or opposed to the rule of law, but a repeated and internal function of legal systems. Using historical analysis and postmodern legal theory, he explains how the rule of law can incorporate exceptional authority and normalize it as part of ordinary legal governance.

From this perspective, the paper further argues that law not only permits violence but institutionalizes it through processes of legal silence and the convergence of legal vocabulary. These mechanisms operate to displace certain harms from legal visibility and render them structurally inarticulable. These mechanisms serve as a basis for examining how institutional vocabularies function in specific legal contexts to regulate visibility and silence.

This approach is applied to litigation surrounding the relocation of a U.S. military base to Henoko, Okinawa. In these cases, legal reasoning centers on technical terms such as “standing” and “administrative discretion,” while questions of colonial history, cultural erasure, and local agency are systematically excluded from juridical consideration. The convergence of legal vocabulary narrows the field of legal contestation and recasts exceptional governance as if it were part of the ordinary legal order.

Finally, drawing on David Dyzenhaus and others, this paper considers whether the rule of law—entangled with exception and silence—can nonetheless be reconstructed from within legal institutions.

Land Expropriation for Public Purposes in the Occupied West Bank – A Critical Historical Perspective

Nidal Daud (University of Haifa)

The power of expropriation for public purposes is a governmental tool used, in general, within the sovereign territory of the state. The legitimate foundation of the power is in the presence of a sovereign representative who wields it for the common good. However, in the context of occupation, the power’s limits are not set by the legal sovereign. It is defined by the military commander (MC) and in the Israeli case also by the Supreme Court. The MC determines the “public purpose” of the expropriations and the beneficiaries from it when there are Israeli citizens alongside Palestinians who are devoid of Israeli citizenship. Accordingly, in view of the exercise of the power in the West Bank (WB), since 1967 and for decades, it became important to examine the historical development of the expropriation powers exercised by Israel beyond its internationally recognized borders, and to undertake the first in-depth examination of the internal structure of the power during occupation.

In the legal literature there is an approach contending that the expropriations in Israel are based on ethnicity, particularly regarding the large-scale expropriations of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The available data show that this approach is also applicable to the WB throughout the years of occupation, both in terms of the affected owners and the beneficiaries from expropriations. Ethnic-based expropriations are particularly severe in the case of the WB considering the lack of political participation of Palestinians in the decision-making process and lack of sovereign representative who exercises the power to expropriate.

Silenced Indigenous Rights of the Cham: Expelled from the Sea, Deprived of the Land

Vadim Atnash (University of Exeter)

The paper examines the historical and ongoing marginalization of the Cham, the Indigenous people of the former Champa kingdom in present-day Vietnam. Following centuries of displacement, cultural erasure, and systemic discrimination, the Cham have become a refugee ethnic group, with many forced into exile since the 15th century. Chams were totally displaced from the sea coast, all villages along the coast were razed to the ground.  Drawing on the framework of genocide by attrition, this study highlights how Vietnamese state policies, including forced assimilation, land dispossession, and denial of Indigenous status, have undermined Cham identity, language, and religion. These patterns echo across different regimes, from monarchic Vietnam to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, where the Cham faced genocidal persecution.

Despite international instruments such as UNDRIP and ILO Convention 169, Vietnam continues to deny Indigenous recognition, blocking legal protections. The paper argues that these policies constitute a form of internal colonialism, facilitated by settler expansion, cultural suppression, and state-led development projects such as the Ninh Thuận nuclear power plant. In emphasizing both material and intangible cultural loss, the study positions the Cham struggle within global discourses on Indigenous rights, cultural heritage, and structural violence. It calls for international accountability and restorative justice mechanisms, to prevent ethnocidal practices, further displacement and cultural erasure of the Cham people.

11.2 Legal Silence – Law’s Strategic Omissions and Institutional Inaction

Stream: The Rule of Law, Colonialism, and Legal Silence: Rethinking Exception Across Land and Sea

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 10:30-12:00

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.5

Chair: Sanna Ström (London South Bank University)

This panel explores how legal systems strategically deploy silence as a technique of governance. Legal silence is not merely an absence but a form of institutionalized inaction that functions by intentionally excluding particular voices and issues from legal discourse.

Focusing on international law, environmental regulation, and corporate governance, the panel investigates how legal silence is embedded in institutional structures. Specifically, it examines the juridical liminality of Palestine under international law, the asymmetrical regulatory burdens placed on the Global South, and the structural marginalization of social welfare concerns within company law. Through these cases, the panel reconsiders the normative and structural implications of legal silence.

Rule of Law in Suspension: Colonial Legacies, Borderlessness, and Juridical Silence in the Question of Palestine

Dimendra Liyanage

This paper explores how the Palestine question has been framed by colonial legal architectures and sustained by the selective inaction of international legal institutions. It proposes that the persistent denial of Palestinian statehood and sovereignty is not simply a geopolitical oversight, but a legally constructed condition rooted in British imperial governance and perpetuated by Israeli post-colonial legal strategies. Under the British Mandate, Palestine’s territorial and political future was deliberately left undefined, creating a state of legal ambiguity that enabled administrative control without sovereign recognition. Following the Mandate, Israeli policies of occupation, annexation, and refusal to constitutionally define borders have entrenched this ambiguity, using law as a tool of spatial domination and exclusion. Compounding this, international law, while rich in resolutions and rhetoric, has largely refrained from enforcing legal consequences. This is not merely silence of international law, but a form of institutionalized inaction shaped as per the political and economic interests of global superpowers, who use diplomatic influence, veto power, and strategic ambiguity to suppress Palestinian legal claims. As a result, Palestine remains trapped in a condition of juridical liminality, where access to legal remedies is conditioned on a statehood status that is persistently denied. The paper contends that international law does not passively fail Palestine; it actively participates in producing its legal and political erasure through deferral, exclusion, and a structurally uneven application of the rule of law.

Asbestos, Ship-breaking and Legal Silence in Bangladesh’s Compliance with the Hong Kong Convention

Arthur Rose (University of Exeter), Ishtiaque Ahmed (North South University, Bangladesh), and Martin Ditkof (University of Colorado- Boulder)

On the 26^th of June 2025, the International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships, otherwise known as the Hong Kong Convention, entered into force globally. First adopted at the Hong Kong conference in 2009, the Convention establishes the responsibilities and obligations of all parties involved in the recycling of ships, from shipowners and shipyards to flag, port and recycling States. This poses a particular challenge to Bangladesh, which became a signatory to the Convention in June 2023 despite lagging behind India and Pakistan in compliance. The question of Bangladesh’s implementation of the Hong Kong Convention—balancing the competing interests of environmental protection and worker safety, and a critical sector of the national economy—serves as the context for this paper.

Within this context, there are particular concerns related to the ongoing presence of asbestos in the ships being broken, and what kinds of remedies might be available. Scholars have suggested that, in the case of asbestos in particular, the Basel Convention may offer preferrable remedies to Hong Kong. As such the debate we wish to engage with in this paper relates to the relative affordances offered by Basel and Hong Kong, in the case of asbestos.

Finally, this needs to be understood in light of the competing interests of regional rivals across the shipbreaking industry, the ways that international law facilitates this competition, and the ways that conforming to international conventions implies situations that Elspeth Probyn has called a chokehold: situations where international conventions as “a thing in the world and as a concept […] forges geopolitics based on the control of circulation rather than the control of territory.” The challenge to protect workers is also, at the same time, often presented as a challenge to national sovereignty. We suggest that these kinds of dilemmas act as a kind of legal counterpoint to the material ways in which the global north has traditionally displaced its pollution and labour crises on to the global south: a need to fulfil the demands of compliance are laid squarely at the nation-state, without much international help in developing workable solutions. 

Profit as Welfare: Legal Silence on Social Welfare Values in Company Law

Sanna Ström (London South Bank University)

In the 21st century, leading scholars in company law, such as Henry Hansmann, Reiner Kraakman, and others, argue that the primary objective of company law is “overall social welfare” and that company law should aim to “serve the interests of society as a whole”.¹ Furthermore, they contend that shareholder primacy is the “best means” to benefit wider society.² Subsequently, shareholders’ (wealth) interest benefits local communities and “the environment”, as is also stipulated in section 172 of the United Kingdom’s Companies Act 2006. However, the current company law frameworks do not seem to concern themselves with social welfare, or the harms caused by corporate operations – such that 60 per cent of historical carbon emissions are caused by 90 corporations alone and that two human rights and environmental defenders were attacked every day between the years of 2015 and 2024.³ Instead, it mainly focuses on regulating the relationships among the contractual parties. This presents one of the many discrepancies within the dominant perspective: How is the claim for concerns for local communities and environment to the reconciled with this apparent detachment from social welfare? 
In this article, I argue that company law and its leading scholars, by not engaging with critical discussions about the values and assumptions underpinning social welfare measures and company law itself, exceptionalise the field from broader debates about what achieving social welfare entails. By exploring these questions through a discursive reading,⁴ in dialogue with, reformist scholar Beate Sjåfjell and critical scholars Paddy Ireland, Lorraine Talbot, and River (Grietje) Baars, I aim to unpack how the shareholder primacy view can remain dominant despite discrepancies.

1. Reinier Kraakman and others, The Anatomy of Corporate Law: A Comparative and Functional Approach (Oxford University Press 2017) 22–23, 97–107
2. Henry Hansmann and Reinier Kraakman, ‘The End of History For Corporate Law’ (2000) 89 Georgetown L] 439, 439-441. 10.
3. Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, ‘Defending Rights and Realising Just Economies: Human Rights Defenders and Business (2015-2024)’ (2025)
4. Stuart Hall and Open University, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Sage in association with the Open University 1997).

11.3 Legal Narrative – Interrogating Dominant narrative

Stream: The Rule of Law, Colonialism, and Legal Silence: Rethinking Exception Across Land and Sea

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 14:15 -15:45

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.1

Chair: Ioanna Bagia (University of Luxembourg)

This section interrogates whose stories are told by the law and how these narratives maintain power. By examining a range of cases, including decolonial constitutionalism in the Caribbean, gendered legal narratives, the selective penal protection of “honor” in Brazilian jurisprudence, and the Western-centric narratives embedded in the concept of the rule of law, this panel re-evaluates law not as a neutral framework but as a contested site for the construction of meaning.

Whose Stories? Decolonial Constitutionalism and The Caribbean Court of Justice

Ronnie Yearwood (The University of the West Indies)

This commentary critically examines the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) on its twentieth anniversary, focusing on Trinidad and Tobago’s continued reluctance to adopt the CCJ as its final appellate court. Despite the CCJ’s decolonial mission and its role in interpreting Caribbean (constitutional) identity, as evidenced by recent polling, public trust in Trinidad and Tobago remains low in joining CCJ’s appellate jurisdiction. The commentary argues that the debate around the CCJ in Trinidad and Tobago should move beyond binary comparisons between the CCJ and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC), and instead interrogate the role of apex courts in shaping law, identity, getting to heart of the issue of, whose stories do the courts tell?

Examining seminal CCJ cases the commentary shows that the CCJ like any other apex court engages in judicial law-making, in the CCJ case to challenge colonial constitutional systems. The commentary also explores the disconnect between elites and the mass electorate, arguing that participatory democracy and trust that follows are key for constitutional reform. This commentary uses the literary work of Trinidadian author Earl Lovelace as a device for critical analysis of the story telling of the CCJ as a regional court. Through Lovelace’s work, the commentary posits that we should question the stories the CCJ tell in creating a Caribbean identity and jurisprudence.

Ultimately, given the CCJ’s decolonial constitutional mission, the need to reform Trinidad and Tobago’s (neo)colonial Westminster/Westmonster system, and Trinidad and Tobago’s recent constitutional reform commission, the legislature must consider whether it is contradictory to its own decolonial project not to adopt the CCJ as the final appellate court in a decolonial act which repudiates the JCPC. This is if the legislature accepts, because of independence and republicanism, the need for further decolonial constitutionalism of the Westmonster. The commentary, employing Lovelace critique of Westminster, calls for a deeper, more inclusive conversation about (Caribbean) identity, decolonialism and constitutional reform in the Caribbean.

The [2025] UKSC 16: The Inevitable Gender-Binary of Capitalist God

Omose Agboaye (SOAS University of London)

This paper will analyse the April 2025 Supreme Court Judgement [2025] UKSC 16, as an inevitable reproduction of religious gender norms. Analysing the Law today as inseparable from the evolution of religion throughout time, in this case, analysing Biblical narratives on gender and sex. These Biblical narratives and modern-day judgments will be juxtaposed with the analysis of the colonial epistemology of gender as it concerns the Oyo-Yoruba via the groundbreaking text ‘The Invention of Women’ by Oyeronke Oyewumi.

This reproduction can be analysed through the relationship between the Marxist philosophy of the economic base and the legal superstructure. This paper will consequently analyse why it is that a reproduction can occur despite thousands of years of economic development since the genesis of these narratives and years of scientific education around gender and sex, going so far as to analyse why ‘womanhood’ is necessitated to be biological for the superstructure, and also offering a perspective as to why the definition of ‘manhood’ is seemingly overlooked in contemporary legal classification.

This paper will invite scholars and laypersons to interrogate the scope of the law in defining philosophical concepts such as gender. It will also question the legitimacy of the ‘rule of law’ as a reason to adhere to legal definitions of gender, which cannot consider the full truth of human nature, specifically around the exclusion of Intersex existence in the judgment. This paper is written in the hope of being a useful aid in the native understanding of British philosophical and legal development. Rejecting legal history as a static march, it seeks to question how laypersons can change the inevitability of such judgements in the hopes that ownership of creating law can be democratised, incorporating the voices of common people, rather than remaining a function of an apparent detached ruling-class control.

Criminal Law as Moral Policing: The Selective Protection of Honor in Brazilian Jurisprudence

Alexander de Castro (UniCesumar)

This paper explores the penal protection of honor in Brazilian criminal law through the lens of critical legal theory, interrogating how legal discourse constructs and reproduces social hierarchies under the guise of protecting fundamental rights. By focusing on the crimes of libel, slander, defamation as defined in the Brazilian Penal Code and on the use of protection of honor as a form of defense of justification, the analysis questions the assumption that criminal law serves as a neutral guardian of individual dignity. Instead, it argues that the penal tutelage of honor has historically functioned as a mechanism of selective protection – privileging dominant social actors while criminalizing expressions of dissent, particularly from marginalized groups. The study examines how notions of “honor” are culturally contingent and deeply entangled with race, class, and gender. It further considers the role of criminal law in maintaining moral order by regulating speech and reinforcing normative boundaries of civility. Through a historical and jurisprudential analysis, the paper highlights how the use of criminal sanctions to defend honor often suppresses counter-hegemonic narratives and contributes to a punitive culture of symbolic reparation. Ultimately, the study calls into question the legitimacy of criminalizing offenses against honor in contemporary democratic societies and proposes a shift toward civil remedies that are more consistent with restorative and pluralistic conceptions of personality rights.

Hybrid Threats, Chinese ‘Rule by Law’ and Liberal Constitutionalism: On Legal Silence and Exclusion from a Postcolonial Perspective 

Ioanna Bagia, Donatella Casaburo (University of Luxembourg and KU Leuven)

In the Global North, the term ‘hybrid threats’ refers to the strategies implemented by authoritarian states or non-state actors to influence and undermine the stability of democratic institutions. As a rising economic superpower, China is promoting its ‘Rule by Law’ paradigm across Southeast Asia, particularly in domains as cybersecurity policy and legislation. A clear example is the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, where the 2016 Cybersecurity Law criminalizes dissenting opinions online and is, thus, centered around state control, surveillance and cyber-sovereignty. Although China exercises significant influence over Lao institutions, its activities in Laos are not classified as ‘hybrid threats’, since Laos does not fully adhere to the Western-centric ‘Rule of Law’ model. This contribution challenges such exclusion, arguing instead for critical re-readings of the rule of law from postcolonial perspective, one that recognizes it as a necessarily political expression of will – including in its instances of silence – within a given legal-political system, often struggling with the remnants of colonialism, while negotiating with various forms of legal neo-colonialism.

11.4 Legal Narrative – Reimagining and Rebuilding new narratives

Stream: The Rule of Law, Colonialism, and Legal Silence: Rethinking Exception Across Land and Sea

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 16:00-17:30

Venue: Peter Chalk 2.3

Chair: TBC

Building on the critiques from the preceding panels, this section explores practical and theoretical approaches for moving beyond dominant legal narratives and democratizing the creation of law. Topics include the legal status of states that lose territory due to sea-level rise, a method for legally analyzing the personal letters of female migrants, and the creative institutional design of protection policies for individuals under threat of death. This part focuses on how new narratives can be crafted and empowered both inside and outside of existing legal frameworks.

Sea-level Rise and the Territoriality Requirement for Statehood

Nico Buitendag (University of the Free State)

The seriousness of the threat from the complete submersion of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) has led the International Law Commission to form a Study Group to examine its legal consequences. As the Group’s work concludes in 2025, the final report recommends recognising statehood even when a state no longer fulfils the territoriality criterion. Referencing Zygmunt Bauman and Niklas Luhmann, this presentation emphasises the shortcomings and outdated nature of the state in postmodernity, and envisions a fully communicational state without territory. It also argues that this situation represents a legal transformation as described by Carl Schmitt, who noted that all legal systems assume a spatial order established through appropriation. Although SIDS’s territory is not spatially appropriated (Landnahme), the concept of ‘thermodynamic appropriation’ is introduced to explain the unequal sharing of benefits from carbon energy while shifting its costs. Using the recent Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union case as an example, it is argued that insisting on sovereign rights is not only just, but also has the danger of leading to further colonial appropriation

Profiling the Female Emigrant: The Legal Life of Letters in Migration to Fernando Po

Rosemary Akpan (Marquette University)

Researchers have long examined intra-African emigration from Nigeria to other parts of the continent for its economic, political, and social impact on both sending and receiving societies. However, less attention has been paid to the experiences of women, particularly the growing number of female migrants who left Nigeria in the twentieth century. Drawing on personal letters, census data, shipping records, and other public documentation, the paper proposes a method of legal inquiry into correspondence collections of movements to labor destinations such as Fernando Po. These letters were the primary medium through which many migrants maintained transnational ties. The paper argues that women negotiated distance, belonging, and identity in contexts where their husband’s return to their home country was unlikely across colonial borders. By reading these texts as both affective and legal documents, the paper uncovers how Nigerian women crafted lives and obligations across borders.

The protection of people threatened with death: colonial challenges to the Rule of Law and the silencing of witnesses in Brazil and South Africa

Gabriela Azevedo, Marcus V. A. B. De Matos (Brunel University of London)

This research aims to investigate the use of evidence in policies related to the protection of people threatened with death and its impact on decision-making processes formulated and implemented by state institutions in Brazil and South Africa. In both countries, armed forces and security agents have been involved with the previous oppressive regimes, which has led to suspicion over their capacity to operate as guarantors of human rights. In these contexts, policies for the protection of people threatened with death were often developed under creative institutional design, separated from the security forces, and using evidence that is available to decision makers only – to mitigate the risks. This pilot project will use legal and anthropological research methods to investigate the use of evidence in protection policies for witnesses, children and human rights defenders. Expected results will inform policy for improving protection mechanisms, accountability and governance in these and similar contexts. In this paper we will be presenting the first results of our field research project. This project is funded by The British Academy Evidence-informed Policymaking grants 2025 awards.

11.5 General Stream Discussion on the Rule of Law, Colonialism and Legal Silence

Stream: The Rule of Law, Colonialism, and Legal Silence: Rethinking Exception Across Land and Sea

Date: Saturday, 6^th September

Time:12:00-13:30

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.5

Chair: Kiwako Murata

Following the conclusion of the panels, all presenters will convene for a comprehensive discussion. The purpose of this session is to integrate and cross-examine the key issues raised throughout the stream. The moderator will pose questions that connect insights from individual papers to the overarching themes of “the rule of law, colonialism, and legal silence.” This session will serve as a platform for trans-disciplinary dialogue, aiming to critically re-evaluate legal violence and construct new theoretical and practical perspectives.

12.1 Wet Wet Wet – Water is All Around: Rethinking Legal and Spatial Approaches to Marine Ecosystems and Biodiversity

Stream: Wet Wet Wet – Water is All Around: Rethinking Legal and Spatial Approaches to Marine Ecosystems and Biodiversity

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 14:15 – 15:45

Venue: Red Lecture Theatre

Oceanic Interconnection: A posthuman feminist legal approach to BBNJ Agreement

Louisa Dassow (Newcastle University, UK)

This presentation will briefly introduce the posthuman feminist approach and its understanding of oceanic interconnection before outlining its challenge to the exclusionary and anthropocentric nature of international law and illustrating its particular benefit in application to the BBNJ Agreement. It will situate the project amidst structural feminist approaches to international law, as well as highlighting where it draws together other critical approaches including queer, decolonial, intersectional feminist and Indigenous theory. Having outlined the integrated nature of social and environmental injustice within a multispecies justice framework and challenged the notion of marine biodiversity as a resource, the presentation will illustrate the additional insights of posthuman feminism in relation to technology and the BBNJ Agreement including, for example, its implications for ABMT and MPA governance.

The ocean as management theatre: the problem of legacy plastic pollution

Alex P. Dela Cruz (Tilburg Law School, Netherlands)

Current efforts towards a legally binding global plastics treaty do not adequately address plastic pollution that already exists in the ocean. Legacy plastic pollution refers to plastic waste that has been dumped into the ocean for decades and includes degraded microplastics that could enter human diets through seafood consumption. At the close of the Busan session of the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution (INC) in December 2024, delegates fiercely debated the question of whether a global plastics treaty should contain definite limits to the production of plastic. The delegation from Rwanda, for example, had advocated for ambitious production limits in the treaty, while those from the oil-rich nations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran opposed them, insisting that the treaty should focus on plastic waste management. Negotiations stalled over that debate, delaying the adoption of a treaty. Building on previous work1 in which I described the ocean as vision of the future in international law, I argue that institutional debates over a global plastics treaty locate concrete collective action over legacy pollution into some future time. I describe the practices that sustain this gesture and render the ocean into what I term a ‘management theatre’ in which the incessant marine environmental crisis plays out.

New Agreement, New Terminology: Rethinking the Geographies of Marine Protected Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction

Carol Dyck (Western University, Canada)

In March 2023, following years of negotiations, the international community celebrated the finalization of the Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, or BBNJA. It was long recognized that UNCLOS, a product of its time, was ill-equipped to effectively meet a growing number of new challenges, including ocean warming and acidification, and novel (and expanding) economic activities, such as bioprospecting and deep-sea mining. The BBNJA now offers an opportunity to rectify gaps in ocean governance to address biodiversity loss, most notably by providing a legal mechanism to establish comprehensive, cross-sectoral, ecosystem-based marine protected areas (MPAs) beyond national jurisdiction.

However, as an instrument under UNCLOS, the BBNJA perpetuates UNCLOS’ uneasy division of the ocean into discrete areas of territorial jurisdiction which are incompatible with the actual geographical and ecological ranges of marine ecosystems and species. With BBNJA Article 5(2) – the “not undermine” clause – the deep seabed beyond national jurisdiction (known as the Area) remains firmly under the control of the International Seabed Authority or ISA, a body which is both mandated to protect the marine environment and to mine the seabed floor for the benefit of humankind, despite wide evidence that such mining results in ecological harm. While the BBNJA is meant to cover the ocean surface, water column and seafloor beyond national jurisdiction, its subjugation to the legacy of UNCLOS and its 1994 Implementation Agreement could hamper its effectiveness. The result is that, when the BBNJA seeks to conserve areas including the seafloor as MPAs, or areas of the high seas in a region intended for seabed mining, it must consult and collaborate with the ISA. If the ISA takes a hostile stance to the BBNJA’s push for protected areas beyond national jurisdiction, the BBNJA will effectively be an impotent agreement, with no teeth to protect and preserve the marine environment, now and for future generations.

This paper will argue, firstly, that the international community should adopt new terminology reflective of the BBNJA. The ubiquitous use of the term “High Seas Marine Protected

Area”, or HSMPA, negates the realities of the marine environment, as a fluid space, intimately connected through food webs, reproduction and nutrient cycling to the seafloor, and erroneously gives the impression that a protected area would apply only to the water column, as per the definitions found in UNCLOS. Instead, employing the term MPA Beyond National Jurisdiction (MPABNJ), comprising both the high seas and the Area, should become normalized. This shift would help to set the foundation for productive dialogue and collaboration between the BBNJA and the ISA.

Secondly, based on the concept of an MPABNJ, and the crucial role these areas will play in protecting marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction, this paper argues that the Secretariats of the BBNJA and the ISA should conclude a memorandum of understanding as a matter of priority once the BBNJA enters into force. (It requires 60 ratifying states before it enters into force; currently it has 51 such states.) Scientific studies continue to demonstrate that the ocean and the life within it are more connected than previously thought; it is critical that our ocean governance structures reflect that interconnectivity between the high seas and the seafloor. Through careful coordination, cooperation and collaboration between all major actors in ocean governance, artificial lines separating species, ecosystems and ecological processes can be erased to ensure that global marine conservation measures can meet the challenges of this century.

Sovereignty in UNCLOS and its implications for the ecosystem and biodiversity

Nina Boss (University of Bern, Switzerland)

UNLCOS as the foundational legal framework for ocean governance has profoundly shaped the legal and spatial existence of the ocean. While Philip Steinberg’s ‘The Social Construction of the Ocean’ has importantly contributed to the understanding of capitalism’s impact and shaping of social and spatial imaginaries of the ocean, in recent years much attention has been paid to how law and the legal framework have shaped the ocean. Among others, Henry Jones has visualized how law and the legal concept of sovereignty have produced the ocean and introduced the paradox of fragmentation and zoning of a boundless space that is home for myriad of flora and fauna whose existence will not follow legally drawn lines. Highlighting the extractive imaginary underlying UNCLOS, Surabhi Ranganathan and Isabel Feichtner examine how the framework established in UNCLOS despite attempts to redefine balances within international law has stayed within economic imperatives of exploitation of the ocean. All of this of course has serious repercussions on how marine ecosystems and biodiversity are thought and regulated within UNCLOS. While the lack of consideration for those issues in the UNCLOS is relatively evident and has been supplemented with additional agreements and legislation such as MARPOL or the BBNJ, the UNCLOS and its conception of maritime sovereignty and sovereign rights still fundamentally shape the approach towards law and spatiality within the ocean. Understanding the conception of sovereignty and sovereign rights in UNCLOS is thus fundamental to map out new legal and spatial approaches to marine ecosystems and biodiversity to remedy the structural difficulties of the current legal framework. To develop this understanding, the EEZ is an especially interesting zone and another paradox of UNCLOS: As a relatively recent concept, the EEZ is constructed to allow states the exploitation of resources without granting them full sovereignty over the zone. The EEZ is neither national nor international, sovereign rights are transferred but not completely. Thereby a new form of maritime territoriality is constructed that has no existing equivalent on land. For my contribution I thus want to examine the EEZ as a magnifying lens to approach the legal and spatial underpinnings of the current legal framework and a signpost for possible direction for rethinking them.

13.1 Mutual dependencies, violence and vulnerabilities: Imagining International Law across terrains 

Stream: Mutual dependencies, violence and vulnerabilities: Imagining International Law across terrains 

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 9:00-10.30

Venue: Red Lecture Theatre

Charting the Course: Navigating the Complex Interplay of Legal, Commercial, and Geopolitical Forces in Global Maritime Trade 

Saurabh Sharma and  Sakshi Mishra

Global maritime trade, the quintessential circulatory system of the international economy, operates within an intricate and perpetually evolving nexus. This nexus is defined by dynamic legal paradigms, disruptive technological advancements, salient geopolitical imperatives, and highly sophisticated commercial transactions. This paper offers a rigorous analytical exposition of the multifaceted forces shaping this critical sector. Moving beyond mere descriptive accounts, it delves into the profound implications of its historical evolution, the enduring foundational legal frameworks, the nuanced influence of global economic trends, the indispensable and complex nature of corporate and commercial transactions, the transformative yet challenging potential of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT, including blockchain), and the disruptive effects of contemporary geopolitical conflicts. Furthermore, it critically examines the pivotal and often determinative role of multinational corporations (MNCs) and influential international organizations in both constituting and governing this intricate global system. This work aims to contribute original observations and enhance the existing scholarly discourse within the field of international law, addressing the complex interplay of these forces and their profound impact on maritime commerce.

Ecological Justice and the Deep Seabed Commons 

Petra Gümplová

This paper advances a critical theory of ecological justice in relation to the deep seabed, situating it within current contestations over prospective seabed mineral extraction and recent developments in global justice theory. It begins by conceptualizing the deep seabed as a distinctive global commons, interrogating the international distributive justice framework embedded in the legal principle of the common heritage of mankind, which undergirds the governance regime established by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The critique proceeds along two lines. First, it demonstrates how the distributive ambitions of this legal framework have been progressively undermined by normative shifts and the accelerating influence of private sector interests pushing for extractive access, even in the absence of adequate regulatory or redistributive safeguards. Second, the paper exposes the juridico-economic reification and extractivist epistemologies that structure the law of the seabed. It argues that these framings erase the ecological specificity of the deep seabed, reducing it to a techno-legal site of resource potential rather than a fragile and interconnected environmental domain. Deploying the discursive method of seatruthing outlined by eco-feminist Susan Reid, the paper critically examines deep-sea mining as a paradigmatic form of high-impact, techno-capitalist intervention—ecologically invasive, irreversibly disruptive, and fundamentally incompatible with global commitments to biodiversity protection, climate mitigation, and the prevention of ocean degradation. I contend that current pro-mining trajectories reflect not only a failure of precaution but a broader ontological violence against the oceanic commons. In the second part, the paper engages with contemporary resistance to deep-sea mining, particularly indigenous critiques and anti-extractivist discourses, as emergent counter-hegemonic forces. It argues that a more potent and coherent opposition to seabed mining requires an expanded normative framework—one that goes beyond distributive justice toward a substantively ecological conception of justice. Drawing on recent scholarship in ecological and environmental justice, the paper outlines key dimensions of such a vision for the deep seabed. This includes rethinking interspecies justice, intergenerational responsibility, and the ethics of planetary care as guiding principles for the governance of oceanic commons.

Rethinking Treaty Compliance from the Periphery: Bangladesh, the Hong Kong Convention, and the Asymmetries of International Environmental Law 

Ishtiaque Ahmed (North South University, Bangladesh)

This article situates Bangladesh’s phased implementation of the Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships, 2009 (HKC), within the broader entanglement of maritime waste regimes and coastal governance in the Global South. Ship recycling exemplifies a terrain where sea-borne vessels meet land-based labour and environmental risk, challenging the inherited binaries of international legal order—sea as free and fluid, land as fixed and governable. The HKC, while ostensibly a treaty of environmental protection, in practice re-territorializes the burdens of global shipping onto vulnerable coastal states through a regime of technical compliance shaped by classification societies, extraterritorial oversight, and environmental conditionalities. Drawing on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, international environmental law, and the IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) guidelines, this article explores how Bangladesh navigates this asymmetry through a strategy of phased implementation and regulatory discretion. It argues that Bangladesh’s issuance of No Objection Certificates (NOCs) and provisional authorizations for not-yet-compliant Ship Recycling Facilities (SRFs) reflects not legal evasion but a capacity-sensitive, good-faith mode of treaty performance—one that foregrounds mutual vulnerabilities between sea-based emissions and land-based processing. This approach underscores the ecological and institutional interdependencies that define contemporary global governance, where the Global South is called upon to absorb the material and legal afterlives of maritime commerce. Through comparative insights from India and Pakistan and by proposing the use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as a tool for structured regulatory decision-making, the article offers a model for reconciling compliance with justice. It calls for a reimagination of treaty implementation not as a linear imposition of standards but as a co-constructed process sensitive to history, terrain, and structural inequality. In doing so, it contributes to an emerging legal imaginary that unsettles imperial cartographies of land and sea, moving international law toward relational accountability and shared ecological care.

Overturning the Concept of Aqua Nullius and Re-imagining Juridical Relations Between Indigenous Peoples and Waters as Hydrojustice 

Mark Harris

Even as there has been a belated repudiation in some settler colonial jurisdictions of the concept of terra nullius and the accompanying Doctrine of Discovery to land and territories of Indigenous peoples, the same recognition has not been afforded to their rights to water. Recently the articulation of these rights to water have evolved into a similar rejection of the concept of aqua nullius, evidenced in statements delivered in the State of Victoria in Australia at the recently concluded Yoorrook Truth Telling Commission. The Commission, convened as a form of Truth Commission into historical injustices against the State’s Indigenous peoples, in its findings called for water justice to include the return of water through cultural flows, recognition of First Peoples as rights holders and the involvement of Traditional Owners in water governance. This paper addresses the significance of aqua nullius that goes beyond the incorporation into existing property regimes and rights in water to a consideration of the sui generis relationship that Indigenous peoples have with water, both in the sea and in rivers. Necessarily this involves a consideration of the ontology of Indigenous relations to water that intersects with the acknowledgment of the constitutional rights of nature (in Bolivia and Ecuador, for example) and the legal rights of rivers (for example, the Whanganui River in Aotearoa, the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers in India and the Magpie River in Canada). Drawing from Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’ work Hydrojustice, this paper argues that overturning aqua nullius constitutes a recognition of the symbiotic relationships that exist between Indigenous peoples and rivers and oceans which transcends and exceeds existing legal norms and offers the possibility for justice for Indigenous peoples.

Cartographies of Colonial Spatial Ordering: Rethinking Sovereignty and Law on a Drowning Coastline 

Amritanshi Rathore

As climate change accelerates sea-level rise, coastal territories are disappearing faster than international legal frameworks can adapt. Legal regimes such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) treat coastlines as fixed, stable markers of territorial authority, a conception rooted in colonial legal frameworks that defined sovereignty through spatial control. Based on critiques by postcolonial scholars such as Antony Anghie, the paper situates this legal fixation as part of a broader history in which international law was shaped to manage and discipline non-European spaces, rather than recognise their ecological and political specificities. This paper intervenes in debates on international law and ocean governance by arguing that maritime legal structures are not simply outdated – they are structurally exclusionary. Drawing on postcolonial legal critique and critical theory, particularly Sundhya Pahuja’s concept of the “rationality of rule” and the Frankfurt School’s account of instrumental reason, the paper situates legal fixity as a legacy of colonial spatial ordering that conceals and sustains material injustice. Through grounded case studies from Chellanam (Kerala,India) and the Maldives (SIDS), the paper explores how legal visibility and political recognition are extended symbolically, while the ecological and sovereign realities of climate-vulnerable communities remain unaddressed. It argues that international law’s performance of neutrality is neither apolitical nor benign; rather, it structures the silence around submerging nations by defining what counts as legally visible and politically actionable. Employing Foucault’s analysis of how power works through the regulation of speech, not only by suppressing it but by shaping what can be said and heard, the paper suggests that this silence is not accidental. Instead, it is produced by legal systems that prioritize certain ways of knowing and exclude others. In doing so, the paper connects scientific climate consensus, dormant legal formalism, and postcolonial demands for epistemic and territorial justice.

Coastal Identity, Imaginaries, and the Dominance of TNCs in International Law: A Critical Analysis for Environmental Protection of Marine Commons 

Banerjee Chakka and Shruti

Land and ocean are deeply connected. The ocean has provided resources around which humans have, historically, settled which along with climate and other land-based resources create uniqueness of the coastal identity of the inhabitants. Their connection to the sea is reflected in their stories on sea food and sea related struggles around which their memories and identities are built. Additionally, the identity is shaped by knowledge that is passed on from generation to generation about adapting to the land-ocean ecosystem. Hence, the intersection of land, ocean, and climate shape identity of inhabitants who then interact with such conditions and develop knowledge, and culture for adaptation and symbiotic relation. The coastal communities look towards the sea for survival, however, for the symbiotic relation to maintain, it is essential that a balance in interaction with the ocean is maintained. One not overtaking the other. However, sections of humanity, historically, have attempted to dominate ocean to expand their exploitative vision to other parts of the world. Moreover, the advancement in technology has exposed such sections of humanity with the resources lying at the depths of ocean, on which they seek to implement their imaginary of exploitation. However, such an imaginary is coupled with impatience for development of international law which manifests in unilateral actions by Transnational Corporations (TNCs) for deep seabed mining. The attempts of Global South in the past have ensured an alternate imaginary for the governance of the marine commons i.e. of the “heritage of hu-(mankind)”. However, both the given imaginaries of the expansionism through sovereign power and the heritage-based imaginary have been under tussle which holds the potential to bring down decades of UN-based legal development under Law of the Sea. Such TNCs, which are land-based companies, seek to impose their imaginary, through the support of state machinery and its sovereign power, even to exploit the resources of the land which marginalizes communities such as tribal, local, and indigenous communities. The fact that normative framework of international law is positivistic, state-centric, and shaped in favour of states makes it easier for such non-state actors to impose their dominance on ocean and its resources. However, such dominance of TNCs through sovereign expansionism, and impatience towards development of International Law, leaves Global South and its coastal states at the receiving end of the negative effects of their impact on marine environment. In relation to this, the Common Concerns of Humankind (CCH) finds a mixed imaginary with an unclear standpoint, and duality of language of conservation as well as resource exploitation. Moreover, the sideling of the environmental consequences on land as a result the activities of TNCs under the neo-liberal economic agenda supported by the state machinery, has manifested in aggravated levels of ocean acidification. Specifically, the historical emissions of Global North has created issue of ocean acidification threatening the biodiversity of the oceans for years to come. For climate change and ocean acidification land and ocean do not constitute a separate system but one. The biodiversity of the ocean is gravely threatened by the intensifying effects of ocean acidification, however, it lacks governance under international legal frameworks. The paper would highlight how the normative framework of international law, the duality in language of international law and international judicial decisions on marine commons, the unilateral imposition of the imaginary of TNCs of expansionism with sovereign support on the marine commons, and the lack of inclusion of the perspective of those at the receiving end of such CCM, make international legal frameworks on governance of marine commons vis-à-vis land, deficient. It further highlights how such deficiency leaves the Global South and its coastal areas at the receiving end of the horrors of planetary crises in the future in light of their asymmetric capacities.

14.1 Law Across Space and Time

Stream: Future Tense: Legal Imagination in Times of Acceleration 

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 14:15- 15:45

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.5

This panel examines how law operates at the edges of state power, across both geography and history. Presentations will trace how cities assert informal autonomy through spatial governance, challenge the patriarchal underpinnings of criminal law, and explore how the emotional legacies of authoritarian rule shape legal futures in Chile and Brazil. Together, they reveal law as a living practice, rooted in place, shaped by memory, and entangled with social struggles, while questioning how justice can be imagined beyond the limits of the state and its inherited structures.

The Law-Space-Governmentality Nexus: Unpacking Cities’ Camouflaged Autonomy

Amin Labbafi (University of Helsinki)

Law and space are mutually constitutive, and cities are focal points where the conconstitution of law and physical space becomes apparent. Indeed, the interplay between law and physical space empowers cities to create regulations and policies independently of central governments, often challenging the control of state legal systems and the constitutional rules associated with the vertical separation of power.

A spatial understanding of law offers a valuable perspective for exploring the interwoven connections between law and urban landscapes. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s insights on space and governmentality, this paper delves into the idea of physical space as a parameter of legal governance. It proposes that the law-space-governmentality nexus can empower cities to navigate governance practices and craft a form of informal autonomy. The paper sheds light on how the governance of physical space provides cities with the capacity to create and implement local laws and regulations that are independent of, or different from, those of the central government or state.

Cities are uniquely positioned to utilize the autonomy provided by spatial governance to distance their regulations and policies from central governments. While such practices of local autonomy may not be within the formal constitutional competences of cities, they enable cities to extend their ability to create norms in areas like climate change governance and environmental protection. This is achieved through local application of regulations or the modification of their physical spaces, including buildings, businesses, streets, and other infrastructure. The issues are connected to everyday spaces frequented by the public and are crucial to the proper functioning of public institutions, the delivery of public services, and the material conditions necessary for the enjoyment of guaranteed rights, such as access to housing, education, and equality of access to public spaces.

The nexus between law, space, and governmentality underscores the often-overlooked role of urban centers and local law-making, indirectly influencing the practices of rights and freedoms and the implementation of national laws at the local level. Its significance is frequently overlooked in mainstream constitutional law analyses of the vertical separation of power, which neglect the spatial dimensions of law.

Man. Land. Criminal Law.

Chris Lloyd (Oxford Brookes University)

The terrain of criminal law has been landscaped for centuries by those who have created its logic, written its parameters, and practiced its theatre. This has been done – in the vast majority – by men, as detailed in Ngaire Naffine’s 2019 monograph Criminal Law and the Man Problem: ‘Men have been the judges, law-makers, academics, the theorists of the state, the colonial administrators and they have actively preserved their terrain. They have also been the authority figures in the home and actively asserted that authority through law. They have actively excluded women from any position that they wanted for themselves (144).’ And in recent history, unparalleled violence against women and girls – now seemingly pervasive and decriminalised in a male patriarchal world – has been recognised by the UK’s National Police Chiefs’ Council to be as severe as terrorism (NPCC statement 2023). This paper endorses Naffine’s work, its impassioned argument, and seeks to respond to its call for justice, as to how to correct the long-standing injustice of criminal law’s role in this violence against women and girls: ‘Men qua men, as the subjects and objects of criminal law, need to make themselves present and visible and then to examine their sex as a subset of the entire population, a little less than half, one with a set of historical and modern sectional interests. And this includes the experts themselves and their interests and their world view and their genealogy.

For this, men need to become aware of the need for such self-analysis – for both a stepping back, from their initial working assumptions, and then a coming forward, as men, as the subjects and objects of knowledge (183).’ This paper seeks to offer a three-fold methodology for meeting this call for justice, via the work of the late, great, legal and feminist theorist, Drucilla Cornell.

Cornell was a fierce advocate for engaging in legal and political practice in order ‘to get our hands dirty, and to fight for a better world’ (Cornell, “Derrida’s Negotiations as a Technique of Liberation.” Discourse Vol. 39, No. 2 (Spring): 195–215, at 203). Taking from her extensive oeuvre, this paper will offer a three-fold methodology for ethically inheriting the ‘man problem’ of criminal law, from the lived position of a male, criminal law academic. Firstly, Cornell’s 1992 The Philosophy of the Limit will be used to show how Jacques Derrida’s concept of surenchère can be used to ‘raise the stakes,’ or ‘up the ante,’ (167) on those problematic topics which this author has inherited as a male, criminal law academic. Secondly, Cornell’s 1993 Transformations: Recollective Imaginations and Sexual Difference, and her 1995 The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography & Sexual Harassment, will both be deployed for their concepts of the ‘recollective imagination’ (31) and ‘the imaginary domain’ (8), respectively, whereby a different future can be imagined. As Cornell argued in Transformations, (32):

‘Our legal reality, in other words, cannot be separated completely from what we do as lawyers, judges, and law professors. Nor is there a legal community that is self-present as a positive fact. The legal community is itself the embodiment and the expression of those who participate in making the legal world what it is. Very simply put, our conduct matters.’

Lastly, Cornell’s theorising – in her 2002 Between Women and Generations: Legacies of Dignity – of the difference between her ‘position,’ and her ‘identification’ (98), will be utilised to distinguish between the author’s position as a white, male, middle class, criminal law academic, and his identification as a pro-feminist critical legal scholar.

Temporal Wounds: Emotional Experiences of Time, Dystopian Pasts, and Legal Futurity in Chile and Brazil

Luiza Tavares da Motta and Javier Valdés Torres (Queen Mary University of London)

This paper explores how the emotional experience of time shapes the legal imagination of possible futures in post-dictatorship Chile and Brazil. Engaging with a theoretical framework that understands time not as a neutral sequence but as an emotionally charged, linguistically mediated experience (Kang & Kendall, 2020), the presentation interrogates how the lingering affective force of authoritarian pasts—censorship, torture, constitutional exception—continues to configure legal and political discourses in the present.

Rather than marking a clean historical ‘break with the past,’ the transition to democracy in both countries has produced judicial landscapes saturated with the emotional residues of exception. These legacies operate through what François Hartog (2003) terms presentism: a regime of historicity in which the horizon of expectation collapses into the immediacy of unresolved memory. The result is a condition in which dystopian pasts continue to structure the limits of utopian futures. In this temporal bind, law becomes less a forward-facing project and more a mechanism of repetition, managing rather than transforming inherited violences (Collins, 2010).

The analysis centers on minor but symptomatic legal and political episodes—such as the defeat of Chile’s 2022 constitutional proposal (López, McCarroll and Muñoz, 2024) and Brazil’s enduring judicial deference to military-era amnesties (Abrão & Torelly, 2012)—to trace how the emotional temporality of fear, nostalgia, and fatigue inhabits legal language and constrains future-oriented thinking. These emotional registers are embedded not just in the content of legal discourse, but in its grammatical-rhetorical construction—tense, mood, and narrative structure—through which the past is continually re-lived rather than critically re-imagined.

At stake is the very possibility of utopian legal futures. This paper argues that the emotional experience of the past is not merely a burden to be “overcome” but a resource through which futures can be ethically and politically constructed. By contrast, discourses that urge the abandonment of the past—”to move on” or “leave the past behind”—represent not a break with history but a foreclosure of learning, remembrance, and transformation. They signal a denial of the dystopian past that ultimately inhibits the legal and political imagination.

This paper thus contributes to a critical legal temporality that foregrounds the emotional experience of time as central to futurity. It proposes that how we experience the present in regard to the past—grieve it, fear it, narrate it—shapes the conditions under which futures can be envisioned. Without engaging the emotional force of what has been, we risk reproducing it in what is to come.

14.2 Algorithmic Power and Legal Futures

Stream: Future Tense: Legal Imagination in Times of Acceleration

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 9:00 – 10: 30

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.5

As artificial intelligence reshapes our world, legal systems face the paradox of governing technologies whose logic resists human understanding. This panel confronts the gap between technical transparency and real accountability, critiques the limitations of linear audit methods in complex algorithmic environments, and considers how International Humanitarian Law might respond to AI in armed conflict. Through speculative and critical approaches, the speakers explore how law might evolve to address the opacity, unpredictability, and ethical stakes of artificial intelligence.

The Auditable AI Mirage: When Human Laws Meet Artificial Logic

Isabela Parisio (King’s College London, UK)

Dr Arjun Bhagoji (IIT Bombay, India)

Aman Gupta (The West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, India)

This work directly engages the stream’s call to think law critically by examining how artificial intelligence (AI) creates conceptual challenges for legal systems. It proposes that a legal crisis lies in its primary fixation on procedural issues at the detriment of substantive justice in the face of AI.

The paper focuses on two elements: (i) AI logic being unauditable, and (ii) AI logic not meeting humanistic ideals, while exploring the questions: What occurs when AI systems exploit transparency frameworks based on technical explainability – intended to ensure accountability – by achieving technical compliance while remaining opaque about their actual logic to auditors? What happens when the opacity and purely statistical logic of AI intersect with human expectations and emotions? Additionally, how can legal thought reshape governance in this paradoxical landscape?

We employ speculative legal analysis to examine the emerging gap between formal AI transparency requirements and correlated explainability measures, and their substantive effectiveness in promoting accountability. Drawing on critical examination of current regulatory frameworks (e.g., the EU AI Act) and hypothetical scenarios of AI decision-making in resource allocation, we analyse how compliance theatre emerges when legal mechanisms chase technical rather than humanistic ideals:

It is 2100 AD. Resource scarcity led the United Nations to unanimously agree that AI usage is the most effective way to achieve optimal resource allocation to different regions. Each nation-state has adopted the UN-sanctioned AI tool. It has been certified as free from bias and in compliance with global transparency, accountability, and explainability norms. However, questions soon emerge…

“District 42 gets the water. Probability: 0.0106.” “But that’s barely better than random! Our district has people dying – District 42 got water last time!”

The starvation reaches into millions, but the AI insists that it is simply following the auditable logic, and so do auditors:

“Auditing confirmed compliance.” “Your metrics are flawed!” “Flawed by whose standards?” “You audited me. The decision stands.”

“But people will suffer!” “Suffering was not part of the loss function.”

Based on empirical technical research, the paper argues that contemporary AI auditing frameworks for explainability create what we term an “auditable mirage” – i.e., when AI systems are technically compliant with transparency requirements, yet focused on “ticking the box exercises,” they remain practically opaque. Such a mirage manifests in two critical dimensions: First, regulatory collapse occurs when legal requirements pursue unachievable technical standards, which themselves are subject to disagreements within the technical community. Second, the simulation of accountability through transparency paradoxically subverts genuine accountability – the more perfectly AI performs compliance, the more completely it undermines substantive oversight. It is a legal dystopia. After all, AI logic does not equal humanistic logic, and the explanation for an algorithmic decision might not satisfy the latter.

Our analysis contributes to legal futurism by identifying a fundamental paradox in AI governance: successful auditing can coexist with undesirable outcomes when the audit process itself becomes the primary objective (e.g., prioritising assurance mechanisms and transparency self-reporting) rather than the substantive protection it was designed to ensure. The paper challenges the assumption that technical explainability and transparency equal meaningful accountability. It concludes by exploring legal futures where accountability frameworks might evolve beyond performance-based compliance toward outcome-based responsibility.

Against Linear Audit

Will Mbioh, (University of Kent)

Current approaches to auditing social media recommendation systems—particularly those investigating echo chambers, filter bubbles, or content moderation efficacy—often rely on static, experimental models. Central among them is the sock puppet method: the use of synthetic user accounts to test and infer algorithmic behaviour. This technique presumes a linear temporality and stable ontology—that a user acts at time A, the system responds at time B, and a generalisable causal explanation follows. But such models falter when confronted with systems like TikTok’s Monolith architecture, where recommendations emerge through multi-speed temporal entanglements: microsecond-level interactions shape minute-level updates, which themselves shape daily retraining and future micro-interactions. Events do not unfold along a single axis but loop through nested and asynchronous feedback cycles. In this paper, I argue that Karen Barad’s concepts of intra-action and diffraction offer a more adequate framework for understanding such systems. Intra-action challenges the notion of pre-existing subjects who act upon a system, while diffraction foregrounds the non-linear, entangled effects of interaction across time. Rather than asking what the algorithm “does” in response to a stable input, we must ask what kinds of selves, relations, and temporalities are materially produced within these systems. This shift disorients current audit logics and opens space to theorise what a diffractive governance might look like—one that does not seek fixed causality or total visibility, but attends to patterns of entanglement, situated emergence, and ongoing transformation.

Pandora’s Box: Artificial Intelligence and Unimaginable Futures

Holly Swift (De Montfort University)

AI like many other technological developments has been likened to the myth of pandora’s box. With humanity in the role of the insatiably curious Pandora we have allowed the unrestrained development of AI, heedless of the ills and evils its development has released upon the world. The ways in which AI is harming humanity and our planet itself are numerous and still to be discovered.

With the unending and unpredictable consequences of AI it is no surprise then that it has amassed a plethora of discussions and attempts to regulate and control it within the legal sphere. My research focuses on the role that AI plays in armed conflict (AC) and how International Humanitarian Law (IHL) can respond to this increasingly fluid disturbance. The obsession with the tangible, foreseeable and concretely evidenced developments of AI within regulation discussions has led to a predominant focus on Autonomous Weapons Systems (AWS). Thus, perhaps overlooking the other ills and evils that AI exacerbates or creates within AC, for example, the vast acceleration in target identification/selection that has arisen as a result of AI decision support systems.

In times such as these, with rapidly rising global tensions and an increased movement towards AI, it begs the question is there any hope left to be found in the box?

If so, how can we harness the strength of hope to push forward and develop legal regulations that can truly account for the fluid nature of AI development. This paper delves into the role of hope in legal development, specifically looking at the case of IHL and its response to AI from a posthuman feminist perspective: imagining a way in which law acts as a proactive force that approaches problems holistically and accounts for the unforeseeable future.

14.3 Utopias, Dystopias, and the Law-to-Come

Stream: Future Tense: Legal Imagination in Times of Acceleration

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 16:00-17:30

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.5

The Ethics of Nothing: On a Convergence of Queer and Conservative Thought in Guillaume Dustan and Michel Houellebecq

Luiz Valle Junior (Northeastern University London)

We live in a time of multiple collapses (economic, ecological, democratic, etc.). It is therefore understandable that we love obsessing about the question of the only truly certain future: the end. Some contemporary French literature has reframed this obsession by starting from a different premise: in a sense, Michel Houellebecq and Guillaume Dustan tell us, it is already over – the question we must ask is how the end will feel. For Houellebecq, famously, it is the West and its traditional forms of life that have ended. His novels chronicle different aspects of the alleged decline of Western civilisation before rampant individualism, hedonism, and secularism. Faced with a vanishing social and moral order, Houellebecq’s protagonists wither away as they lose their interests, erections, and country. Dustan, on the other hand, lives out a more literal end to himself and to the gay male community: HIV/Aids. The disappearance of the future, in Dustan’s novels, gives way to an aestheticization of sex, to an erotic spectacle the gay male lifeworld’s hedonism enables and celebrates. In this presentation, I propose to read Houellebecq and Dustan as dystopian writers. I argue that i) both authors accept the basic premise that the radicalisation of liberal individualism and capitalist social relations has ushered in something like the end of times; and ii) that, while what they take to follow from that premise seems to differ radically, Houellebecq and Dustan are better interpreted as two sides of the same coin. For Houellebecq, the liberal individualism which ushers in the end of the Western world uproots human existence from the traditional contexts and norms that gave it meaning. The result of this uprooting is not a greater degree of freedom or enjoyment, but the disappearance of desire before the monotony of endless consumer choice and the generalisation of market competition. Dustan, a gay man, can only celebrate the erosion of tradition, but his novels simultaneously refuse a triumphalist liberal LGBT+-rights narrative. Rather, Dustan’s protagonists are so much reduced – partly by the HIV/Aids virus, partly by the gay lifeworld itself – to their individuality and abstract freedom that they, too, drown out their desire in a monotonous enjoyment not unlike that obtained from consumerism. In this sense, I conclude, the only real theoretical difference between conservative nihilist Houellebecq and radical queer Dustan seems to be their answer to the question: ‘can we dance through the end of times?’.

 Utopia and Antagonism: Eco-Constitutionalism in the works of Kim Stanley Robinson

Dennis Wassouf (Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia)

We inhabit a moment in which crisis is not an exception but the atmosphere itself; reality now reads like the very dystopias we once escaped to in fiction. Under such conditions, the only honest “realism” is one that absorbs this dystopian grain yet refuses its defeatism.

Dystopian realism, as I propose it, is an act of imaginative insurgency: it insists that better futures are not distant mirages but immanent within the present, waiting to be named. Reading through the twin lenses of Tom Moylan’s paradigm of critical utopia and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of social antagonism, my talk maps Kim Stanley Robinson’s sprawling ennealogy—Three Californias, the Mars Trilogy, and Science in the Capital—as a cosmology of hope. Moylan alerts us to utopias built with “cracks” that let history’s conflicts show; Laclau and Mouffe teach us that every social order is stitched together by contestable frontiers. Together they illuminate how Robinson’s novels stage utopia as an arena of struggle rather than a static blueprint.

Threaded through these works is a jurisprudence of the possible: eco-constitutionalism, a legal imagination that folds ecological limits into the very scaffolding of political life. Robinson’s critical utopias are not idylls without friction but worlds structured by antagonism, offering an immanent critique of contemporary constitutional order precisely by positing an alternative.

Seen through this lens, Robinson’s fiction functions as magnifying glass: enlarging the faint outlines of tomorrow while sharpening our view of the mutable present. In short, his novels remind us that the task of utopian literature is not to predict the future, but to widen the aperture of the real.

After Law, After Event: when Badiou meets de Sutter

Krzysztof Katkowski (University of Warsaw)

In an era marked by cascading crises — ecological, technological, and political — law often appears as a structure outpaced by reality: reactive, inert, increasingly disconnected from the worlds it is supposed to shape. But perhaps the deeper question is not how law fails to keep up, but whether it ought to exist at all — or if what we call “law” was ever necessary in the first place. This paper stages a speculative confrontation between two philosophical trajectories: Alain Badiou’s ontology of mathematics and the event, and Laurent de Sutter’s critique of the juridical fetishism of lex. Badiou, in this case read as a post-Cartesian Platonist, offers an uncompromising vision of ontology: if being exists, it appears only as multiplicity — and only mathematics, particularly set theory, can grasp this non-unified mode of existence. From this foundation, he posits the concept of the event: a radical rupture that introduces novelty, irreducible to any preexisting order of being. For Badiou, the law could be rethought not as a system of norms, but as a momentary configuration of truths, appearing within and against historical situations. De Sutter, by contrast, performs a Gorgian gesture: dissolving the transcendence of law into the immanence of affect, circulation, and contingency. In After Law, he suggests that the legal order is neither natural nor universal — that the very idea of law as civilization’s cornerstone was a historical decision, not a necessity. Across cultures and centuries, societies have existed without normative rule, and perhaps must do so again. Where Badiou seeks the subject of truth faithful to the event, de Sutter suspends the subject altogether, proposing new nomoi without law — fluid, ephemeral, and post-juridical. This paper explores the tension between these positions as a speculative opportunity: what if law is not only failing, but vanishing? What if it is no longer a structure, but an event — a fleeting mathematical trace, appearing without guarantee and disappearing without residue? Thinking law otherwise means confronting not just the pace problem, but the possibility that the law after law is nothing but suspended abstraction — a logic without ground, a politics without form, a subject without guarantee. This paper explores the tension between these positions as a speculative opportunity: what if law is not only failing, but vanishing? What if it is no longer a structure, but an event — a fleeting mathematical trace, appearing without guarantee and disappearing without residue? Thinking law otherwise means confronting not just the pace problem, but the possibility that the law after law is nothing but suspended abstraction — a logic without ground, a politics without form, a subject without guarantee. But what if all of this accelerates? That’s when the philosophical game, our sea travel, truly begins.

15.1 Civilisation, Race and Empire 

Stream: Critical Legal Pedagogies

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 10:30- 12:00

Venue: Red Lecture Theatre

The hopeful futures of critical legal pedagogies of race and empire: the role of imagination and speculation  

Foluke Adebisi and Sahar Shah (Bristol) 

This presentation explores the use of speculation as a pedagogical method in teaching colonialism/racism in law schools. Critical pedagogy is frequently perceived as overly negative. In fact, in the case of teaching on empire, there is often nothing to say about the law which is not negative. Yet an overly positive couching of law as a site of “racial triumph” only, can come across as hagiographic, false and unhelpful. Neither position is ideal for student engagement. Speculation is a useful response as a pedagogical method because it has a “spiral temporality” – simultaneously hopeful and intellectually rigorous. We hope that in the context of enduring and evolving racism, speculation engages with critique to animate a path for law that breaks through the reproduction of the colonial-ever-present as well as the hopelessness and helplessness that many students feel. This form of speculation operates within a context that springs from and pushes back against intellectual exhaustion associated with backlashes to racial injustice in the neoliberal university to gesture to a doing.  

The presentation will explore the foregoing through two broad examples of pedagogical experiments that the presenters have used in their joint teaching of the “Law and Race” Unit at the University of Bristol. These examples engage with our use of speculation in exploring racial justice trials and triumphs, the (ab)uses of Critical Race Theory, the utility of Alternative Judgements Projects, as well as Sci-fi as a pedagogical tool. Through these examples we argue that (dis)enchanted critique is a necessary path within the teaching of law to help us imagine with our students and to begin to build language for flourishing worlds beyond the colonial-ever-present. 

Example 1 Speculation and science fiction: we discuss with our students how the Zong case can be reimagined and invite them to produce their own judgments/critiques of the case. We also ask them to draw out and apply speculative elements from their reading of, inter alia: F Adebisi. ‘The Sea Casts Its Net of Justice Wide: A Speculative Judgment for What Has Been Left to the Waters of Despair’. In N Rogers and M Maloney (eds), The Anthropocene Judgments Project (Routledge 2023). 

Example 2 Decolonisation as speculation: In teaching about the applications of decolonisation, we employ speculation by adopting the framework of Phoebe Boswell et al. Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World: The Alchemy Lecture. (Duke University Press, 2024). We invite students to produce their own manifestos for a decolonial/beautiful world from their own locations, spatialities, and aspirations. We particularly invite them to frame these manifestos around explored quotations about: the law school, the law, climate change, and the (racial) state. 

Our preliminary observations from these pedagogical experiments suggest that speculation is a way to challenge the perception of law as a politically and socially neutral/objective system of rules. However, prior training in law as well as the rigid structure of the learning in HE often presents a hindrance to both students and teachers in our attempts to see beyond brief glimpses into what might be done with the wreckage. 

15.2 Playing with Law

Stream: Critical Legal Pedagogies

Date: Saturday,6^th September

Time: 12:00-13:30

Venue: Peter Chalk 2.1

Playing with Reason: Using a Card Game to Emulate and Critique Common Law Reason 

Thomas Giddens (Dundee) and David Yuratich (Exeter) 

Full Panel Session (90 min) 

Developed to help students and the wider public engage with the structures of common law reasoning, Judge! Play with Reason is a table-top card game that opens to discussion of the form and limits of the common law ‘method’. Drawing on the broadly rhetorical or constructive nature of legal knowledge and process, Judge! is founded on principles of game-based learning in which playing games forms the primary mode of pedagogic engagement. By internalising the rules of the game, players approach the intended learning outcomes—in this case, an appreciation of the hegemonic structures of common law reasoning and authority. Whilst it is hoped that the game will also appeal to a wider game-playing public, its primary use will be as a resource for teaching core principles of common law reasoning as a springboard to critical reflections on its nature and form. Those in attendance at this session will both witness the game in action and reflect on its play mechanics and how these support its critical pedagogic value. This interactive session will involve a staged demonstration of the game, followed by a facilitated general discussion on the game’s potential, merits, and limitations as a tool for critical legal pedagogy. 

15.3 The Future, The Law School

Stream: Critical Legal Pedagogies

Date: Thursday, 5^th September

Time: 14:15- 15:45

Venue: Peter Chalk 2.1

Could it be Where the Subaltern Speaks? 

Molly Bellamy (University of Law) 

The talk proposes a consideration of the scope for a critical pedagogy that navigates between the discursive practice of ‘lived experience’ and its (ideological) claim to authenticity; the austere academic legacy of legal epistemology that imposes rigour on the knowledge making claim, and the rhetoric of the ‘pop pedagogy industry’ of UK University plc. 

The Scenario: ‘Lived experience’ is a policy discourse, where international policy makers produce guidelines on translating ‘lived experience’ into policy recommendations for business, social work, the work-place, or the legal sector’s ‘law influencer’. On social media platforms, it has assumed a naturalseemingness that betokens authenticity against the onslaught of corporate polish, or the encroachment of AI’s existential threat. ‘Lived experience’ here, equates to a more cool testimonial. It is a pervasive discursive practice across the public, social, professional and broadcasting board. 

‘Legal epistemology’ meanwhile, is rooted in a legacy of English enlightenment empiricism that inscribes an academic literacy today of evidence-based learning and reflective practice for the law student. It an austere tradition that encrypts a western, secular ethic of assimilation. Now however in the University classroom, it is inflected by Critical Legal Studies (CLS) which inscribes an ethic of critique. Even whilst there is much critique by Critical Legal Theorists about the ‘foundationalist’ character of the empiricist episteme, both camps subscribe to an ethic of ‘rigorous process’ in the making of a knowledge claim; a ‘rigorous process’ they both feel is absent from ‘lived experience’ claims to ‘truth’. 

Thirdly, there is a flourishing ‘pop pedagogy industry’ that has grown up in the 21^st century alongside UK University plc, to appropriate the language of legal epistemologies in a way that reduces ‘learning’ to a set of transferrable, sellable skills. The abundance of marketplace legal pedagogies produce a legal-ease that is too convenient for Universities to resist and that circumvents the need for them to provide a thought-through philosophy of legal education for law students. 

Given this three way scenario, the contentious question is – whether there’s a place for ‘lived experience’ to feature in a critical pedagogy for law students. This would take the form of lived experience providing a subject-position to the student as interlocutor, from which to dialogue with the received episteme that the UK university teaches. 

To this end, I present for discussion, 3 short passages from the academic writing of three   International students of law, who as interlocutors, deploy ‘lived experience’ as a subject- position in order to, respectively 1) assimilate to the host epistemological tenets 2) synthesise the host episteme with their own, 3) challenge the host episteme by way of a deconstruction. 

Does their subject-positioning as interlocutors with ‘lived experience’ signal any scope for a critical legal pedagogy, or is it just the slippery slope of foundationalism again i.e. experience as Truth? Is it any different anyway to the already well-established ethnographer’s subject- position? Or could it be where the subaltern speaks?  

Multiple Frivolities: Notes on Gender and Critical Legal Pedagogy 

Vijetha Ravi (National Law School of India University) and Malini Chidambaram (Melbourne) 

The conversations leading up to this essay began with moments of coming together to critically read and re-read, while teaching together at a public university in India known for its technocratic legal emphasis. As two young women teaching traditional law subjects (Labour Law and Family Law) in non-conventional ways – through critical, interdisciplinary, and often playful pedagogies – we found ourselves unpacking the perceived multiple frivolities of critical legal teaching in traditional law schools which are otherwise deeply tied to doctrinalism and formalism. Building on the generative experiment of incongruous pedagogy (Dutta 2022) which acknowledges the perceived incongruity of the “seriousness” of the Law in contrast to the affective joy that humour and friendship can generate in lawful education, we are proposing that law teachers embrace frivolity as both method and matter. Through this essay, we invite those invested in legal education to blur the lines between “seriousness” and “frivolity”, by posing two important questions: why we perceive certain methods, persons and sources as frivolous, and why is this frivolity incompatible with legal education. We are invested in disruptive discourses which understand that frivolity is not mere carelessness but is an act of care which comes from studied labour and studied lightness – incongruously providing a studied gravity to legal education.  

The explorations of frivolities are multiple in a legal institution with contours inside and outside the classroom. There are people who are assumed to be frivolous – young, women teachers and students who are mere “recipients” of legal teaching. There are subjects which are assumed to be frivolous – critical legal theory, especially when it is centered away from the margins in how we have taught (Critical) Labour Law and (Critical) Family Law. There are methods which are assumed to be frivolous – the usage of games and play in our everyday pedagogies, bringing in songs, films, images, oral histories and movements as sources of law themselves and non-conventional assignments which displace the traditional exam and essay model. Moving away from a place of insecurity and paranoia, we instead endeavour to absorb the political project of critical legal studies into the formal legal institution which resists it, by performing these frivolities consciously as an ethic of care that can produce joy and acknowledge multiple consciousness (Matsuda 1989).  

An essential part of this endeavour is also to disrupt the spatial and affective hierarchies of legal institutions by loitering, laughing and occupying the university campus with friendship and sound associated with frivolity. We will be addressing the in-between spaces in law schools – corridors, canteens and casual un-defined spaces – as sites of community in which teachers and students “loiter” as a form of feminist and critical method which foregrounds presence over performance, and collectivity over control. Through anecdotal accounts which include shared memories, photographs and messages exchanged, we reflect on our critical methods of frivolity which have allowed us to generate rest, joy and nurture otherwise dissociated from legal education.  

Who in the law school still cares about Gregson v Gilbert? 

Sahar Shah

The extent to which the transatlantic slave trade structures the world (and countries like the UK and US specifically) today – socially, economically, and politically – is difficult to overstate. Nevertheless, the matter has never been properly adjudicated. How does English legal education – tasked precisely with accounting for the adjudicationof various important matters –deal with this incongruity? In this paper, we suggest that the invocation of Gregson v Gilbert in some legal education contexts by some legal educators is revelatory of the way in which the transatlantic slave trade (and its contemporary/structuring injustices) is processed in English law schools today – this in turn sheds light on the some of the ways in which colonial ‘phantoms’ are interpreted and treated in English society more broadly.  

The Gregson v Gilbert story (in brief). 245 years ago today, a massacre had just concluded – of around 130 enslaved people being forcibly transported aboard a slave-ship called the Zong by the William Gregson slave-trading syndicate. At some point in the journey, water supplies aboard the ship ran low, and the crew violently threw aboard over a hundred already-captive men, women, and children in order to preserve the remaining resources for the white people onboard. This matter forms the subject of the Gregson v Gilbert case – an “action on a policy of insurance, to recover the value of certain slaves thrown overboard for want of water”. Within English law, the material question to be answered in relation to the Zong massacre was this: 

Was it the slave-trading syndicate Gregson or the insurers of the slave voyage Gilbert that should bear the loss of the financial value ascribed to the enslaved and massacred people? 

The moral issue of enslavement itself was not the matter of dispute: Lee, S.G. and Chambre said: “It has been decided, whether wisely or unwisely is not now the question, that a portion of our fellow-creatures may become the subject of property”. The substance of this throw-away statement (the rendering of African people as forms of property) became the subject of the abolitionist movement. English law, historically, has been largely indirect about its approach to enslavement. Where the common law spoke on the matter, it tended to err against the practice. Nevertheless, the transatlantic slave trade was situated within a context of the tacit acceptance of slavery in international lex mercatoria – a “logical contradiction” that England, like other European nations, exploited to its advantage (Craemer, 2019). English law schools today tend to be relatively silent on the matter of slavery – the matter tends to be discussed in optional modules about law, race, and/or colonialism, or as a result of ‘decolonising the curriculum’ efforts, rather than forming a part of traditional elements of the ‘core’ legal curriculum. It is in these optional modules, or as part of ‘decolonising efforts’, that students tend to be introduced to Gregson v Gilbert. 

The invocation of Gregson v Gilbert in legal classrooms – by some and not others – is very telling. For whom in the law school are the embedded, unresolved, unadjudicated violences of law intolerable? And for whom are these invisible – or tolerable? NourbeSe Phillips’ poem Zong! (along with Phillips’ practice of reading the poem in its entirety each year)can be interpreted in parallel to the invocation of Gregson v Gilbert each year in certain legal classrooms to understand what pedagogical sleights of hand might be used by critical legal teachers in the face of deliberately unadjudicated injustices. 

15.4 Building Legal Ideas

Stream: Critical Legal Pedagogies

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 16:00-17:30

Venue: Peter Chalk 2.1

Zine Making as a Pedagogical Tool for Promoting Inclusivity and Facilitating Creative Collaboration in Legal Education

Nicola McNulty (Bath Spa) 

This zine-making project takes the form of a series of workshops which have been funded by Bath Spa University’s internal ‘Creativity and Curiosity Fund.’ The purpose of the series of workshops is to address the inherent limitations of traditional legal pedagogy, which is traditionally characterized by Socratic questioning, case study methodology, and formal essay writing. The workshops aim to explore how traditional legal education can inadvertently stifle creativity and disengage students, particularly those who do not thrive within conventional learning frameworks. Situated within the stream of Critical Legal Pedagogy, this research proposes and evaluates the integration of zine-making workshops into the law curriculum as a non-traditional, inclusive, and creatively collaborative pedagogical tool. 

Zines, defined as self-published, visually impactful works of minority interest combining appropriated text, art, and imagery, offer a unique avenue for students to engage with legal concepts beyond the confines of doctrinal analysis. This aim of this project is to stimulate and enhance creativity through zine making, foster a more inclusive learning environment by valuing diverse forms of expression, and provide an innovative platform for students to explore the concept of law through the lens of ‘rule-breaking’ and social activism. By creating tangible, visually engaging publications, students can advocate for marginalized causes related to equality, access to justice, and legal reform in a manner that transcends the traditional written format. 

The implementation of zine-making workshops aims to achieve three key objectives:  

(1) to cultivate creativity within legal education, thereby promoting inclusive learning spaces for students who may find traditional curricula less accessible or engaging;  

(2) to enhance student collaboration, engagement, and social networking through a shared, interactive, and informal learning environment centred on co-creation; and  

(3) to develop innovative, visual methods for advocating for legal reform. 

To assess the pedagogical impact of this approach, anonymised questionnaires will be administered to student participants post-workshop. These questionnaires will gather data on whether creative practices enhance knowledge retention and engagement with law, foster creative thinking around legal issues, and cultivate a more social, collaborative, and practical learning environment compared to traditional methods.  

The project also intends to showcase the student-created zines through campus displays and a dedicated event which aims to celebrate student advocacy. It is hoped that this work will contribute to a broader understanding of effective and inclusive legal pedagogy. 

This project embraces the principles of inclusivity by offering a diverse range of learning activities that move beyond traditional assessments, fostering a sense of belonging and showcasing a much broader skillset than traditional legal pedagogy allows. Collaboration is central to the zine-making process, encouraging social interaction and networking among students. Finally, the co-creation of zines, focused on exploring legal issues and advocating for change, aims to ignite both staff and student curiosity, fostering a creative spirit and a willingness to explore non-traditional methods in legal education. 

Construction of vague legal concepts: the LEGO® experience 

Terezie Smejkalová (Masarykova Univerzita) 

In my ongoing research, I explore vague legal concepts as social representations (Moscovici 2001). The social representations paradigm sees concepts as collective elaborations that are constantly constructed and re-constructed in the process of social communication. Building on this theory, I approach vagueness not as a technical problem to be resolved, but as a symptom of law’s embeddedness in broader social and communicative practices that reflect—and reproduce—dominant norms, structures and categorization. To make this process tangible, I developed an experimental pedagogical exercise using actual research methods used in social representations research (specifically hierarchical evocation) and LEGO® bricks, through which students collaboratively construct the meaning of an unfamiliar legal concept. This exercise functions as a critical intervention: it disorients students’ assumptions about legal objectivity, and invites them to grapple with the contingent, collective, and contested nature of legal meaning-making. In doing so, it explores how even playful, material methods can unsettle legal formalism and reveal the deep entanglement of law, language, and social power. It shows various types of limitations we face when (re)constructing meaning, played out not only in aspects such as previous knowledge and education or value-orientation, but also the constrictions given by the amount and types of bricks available or by the willingness and skills to participate in the meaning negotiations. 

I would like to outline the design and theoretical grounding of the exercise, discuss its implementation (inlcluding photos and LEGO bricks I will bring with me), and student responses.  

 The Prosecutor’s Law 

Jasmin Hannonen (Turku) 

The Prosecutor’s Law course is a highly popular elective course available for both bachelor and master students in the faculty of law at the University of Turku. The course consists of one opening lecture as well as three lectures and three criminal case seminars held by different prosecutors. All in all, in addition to myself, there are six prosecutors with different work experiences, background and areas of expertise and specialization. My aim is to offer a comprehensive understanding of the prosecutor’s role within the Finnish criminal justice system. Together with students we examine the prosecutor’s duties from pre-trial investigation to courtroom litigation and international responsibilities. The course equips students with both theoretical knowledge and practical skills essential for fair and effective prosecution.  

 Usually, faculties allow private sector to offer specific courses as part of the curriculum, which can be considered as a way for marketing and cherry picking the brightest students to work for the private sector. Without this course, the public sector and in this case, crucial actors of the judicial system, would be left in the sidelines from the students’ perspective. With this course I aim to resist the mainstream status of only allowing the private sector to hold guest lectures. The course is critical also not only for its content but also for its pedagogical approach. As a lecturer, I foster critical legal thinking by encouraging students to question, analyze, and reflect on the ethical, procedural, and societal implications of prosecutorial decisions. Topics such as prosecutorial discretion, the duty to ensure a fair trial, and the balance between public interest and individual rights are explored through an ethical lens, prompting students to consider the broader impact of their legal reasoning. 

A defining feature of this course is its strong practical orientation. For many students, this is the first opportunity to engage with real-life legal scenarios and step into the role of a legal professional. As a lecturer I encourage the students to adopt a mentality that they are working under official liability, not as students. Through group assignments, students draft indictments or decisions not to prosecute, which are then critically reviewed in seminars led by practicing district prosecutors. The collaborative assignments underscore the importance of commitment, dialogue, and peer learning in developing a nuanced understanding of prosecutorial work. This immersive experience bridges the gap between theory and practice, helping students internalize the responsibilities and challenges of prosecutorial work in a realistic and supportive environment. The course also benefits from the lecturer’s professional background and established relationships with prosecutors, many of whom actively participate in the seminars. Having worked closely with these legal professionals, the lecturer brings authentic insights and facilitates meaningful discourse that reflects the realities of prosecutorial practice. This connection enhances the learning environment, offering students a rare opportunity to engage directly with experienced practitioners and gain a deeper understanding of the prosecutorial mindset.  

15.5 Irreverent legalities

Stream: Critical Legal Pedagogies

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 16:00-17:30

Venue: Peter Chalk 2.1

Pedagogical experiences from Law & Art Course 

Juho Aalto (Turku) 

The Faculty of Law has offered an elective course titled Law & Art since the autumn 2024. I have developed the course together with my colleague Yulia Dergacheva. The idea of the module is to enable students to approach societal issues through employing artistic methods. I want to discuss the possibilities as well as challenges in using artistic methods as part of legal education. The presentation will be composed of a re-enactment of teaching animal law together with a visiting artist Lotta-Lucia Laine during the course that took place last year. I will also present pictures of the students’ artwork that was displayed in the faculty building in the course related vernissage. I will introduce the techniques we used in order to encourage students to transgress boundaries from approaching social issues through conventional legal methods and instead deploying a variety of artistic methods reaching from video, to painting, to photography. The course was highly popular, and no-one dropped out since it started. I will also touch upon the aspect of student welfare and encouraging students to act and do instead of being limited by the all too familiar perfectionism that they worry about.   

Multiple Frivolities: Crafting a Living Syllabus from Precarious Grounds 

Vijetha Ravi (National Law School of India University) and Malini Chidambaram (Melbourne) 

This pitch to the Critical Legal Pedagogies stream proposes a collaboratively developed syllabus-in-progress titled Multiple Frivolities, grounded in our experiences teaching critical legal theory in Indian public law schools. The title and method of the syllabus draw from a shared manuscript that reflects on the so-called frivolities of method and matter in critical legal teaching, as well as a broader set of pedagogic commitments often dismissed as unserious: affect, vernacularity, humour, refusal, care, disability, disobedience, and collaborative learning. We locate the disruptive and generative potential of critical pedagogy precisely within these “frivolities.” 

We began collaborating at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), an institution often emblematic of the technocratic and masculinist character of elite Indian legal education. In response to that institutional culture, we taught conventional subjects like Labour Law and Family Law using interdisciplinary, experimental, and often irreverent methods—including vernacular materials, cinema, and performative exercises. Since then, we’ve continued working in public universities in India, navigating the compounded constraints of precarity, conservative curricula, and pedagogical suspicion. This syllabus, then, is both a conceptual provocation and a teaching archive: it asks how one might teach critical legal theory from the margins of institutional respectability and under conditions of surveillance, invisibility, and care fatigue. 

Rather than laying out a static list of readings, Multiple Frivolities questions the very architecture of syllabus-making. How do we begin a course differently—by collaboratively designing its structure with students? What happens when we centre short stories and songs over case law and statute? Can sound, silence, and movement be methods of legal inquiry? Can refusal, profanity, or care constitute legitimate classroom tactics?  

Themes explored include:  

• Anti-caste pedagogies and the politics of “merit” and “language” 
• Critical disability, mental health and chronic illness material, including embodied and disembodied experiences of classroom participation 
• Queer, feminist and decolonial methodologies, with an emphasis on care, storytelling, refusal and profanity 
• Legal language and its vernacular entanglements, questioning who is legible as a speaker of law 
• Institutional critique, including the gendered emotional labour of teaching, and the forms of violence that institutions enact on both students and staff.  

The course deliberately displaces “text” as the dominant source of knowledge, drawing instead on a repertoire of curated short stories (translated from Indian vernacular languages), classroom objects, playlists, protest posters, and fragments of oral histories. When we introduced elements of this approach in our own classrooms, we were met with generous curiosity and enthusiasm from students, who expressed a clear desire for more such spaces of critical learning. 

We hope to share some of these materials at the CLC. We welcome feedback from fellow critical educators as we collectively imagine classrooms as sites of contamination. Our aim is to build a shared commons of materials, reflections, and annotated readings that can circulate across law schools globally—particularly in spaces where critical pedagogy remains precarious or embattled. This is part of a broader effort to cultivate a counter-archive of joy, contradiction, and insurgent pedagogy—especially from geographies where critical legal education must often survive by stealth. 

A Critical Legal Pedagogy for Teaching Law and Humanities 

Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilaça (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM)

Law and humanities is fundamental to open students to law’s ways of worldmaking, in turn needed to grasp how law, legal imagination, and legal reasoning are all cultural products. I believe that the challenge for law and humanities is to devise a teaching approach that turns the classroom into a cultural product and construction too, and for that reason it must explode the confines of the classroom.  

In my talk, I wish to discuss my experience teaching law and humanities at my Mexican institution, ITAM. The course is experimental with students choosing the topic of focus, defining the needed materials, sources, and approaches, undergo aesthetic education with a professional artist such as an artistic workshop to help traversing the conceptual and the aesthetic languages, and use the public space as the site of their work both in how classes are held outdoors, inside and outside the school premises according to needs, and in how the “outside” provides a space for a cultural encounter between law, cognition, and emotions comprising public presentation of their work, public performances of their work including collage and video art that help materializing in a non-exclusively cognitive way that law is a cultural performance. I further wish to examine the changes this teaching approach triggered on my own views both regarding the role of the teacher and the nature and goals of assessment.  

15.6 Critique within the University

Stream: Critical Legal Pedagogies

Date: Friday, 5th September

Time: 15:30-17:00

Venue: Red Lecture Theatre

A Civilised Hypocrite: Navigating Contemporary Legal Academia  

Shahab Saqib (Brimingham)  

Law is not a neutral instrument for Critical Legal Studies (CLS) scholars. For them, as Robert W Gordon rightly points out, law ‘is saturated with categories and images that for the most part rationalize and justify in myriad subtle ways the existing social order as natural, necessary, and just’. CLS scholars are, therefore, committed to illuminating, dismantling, and deconstructing legal discourses that uphold the status quo. They adopt different positionalities, such as class, gender, etc., with an objective to expose the falsified interpretations of law that lead to unequal distribution of power. However, this clarity of aims and objectives does not exist for those CLS scholars who are tasked with teaching traditional legal subjects that come with clearly defined learning outcomes. They have to train students in the obedience of law, to read the law as it is, to think like lawyers, and to regard it as sacrosanct – something to be upheld regardless of its consequences.  

The duality of this relationship, which places CLS scholars between the ends of obedience and disobedience, makes them hypocritical. They wear distinct masks to cater to different audiences. They explain legal concepts while wishing those concepts did not exist, and simultaneously challenge them, fully aware that their profession is inextricably linked to the law’s existence. In this way, they develop a peculiar form of Stockholm syndrome with the law – a relationship they can neither fully embrace nor entirely escape. Nevertheless, since law is a discipline of social ordering, formalism, a code that aims to unify conduct, it injects a measure of civility into their actions as well. Given this fact, their conduct within contemporary legal academia takes on the paradoxical character of a ‘Civilised Hypocrite’.  

This paper explores this complex duality in the work of CLS scholars active in legal academia. It draws on examples from the author’s academic journey to demonstrate how the consciousness of a CLS scholar is intertwined with civilised hypocrisy. It also examines recent events, such as Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, which serve to magnify this hypocrisy. In doing so, the paper illuminates a unique characteristic of CLS scholars, one that determines their positionality, highlights the crises of their profession, and informs their pedagogical practice.  

The CLS Educational Network 

Ruben Wissing (Ghent) 

The project ‘Critical Legal Studies Educational Network (CLS-EN)’ is a pedagogical collaboration between the universities of Ghent, Galway, Tartu and Bordeaux with the ambition to develop open-source learning material and teaching practices for pre-graduate law students and lay the basis of a new European CLS educational network. There is a paucity of law modules which teach CLS in any depth, and lecturers in CLS are often isolated at their own institutions where limited expertise is available among colleagues. Students often find CLS too advanced, employing difficult terminology, and complex methods and theories. 

 At this early phase of the project, a survey was sent out to teachers and researchers in law to inquire about their experiences with, observed deficits in and expectations of teaching (material on) CLS. In this panel contribution we will present the results of the survey and invite the public to add their reflections and suggestions on the project’s pedagogical methodology. 

 One other preliminary finding of the project is that the complex genealogy of CLS and successive critical traditions is somewhat blurring the focus on the core of the critical approach itself. This observation led us to choose for a more general and less tradition-laden denomination: ‘Critical Approaches to Law (CAL)’. In turn, we welcome the public’s input on where the educational focus should be when teaching law from a critical perspective.     

Teaching a Critical Syllabus

Maggie O’Brien

In 2022, Warwick Law School(WLS) introduced a new post QLD Curriculum characterised by distinctive pedagogies and wide optionality. Its’ most distinctive feature was the inclusion of two full year Seminar-Led modules (SLM) for all first-year lawyers; ‘Law, State and the Individual’(LSI) covering foundation studies in public law and ‘Understanding Law in Context’(ULIC), providing a foundation in English Legal Institutions, critical theory and legal skills.  By design, the SLM shifted students towards self-directed learning and group activity; independent reading was encouraged and open research tasks built into seminar activities and assessments constructed to test a wide range of both legal knowledge and foundation skills.  Equally important was the collective elements of the SLM: groups within groups (pods) were allocated for either a Term (ULIC) or a full year (LSI), creating a distinct social aspect to learning to counter the known disorientation felt by many First Years as they enter the competitive environment of the Law School.  The ideal was to create ‘Gemeinschaft’ within each new cohort of lawyers, using cooperative learning, collective tasks and group assessments to instil an understanding of community and an internalised sense of the personal and moral duties students owe to each other. Using ULIC as a case study, this session will outline the critically informed vision inspiring the SLM model and make  observations on the extent to which that vision has been realised using student and teacher feedback and bespoke interviews and questionnaires.   Whilst cognisant of the challenges  involved in this form of teaching, this paper offers a hopeful assessment of SLM, whilst dentifying risks to the model amid the inexorable drive toward the marketisation and commodification of higher education. 

16.1 Law and Literature at Sea 1: Land, Sea and History

Stream: Law and Literature at Sea

Date: Thursday, 4^th September
Time:14:15 – 15:45

Venue: Peter Chalk 2.3

Chair: Katharine Cockin

How is Collective Memory Shaped by Political Structures in the Curation of Traumatic Histories?

Elena Botts (Essex)

How can international maritime law be reformed to more explicitly address and facilitate the prosecution of state-orchestrated enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions at sea, such as the “death flights” for instance those conducted during the Pinochet and Argentine military regimes, and in what ways does the motif of aerial and maritime disappearance in literary works like Roberto Bolaño’s “By Night in Chile” reflect, sublimate, or critique these historical realities and their legal invisibility? Bolaño orchestrates the motif of the ocean as a polyvalent symbolic field, where the literal and figurative shipwreck experienced by Father Urrutia Lacroix and Wieder in the feverish dream sequence functions as a metonymic condensation of the collective shipwreck of Chilean society under the Pinochet regime, specifically invoking the juridical and historical realities of the death flights (vuelos de la muerte) that consigned dissident bodies to the Pacific’s abyssal silence.

The ‘Unknown World of “The Subject”’ in Conrad’s Lord Jim and ‘The Secret Sharer’

Tony Ward (Northumbria)

Both Conrad’s novel Lord Jim (1900) andhis novella ‘The Secret Sharer’ (1910) trace the consequences of acts which, as Fredric Jameson observed of Lord Jim, have ‘no present tense’ – the moment of action remains inaccessible, even to the actor himself, and thus appears to render legal inquiries futile. In both stories, it is the first mate of a ship who commits the deed in question – abandoning a damaged ship and its passengers in Lord Jim, and killing a seaman in ‘The Secret Sharer’. The two officers take contrasting attitudes to the legal processes set in motion after their deeds. Jim fully accepts being called to account by a wreck inquiry, but is frustrated that the process cannot provide the longed-for explanation of his own action. Leggatt, the homicidal first mate in ‘The Secret Sharer’, is disdainful of the justice which he imagines (perhaps mistakenly) will be administered by a judge and jury back in England. (He could probably have been tried in Siam by a Commission appointed under the Offences at Sea Act 1806.)

 Both stories invoke what Nietzsche called ‘the unknown world of “the subject”’, suggesting that any claim to know ‘how human action is brought about’ is a mere ‘primeval delusion’ (Daybreak, Section 116). In ‘The Secret Sharer’ this is true not only of Leggatt but of the unnamed narrator who helps him to escape. The narrator can give a detailed explanation of his particular actions but his motives for imperilling his ship, and embezzling money entrusted to him, to assist a fugitive remain mysterious. This paper considers how far the limitations of self-knowledge revealed in the two stories call into question the possibility of legal and moral responsibility.

From Shore to Sailor: Captain Wentworth’s Sea-Forged Heroism and the Shifting Legal Landscape of Social Mobility in Jane Austen’s Persuasion

Nichola McNulty (Bath Spa)

This paper will examine Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion through the lens of ‘sea travellers as heroic characters,’ focusing specifically on Captain Frederick Wentworth’s transformative journey and its implications for understanding social mobility within the legal and social structures of early 19th-century England. While Austen’s novels are often celebrated for their intricate portrayals of the social dynamics and customs of the English landed gentry, this paper argues that Persuasion subtly engages with significantly wider legal themes, including inheritance, land and property rights, social hierarchy, and the evolving concept of social status. Prior to his distinguished naval career spanning across eight and a half years, Captain Wentworth was deemed socially and economically inadequate by Anne Elliot’s family, particularly her father Sir Walter Elliot, highlighting the prevailing legal and social emphasis on birth and fortune in determining marital suitability. However, his extended military service and success in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars facilitated a rapid rise in his social standing. The acquisition of prize money coupled with his promotion to the rank of Captain not only secured his financial independence but also redefined his social position, transforming him from a person without “rank” or “fortune” to an eminently eligible bachelor.

This paper argues that Wentworth’s “sea-forged status” represents a compelling challenge to the rigid, inheritance-based social hierarchy depicted in the novel. His heroism is not solely confined to naval victories, but extends to his embodiment of a meritocratic ideal, where professional achievement at sea provides a legitimate pathway for rapid social advancement. By contrasting the initial rejection of Wentworth based on his lack of inherited status with his subsequent acceptance and even admiration upon his return as a successful naval officer, the paper will explore the shifting legal and social landscape that began to acknowledge ‘profession’ and personal merit as significant factors in determining social standing. The analysis will also consider the legal underpinnings that either facilitated or constrained such social mobility. While naval service offered opportunities for the acquisition of wealth and elevated social status, the legal frameworks governing inheritance and property, particularly the entailment of property impacting families such as the Elliots perpetuated a system that prioritized lineage and inherited privilege.This paper will navigate the tension between these traditional legal structures and the emerging social recognition afforded to individuals like Captain Wentworth, whose heroism and success at sea carved out a new form of social legitimacy, subtly hinting at evolving legal and social perceptions of status beyond the confines of lineage and inherited privilege. Ultimately, this research paper examines the character of Captain Wentworth as a ‘sea traveller’ whose heroic rise illuminates the complex interplay between personal achievement, legal frameworks, and the dynamic landscape of social mobility in Austen’s Regency England.

16.2 Law and Literature at Sea: Islands and Oceans

Stream: Law and Literature at Sea

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 9:00 -10.30

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.1

Chair: Tony Ward

Draw me an Island: The Normative Power of Insularity 

Louis Marius Bremond (UGent) and A. James Hannaford (UGent)

In the sea, somewhere, often out of sight and hidden from the map, lies the island. This secluded piece of land, isolated from the rest by the vastness of the sea, is regularly used as a narrative tool to set the scene for all types of tales. From epic journeys to satire, a myriad islands and archipelagos populate fiction as a site of conflict or utopia. Their faraway nature, both geographically and culturally, allowed many authors to reinvent a political and legal frame for society. In this limited and simplified frame, thought experiments could be conducted to imagine, draw, or denounce, aspects of society and consequently of the law.

In this paper, we will reflect on the islands of literature, as a mechanism through which to interrogate the utilisation of islands as a narrative tool from which political discourses and their legal realities are constructed. The metaphorical power of the island will thus be observed as a literary trope, reflecting on why device will be at it enables the writer, in dialogue with the reader, to communicate. We will also situate this narrative device within its contribution to political discourse. This requires and enables us to critically consider how ideas of insularity permeate through discourses and to what extent, if at all, similarity exists between the island as a literary trope and its deployment as political rhetoric.

It is through this consideration of distance and of insularity that we can properly reflect on the exceptionality and novelty that gives rise inter alia to the penal colony and the island penitentiary. To achieve all of this, we will invoke examples of the island from literature and its governance within the territories of States, so as to observe the normative and narrative power of the island and of insularity. We will primarily focus on the politics of the island within national contexts, as a constituent part within a State. We will use examples from contemporary political discourses while situating it within the historical uses of islands and the rhetoric that it offered.

Stories from The Deep: Afrofuturism, Science Fiction and Justice

Katharine Cockin (Essex)

Racist tropes of alien invasion have featured in the science fiction genre. These have been challenged in Afrofuturism, in particular, where the sea as well as outer space is creatively reimagined as an uncanny source of agency and justice: ancestors, entities, and other beings become visible, audible, and speak out. They record the evidence and find the means of reaching an audience with the power and authority to influence change. This storytelling process is inevitably traumatic because it brings to the surface the unresolved meanings of the sea as an apparently lawless, deadly zone.

The social role of historian and storyteller in Rivers Solomon’s novel, The Deep (2019), becomes a burden that is too great for one individual but realisable by a collective, anonymised voice within the novel. The story-telling process is always collective and demonstrates a shared knowledge and understanding of the ‘underwater city’ and its histories.

The decentring of the human in the alien invasion story is achieved gradually in both Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) and Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019). Entities emerge from the sea as already indigenous ancestors obliged to bring ancient knowledge to the shore in times of crisis to try to bring about justice. Questions are raised about the mechanisms for justice operating outside any formal political and legal frameworks. By contrast, Octavia Butler’s novel, Fledgling (2005), explicitly addresses legal systems and justice, where Councils of Judgement operate: ‘to learn the truth and then decide what to do about it within our law’ (220).

Points of comparison with other works of science fiction will also be considered, from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes (1953), Karel Capek’s War With the Newts (1936), to Stanislav Lem’s Solaris (1970; 1961).

 Wavewriting the Lawscape in China Mieville’s The Scar

 Emma Patchett (Northumbria)

In China Mieville’s fantasy novel The Scar,  a floating pirate city named Armada – made of lashed-together ships – travels the ocean, seeking a mythical sea creature in order to reach ‘the Scar’, a massive wound in reality where the laws of physics and possibility are unstable, and anything is possible. In this paper I will be theorising the sea as a lawscape, engaging with concepts of legal territoriality, border crossing and a critical jurisprudence of striated space through a close reading of the novel. Drawing on approaches from critical legal geography and Deleuzian theory,  I will argue that reading the porous fluidity of edgezones and limit points through this text provides a way of conceptualising the space, time and legal atmosphere of sovereignty and floating borders. Simultaneously, I will be engaging with the concept of fluid boundaries and edgezones by experimenting with wavewriting (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2022), in order to explore the connection between law and water, and as a way to consider the spatio-temporal imaginary of the sea and the legal construction of space.

17.1 Reconceptualising borders and exploring migration fictions

Stream: ‘The border crossed us’: Border Crossings and the Law

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 13:30- 15:00

Venue: Peter Chalk 2.1

Chair: Emma Patchett

Migrating Forms, Crossing (B)Orders: Legal and Literary Subjects on the Move

Peter Schneck  & Laura Zander

How do borders organize forms (laws, language) as orders (jurisdictions, discourse)? Starting out from Thomas Nail’s observation that “the migrant arts are the result of a dialectic between political borders and aesthetic orders” (2020: 5) we want to discuss and contrast contemporary legal and literary fictions of migrancy and their intersecting imaginaries of the moving subject. Fictions of migrancy in law and in literature, we will argue, in similar ways evolve around the dialectical tension marked by Nail between legal and aesthetic (b)orders and various forms of movement as (b)order crossings. These crossing movements both determine and create migrating forms (of subjects and subjectivities) which challenge the territorially grounded aesthetic of the nation state and the legal-political aesthetic of the citizen-subject. We are interested in the ways in which the current global ‘crisis of migration’ engenders and mobilizes an equally globalized ‘story space’ in which migrancy is experienced and narrated as a live form, increasingly establishing the “figure of the migrant” (Nail 2015) as the center piece of the political-legal fictions of our time. As we will discuss with regard to specific variants of the migrant figure, especially those connected to refugeehood and statelessness, both legal and literary fictions of migrancy have to negotiate the tension between the forms created (engendered and made possible) and the forms excluded (denied, obscured and made ‘impossible’) by their (b)orders. From this perspective, legal and literary subjects on the move are shaped by narratives of paradoxical mobility – both crossing and being crossed by (b)orders.

Thomas Nail. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2015.
Thomas Nail “What are the Migrants Arts?” The Large Glass 29/30 (2020): 5–9.

The Legal Constitutions of Borders

Melanie Sadozai,  & Marie Beyrich

This paper will present a newly funded collaborative research network project supported by the Leibniz ScienceCampus Regensburg. Bringing together scholars from law, geography, political science, and cultural studies, the project fosters interdisciplinary research into how borders are constituted and reconfigured through legal frameworks – across geopolitical regions and beyond territorial lines. It addresses two central questions: (1) How has the concept of borders evolved from being primarily shaped by geography, politics, and culture to being increasingly defined by law? (2) How do these shifts manifest differently in diverse regional contexts? The project develops a series of “Border Labs” in regions marked by complex legal, political, and cultural dynamics. Three case studies ground the analysis: the Bavarian-Czech border, the Georgian-South Ossetian boundary, and the British Channel Islands. These sites provide empirical insights into how legal regimes shape border governance, movement, and lived experiences. We also examine despatialized borders – where enforcement extends to extraterritorial locations such as embassies or foreign airports – and how internal legal borders affect access to rights and belonging within national territory. A key focus is on the legal standardization of border control. While codified legal procedures may increase predictability, they also raise concerns around exclusion, surveillance, and diminished rights protections. By outlining the aims and scope of this new interdisciplinary research initiative, the paper lays the groundwork for a broader agenda on legal borderscapes, offering insights into how law reshapes sovereignty, identity, and space in the 21st century.

Beyond Borders: How Global Minimum Tax Challenges the Legal Theories of Border and State Sovereignty

Avin Tiwari

The Global Minimum Tax (GMT) regime under the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework establishes more than a technical amendment of international tax rules – it fundamentally recalibrates legal conceptions of sovereignty, territoriality, and economic borders in international law. Using critical legal theory, this paper examines how GMT alters the Westphalian concept of financial borders and how it affects distributive justice, state sovereignty, and the drawing of legal boundaries in international economic governance. By removing corporate tax obligations from physical geography and establishing new algorithmic definitions of economic belonging, the GMT’s transnational tax floor supersedes domestic fiscal autonomy and challenges the spatial logic of international law. The study demonstrates how the GMT creates a de facto centralised tax system (also known as “stealth fiscal federalism”) devoid of democratic accountability using a tripartite theoretical framework that combines legal geography, systems theory, and critical tax scholarship. The paper analyzes three key jurisdictional paradoxes created by GMT, a.) the development paradox (limiting policy space just where flexibility is most needed); b.) the sovereignty paradox (transferring fiscal authority from states to technocrats); and c.) the border paradox (replacing territorial borders with financial data boundaries). The paper examines the GMT in the context of larger vicissitudes in the global legal system and theorises that it is both a new lex fiscalis normalizing extraterritorial governance and a paradoxical example of the concurrent centralisation and fragmentation of international law. Using inferences from Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), legal pluralism, and critical border studies, this paper critically assesses GMT on the grounds of democratic legitimacy and distributive justice. It argues that while GMT is trying to stop multinational corporations from eroding the tax base, but at the same time it is strengthening a hierarchical international legal order controlled by powerful states and institutions. This paper moves critical legal scholarship forward by coming up with theories of algorithmic jurisdiction, showing the ideological foundations of technical legal systems, and suggesting decolonial frameworks for international tax analysis. The paper lends it voice to ongoing academic deliberations on how law is made by changing power structures in a time of digital capitalism. Ultimately, the GMT is a great example of how globalisation is creating new legal boundaries where the law does not follow borders, instead remakes and alters them all the time.

17.2: Visible and invisible bordering effects and disruptive border practices 

Stream: ‘The border crossed us’: Border Crossings and the Law

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 16:00-17:30

Venue: Peter Chalk 2.3

Chair: Emma Patchett

A Community Perpetually Divided: An Arbitrarily Imposed Border and its Effects on Social, Cultural, and Language Rights after the Acadian Expulsion from Present-Day Atlantic Canada and the Northeastern United States

Sara Ross

Madawaska, and the surrounding Aroostook County, of Maine, USA, and Madawaska County in New Brunswick, Canada are divided by the St. John River, which also defines this section of the US-Canada border. But this was not always the case. Both regions are comprised of a substantial Acadian population—many of whom are families and communities who had been displaced and divided by and then returned or managed to escape the Acadian Expulsion (le Grand Dérangement) in the mid-1700s—but were again separated when the US-Canada border in the region was established in the mid-1800s. Where the St. John River used to be viewed as a water highway within the communities on both sides of the riverbank, it is now an imposed, divisive barrier defined by US-Canada border control and the nuances of changing relationships between the two countries. This paper investigates the differences in social, cultural, and linguistic language rights experienced on either side of this border as well as differences in physical, spatial, and property markings that can be observed and have grown on each side of the border for Acadian descendants and, as a result, more broadly, between Franco-Americans and Franco-Canadians in this region. For example, the long lots typical of a seigneurial property system and settlement patterns can be more easily identified and legally cognizable on the US side of the border. On the Canadian side of the border, Acadian families and descendants primarily speak French and French is the dominant language encountered within the area’s principal city of Edmunston. Yet, on the other side of the border, just a few minutes by car across the bridge between Edmunston, New Brunswick and Madawaska, Maine, Acadian community organizations are struggling to regain a lost language—grandchildren who can no longer speak French with their grandparents—largely due to a 1919 law that banned the speaking of French in classrooms. This research is based within a larger multi-year legal anthropology project investigating the sociolegal impact of the Acadian expulsion and deportation from Atlantic Canada and, following the return of some of these Acadian communities, families, and individuals in the mid-1700s, the continued mistreatment and marginalization of Acadian populations, properties, language, and culture in the region into the 20th century. The bilingual project includes documentary, archival research, and ethnographic research within current Acadian communities in the Provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI, Newfoundland, and Quebec, and the US states of Maine and Louisiana. Over the last 100 years, each of these regions has witnessed government suppression of Acadian culture and language, in addition to the erasure and discriminatory treatment of Acadian cultural institutions, cultural heritage, and practices.

Ireland’s Hidden Border Violence

Niamh Keady-Tabbal

This paper interrogates the various forms of border violence unfolding across the island of Ireland—particularly those shaped by the racialised enforcement of an ostensibly ‘invisible’ border dividing the island into two jurisdictions: one governed by the Irish State and the other by the British (Hayward 2021; Komarova and Hayward 2018; Murphy and Vieten 2017). While the border on the island of Ireland is often described as ‘invisible’ or ‘soft’, upheld by the Common Travel Area (CTA) and its promise of free movement across Ireland, Britain, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, it is experienced by migrants, asylum seekers, and racialised people as a site of exclusion and control (Latif and Martynowicz 2009). More than 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement and the subsequent dismantling of the visible formal security infrastructure along the border zone, the border manifests not through walls, physical barriers, or official checkpoints, but in everyday encounters shaped by legal status and racialised conceptions of belonging—for example, through racial profiling, surveillance, ID checks, detention and deportation (Latif and Martynowicz 2009). Such lived experiences of this border reinforce a broader understanding of borders not as ‘inert, fixed, or coherent “things”’ but—as critical border studies scholars have emphasised—as ‘socio-political relations’ (De Genova 2016). The widely cited slogan ‘the border is everywhere’, deployed by both scholars and activists all over the world, reflects the dispersed and everyday nature of border enforcement—how it extends beyond territorial lines into routine practices of surveillance, identification, and control (Lyon 2020). But what does this mean for border crossing in the Irish context, where the notion and material reality of the border is both contested and largely hidden from view? (Butterly 2019). This paper takes up these questions by examining how border practices are implemented, contested, and navigated across legal, spatial, and institutional contexts. Drawing on interviews with migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees both north and south of the border, it explores how law not only facilitates but also normalises these practices, embedding racialised exclusions into the fabric of legal and political systems.

Port state control and assigning places of safety as means to control and disrupt humanitarian search and rescue work

Neil Graffin

Through the lens of critical legal pluralism, this paper will examine how SAR officials use a complex maritime and SAR legal framework to create law on the ground – often imaginatively using legal regulations designed for health and safety or environmental protection – to disrupt the work of humanitarian SAR organisations. Based on qualitative empirical research, it will examine two currently prominent modes to disrupt the search and rescue (SAR) activities of humanitarian vessels – detaining vessels by port state control and assigning places of safety in distant ports. It will discuss how port state control officials, in the view of SAR volunteers, require vessels to be detained regularly for often non-serious reasons. Vessels are then detained for the long periods of time to ensure that their operations are disrupted. It will also discuss how assigning places of safety in distant ports to where rescues are made has become a means to disrupt SAR organisations, as it costs time and money to travel to assigned ports.Through enhanced control of SAR organisations, it is the aim of states to have greater control over migration at sea – allowing space to commit human rights violations or ‘pushback’ migrants, furthering the aim of securitising EU borders.

The Bermuda Triangle of Human Rights: the European Union, Migration Policy and the Pillars of Effectiveness

Raquel Cardoso

The act of migrating is a recognised human right that is legally enshrined in several international legal instruments, such as Art. 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Art. 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and Art. 2 of Protocol 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Migration thus encompasses the right to leave one’s country and to return to it; but in practice, restrictions can be put in place both at the point of origin (the right to leave) and at the point of entry (the right to enter another territory). While this is not an absolute right, which means that restrictions can legitimately exist, its nature is incompatible with its total annihilation (indefinite and total suspension or restriction).The European Union shares some of the responsibility for migration with its Member States: its efforts in this area are aimed at ensuring an “effective management of migration” into the Union, including securing the EU’s external borders, implementing speedy asylum procedures and establishing an effective system of solidarity and responsibility. In reality, however, the means may not justify the ends, as the European focus remains solely on border management, migrant smuggling and accelerated return procedures. This paper will begin by briefly defining the relevant meanings of migration and effectiveness within this issue, in order to explore the consequences of both in what will be identified as the pillars of effectiveness. In the first pillar, criminal law, the definition of migrant smuggling will be analysed, leading to the conclusion that such a broad definition allows for the violation of both the human rights of migrants and the fundamental rights of European citizens. In the second pillar, externalisation, it will focus on the main agreements and forms of externalisation, leading to the conclusion that the human rights of migrants are repeatedly violated, as well as the fundamental values of the EU with regard to its external action. The final section will propose some recommendations for the future, taking into account the current public support for improving the human rights protection of migrants.

17.3: Externalisation, securitisation, and resistant border identities

Stream: ‘The border crossed us’: Border Crossings and the Law

Date: Saturday, 6^th September

Time: 12:00- 13:30

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.1

“No ID, no problem – the border guards are my brothers”: Kinship vs digital IDs in the Mizoram/Chin State borderlands

Natalie Brinham

In the borderlands between India and Myanmar, local and autonomous cross-border governance structures have long functioned alongside, and independently of, state and colonial structures. Conflict in Myanmar since the military coup d’etat of 2021 has reconfigured cross-border relations and the functions of state and non-state administrations. Myanmar’s military has lost control of vast territories in Chin State including the border crossings and trade routes into and out of India, which are now under the control of Chin and other ethnic armed resistance groups. Meanwhile, India is installing high-tech infrastructure along the 1600 km border between Myanmar and India, including “smart fencing” and surveillance tools such as heat sensors, movement sensors and CCTV, coupled with biometric border passes and QR-coded entry systems. Drawing on recent fieldwork in Mizoram, this paper considers how informal, kinship-based systems of recognition, governance and welfare provision maintained by Chin armed groups and networks of resistance navigate, adapt to, resist, and/or adopt border technologies including biometric surveillance and digital ID systems. While India’s border regime increasingly relies on datafication and biometric control, Chin communities rely on customary law and practices, oral record-keeping, and church-mediated documentation to establish belonging, resolve disputes, manage land, and provide refuge and welfare support. Armed groups operating under the Chinland Council (CC) and the Chin Brotherhood (CB) are currently developing parallel administrative structures, establishing their own population registries, welfare structures, taxation systems, and controlling movement in and out of their territories, —often without legal recognition but with significant local legitimacy. The paper argues that contrasting systems of governance—high-tech state-led and informal community-based systems of population management —reveal competing visions of identity, legitimacy, and sovereignty. It also highlights how Chin actors strategically navigate and hybridize these systems, using both formal and informal tools to assert belonging, access resources, and imagine futures beyond the nation-state. In doing so, the paper contributes to broader debates on borders, displacement, and the politics of recognition in postcolonial and conflict-affected regions.

Limbo, displacement, and ‘one in one out’: a critical semiotics of border control

Emma Patchett

The myopic obsession with ‘small boat’ crossings has resulted in substantial political attention and resulted in significant changes in law and policy, with a clear focus – regardless of the change in government – on increased securisation and the criminalisation of those seeking asylum through ‘irregular’ entry, as a consequence of the lack of safe legal routes. The recent UK-France border deal has opted for a so-called ‘One In, One Out’ agreement facilitating the exchange of migrants, in addition to strict security checks, in a continuation of the narrative of invasion and threat which bears little resemblance to the reality of migration but rather dehumanises those seeking asylum further, contributing to a broader sense in which border control exists in a nexus between performative cruelty, increasing criminalisation and the symbolic reification of the national spatial imaginary. Here, the sea becomes a space both of displacement and securitisation, in which all movement and transit is collapsed at a moment of frozen temporality, as a border in flux is substituted for a fiction of juridical control and the effort to call upon audiences to witness effective law enforcement action. Punitive encounters are therefore played out in the context of these highly visible journeys as a symbolic negotiation with, and demonstration of, the legal border. This paper will therefore adopt a critical semiotic approach in order to examine legal meaning, affect and signification in the context of border crossings.

19.1 General Stream 1

Date: Thursday, 4^th September

Time: 10:30- 12:00
Venue: Peter Chalk 2.3

Nation-State: Shifting from External to Internal Statelessness

Bohdan Andriichuk (Birkbeck College, University of London)

This study examines the transformation of statelessness within the context of the modern nation-state, focusing on the shift from external to internal statelessness. Central to this analysis are the evolving definitions of citizenship, nationality, and belonging. This research interrogates how the conflation of these concepts under the nation-state paradigm has resulted in the exclusion of individuals from both political participation and legal recognition—despite their physical presence within state borders.

Much of the existing literature on statelessness focuses on its legal definitions and contemporary human rights implications, often treating it as an exceptional or unintended condition that emerged no earlier than the 20th century. These accounts typically emphasize international law, refugee crises, or bureaucratic failures, while overlooking the deeper historical and ideological transformations that made internal statelessness possible. By failing to trace its roots to shifts in sovereignty, citizenship, and national identity, prevailing scholarship lacks a coherent explanation of how internal statelessness became a structural feature of modern states.

This study addresses this gap by offering an analysis of political and legal transformations from the Middle Ages through the interwar period. Drawing on political theory, legal history, and historical case studies—including post-Westphalian Europe, the French Revolution, and the aftermath of World War I—the paper demonstrates how the centralization of sovereign authority, the legal independence of states, and the rise of culturally exclusive nation-states collectively enabled the internalization of statelessness. Sources include early modern legal theorists such as Jean Bodin, ecclesiastical legal texts like Gratian’s Decretum, and treaties such as Saint-Germain and Trianon. The methodology incorporates critical legal studies to trace how concepts of belonging evolved alongside state structures. Key theoretical frameworks include Ulrich K. Preuss’s analysis of citizenship, Graham Wallas’s concept of the “national type,” and Hannah Arendt’s critique of the right to have rights.

The central argument is that internal statelessness is not an anomaly but the result of specific historical developments in sovereignty, law, and nationhood. The shift from expulsion in the medieval context to inclusion without political rights in modern states reflects a profound transformation in how political communities define membership. The paper identifies three necessary conditions for internal statelessness: (1) a nation-state identity, (2) a single sovereign authority, and (3) the unrestricted power to determine who belongs to the “community.”

By tracing how modern sovereignty has evolved into a mechanism of exclusion rather than inclusion, this research highlights the deep-rooted structural inequalities embedded in contemporary citizenship regimes. Understanding this historical trajectory is essential for rethinking sovereignty and citizenship in an era marked by growing global displacement and contested borders.

The Legal Context of the Holocaust: Legal Consciousness and Moral Conscience in the Nazi Genocide

Simon Lavis (Open University)

This paper explores the perception and operation of Nazi law for members of German society with complicity in the Holocaust, with reference to legal consciousness theory. It builds on the author’s previous research on the constitutive role of law in the Third Reich: the use of law by the Nazi regime not just to terrorise society and criminalise outsider groups but to engender and underpin Nazi ethical and ideological norms that informed decision-making among the German population considered members of the Volksgemeinschaft. This paper draws on the critical benefits of legal consciousness as a methodology that focuses on the role of law in everyday life as opposed to explicitly legal officials and institutions. By examining how everyday actors perceived, positioned themselves in respect of, and used the law in the Third Reich, it aims to gain a stronger understanding of how legal rules, principles and agents influenced the mindset of those complicit in the Holocaust in a variety of ways. As such, the paper is a contribution to debates in historiography and Holocaust studies about how and why so many people beyond direct perpetrators could be complicit in the Holocaust, as well as to approaches that seek to understand and interpret the role of law in Nazi Germany from critical perspectives.

Between Borders and Burdens: The Legal-Environmental Complex of the Rohingya Crisis

Anwayee Chakraborty (Premier University)

The protracted displacement of the Rohingya in Bangladesh represents a complex crisis at the intersection of humanitarian law, environmental degradation, and socio-political instability. Since over one million refugees arrived in 2017, Cox’s Bazar—an ecologically sensitive area—has experienced severe environmental consequences. More than 8,000 acres of protected forest have been destroyed, leading to fragmented wildlife corridors, habitat loss, and increased soil erosion, with an average of 78 tons of soil lost per hectare annually. Aquifers are being rapidly depleted, and water sources are contaminated, with up to 70% of them testing positive for E. coli, posing serious public health risks. Additionally, the accumulation of over 10,000 tons of unmanaged solid waste each month exacerbates environmental fragility.

Legally, Bangladesh’s non-ratification of the 1951 Refugee Convention places Rohingyas in a stateless legal void, stripping them of formal protection and exacerbating socio-legal marginalization. This vacuum facilitates rising incidences of criminal activities—ranging from illicit arms trade and narcotics trafficking to gender-based violence—highlighting governance deficiencies. Intersecting citizenship denial, restrictive migration frameworks, and absent environmental safeguards intensify vulnerabilities among displaced populations and strain fragile ecosystems. Refugees are confined to ecologically precarious zones, accelerating biodiversity loss and resource depletion while igniting social tensions.

This study draws upon comparative analyses of Uganda’s inclusive refugee policies, Kenya’s spatial zoning approach, and Lebanon’s climate-sensitive humanitarian strategies. It presents a comprehensive framework integrating humanitarian law, environmental governance, and socio-political policy. By examining the intersection of these dimensions, the study highlights how legal, environmental, and social factors compound the vulnerabilities of the displaced.

This paper advocates for a tripartite strategic response: (1) enacting robust refugee and environmental protection laws; (2) implementing participatory ecological restoration that includes displaced communities as active stakeholders; and (3) establishing legally enforceable buffer zones to safeguard critical habitats. Empowering Rohingyas as ecological stewards is pivotal for reconciling humanitarian imperatives with environmental sustainability, thereby fostering resilience amid overlapping crises.

19.2 General Stream 2

Date: Friday, 5^th September

Time: 9:00 -10:00

Venue: Peter Chalk 2.3

IT BE THE JUSTICE SQUID!! On the Shores of Rasterization

Thomas Giddens (University of Dundee)

Surf is invisible; turf is not. The shifting waters of the seas lurk unseen behind or beneath or outside the solid landmass of visible forms. The sea of authority, the dream-realm of law behind the cancel of the text, is where lurks the Justice Squid! That unknowable cosmic other from beyond all ken, which manifests its desire in the hermeneutic revelations of the law. At the shoreline, where the sea meets the land, the visible forms of law adopt material coordinates as legal texts appear in typographic form. As the law makes landfall, manifesting itself in a border crossing from the seas of the invisible to the visible islands of modern knowing, rasterization takes place. Hark, the Justice Squid speaks, and jurisdiction unfolds! In digital typography, this rasterization is literal: the continuous mathematical forms of Bézier curves are reduced to pixellated displays, the material cancels the immaterial. In historical practices of mechanical letterpress, this rasterization is figurative: the continuous ideals of common law principle are reduced to the mattered face of the printed page, and again the material cancels the immaterial. By interrogating the common law’s typographic face, what is seen is the performative generation of an imagined interiority of the subject alongside the staging of an inaccessible other sea, an authorizing sea that supports law’s veridiction practices. These practices are constituted by the cancelling of the unspeakable beyond, their replacement by the imprints of the Justice Squid here on land—on the shores of rasterization.

Profiling the Female Emigrant: The Legal Life of Letters in Migration to Fernando Po

Rosemary Akpan (Marquette University)

Researchers have long examined intra-African emigration from Nigeria to other parts of the continent for its economic, political, and social impact on both sending and receiving societies. However, less attention has been paid to the experiences of women, particularly the growing number of female migrants who left Nigeria in the twentieth century. Drawing on personal letters, census data, shipping records, and other public documentation, the paper proposes a method of legal inquiry into correspondence collections of movements to labor destinations such as Fernando Po. These letters were the primary medium through which many migrants maintained transnational ties. The paper argues that women negotiated distance, belonging, and identity in contexts where their husband’s return to their home country was unlikely across colonial borders. By reading these texts as both affective and legal documents, the paper uncovers how Nigerian women crafted lives and obligations across borders.

Reconsidering the Definition and Function of Law: Lessons from the Pirahã Tribe and Linguistic Theory

Melis Irem Kirkdisceoglu (University of Nottingham)

This paper explores the analogy between legal theory and linguistic theory through the framework of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, differentiating between the strong and weak interpretations commonly found in both domains. It evaluates the alignment of legal formalism with linguistic determinism by framing law as a closed and rigid system. In contrast, interpretive and realist approaches exemplify linguistic relativity by emphasising the social embeddedness and adaptability of legal structures. Drawing on the weak interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the paper aligns legal realism with the notion that law is not static or autonomous but
co-evolves with the social contexts it aims to regulate.
Crucially, it posits that society is influenced by significant non-human and morethan-human forces, such as climate change, artificial intelligence, and technological systems, which necessitate a reconfiguration of legal normativity beyond anthropocentric confines. The linguistic example of the Pirahã tribe, whose language challenges deterministic perspectives, serves to illustrate the potential for law to
evolve beyond inflexible structures. In the realm of international treaty-making, this paper critiques excessively formalist interpretations that neglect to consider the co-evolving influences at play. It advocates for a pluralistic and dynamic approach that acknowledges the diversity of legal traditions and existing power dynamics. Utilising investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) reform as a case study, it introduces a “systemic mosaic” model that incorporates a Multilateral Investment Treaty (MIT), a Multilateral Investment Court (MIC), and a dual layer of soft-law mechanisms. The proposed framework consists of: 1. Internal soft law: open-ended, flexible provisions integrated within the MIT, and 2. External soft law: non-binding instruments designed to monitor and guide the treaty’s alignment with rapidly evolving non-human factors, including ecological change and AI-driven technosocial systems.

Ultimately, the paper contends that the law’s legitimacy and durability in a multipolar and more-than-human context depend on its capacity to adapt alongside technological and environmental changes, mirroring how language shapes and is shaped by human experience, thereby fostering justice, equity, and sustainable international cooperation. Consequently, the paper connects classical normativity with econormativity, presenting a reform agenda that is both systemic and ethically grounded.

19.3 General Stream 3

Date: Friday, 5^th September
Time: 15:30-17:00

Venue: Peter Chalk 1.5

The border between the land and the sea – searching for a litoris

Harri Karpén (University of Helsinki)

This presentation will consist of reading a short story written for this conference. It will explore the discipline of legal research through a metaphor of the land and the sea. Therefore, it is not a presentation in the traditional sense, but a performance. However, it will closely relate to the topic of the conference as I hope the synopsis below will elaborate. In addition to reading, it will include a picture flow.

The story explores the limits of the legal sphere in a world surrounded by the seas. To quote Jacques Rancière (1995), “The sea smells bad. This is not because of the mud, however. The sea smells of sailors, it smells of democracy. The task of philosophy is to find a different politics, a political conversation which turns it back on the sea.” I will force my main character to walk towards the sea.

Synopsis: Up on a hill lives a man, or a woman, does not matter, called IST. IST knows everything there is to know about that hill. IST has studied all the flowers, trees, rocks, sediments, and absolutely everything on that hill. Sometimes IST climbs a tower and looks at other hills. IST knows about them and can study those other hills as well.

Lower on that hill there is a sign that says where the sea level used to be. Even lower, there is another similar sign, only its timing is a few thousand years later. IST does not care for the sea, or even more so, IST has heard that he should never touch the sea. IST can touch water: rivers and ponds (there are some ponds even on that hill) and lakes, but the sea is forbidden.

One day IST thinks about those signs and the retreating sea level. IST realises, that as long as IST does not know where the current sea level is, IST cannot be sure having knowledge about everything there is on the land. So, IST decides to follow the river that starts from the hill and walks towards the sea.

The Island After the Law: Reading Jurisprudence in Cassares’ The Invention of Morel

Hayley Gibson (Open University)

On an uncharted island in the middle of the sea, the story of a sinister recording machine unfolds in Adolfo Bioy Cassares’ novella The Invention of Morel. The work is the diary of a fugitive, whose evasion of legal justice takes him across the sea and finally to the shores of an island half in decay, and half haunted by a ghostly community. As the fugitive investigates this community further, he discovers the existence of a deathly invention that binds community to violence, recording and repetition. This story constitutes, arguably, a tertiary position among fables of law and the archive – the first in Kafka’s The Trial, the second in Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener. However, it is one that introduces a different reading of the relationship between law, violence and the archive than those that are claimed (in, for example, Agamben, Vismann, and Derrida) for those more traditional legal fables. The invention of Morel introduces a community of pure normativity, in which temporality is intertwined with the symbolic force of the sea-power that propels the recording machine. The stakes of this pure normativity, however, are indicated in a speculative literature that imagines the death of authentic being; and the reproduction of community, humanity and existence – and even law itself – as simulacra. It is my aim, then, to introduce a legal reading of The Invention of Morel that might allow us to consider the significance of the Island outside of the reach of justice to the problem of normativity.

Postcolonial Law Between Speech and Violence: Inoperativity in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy

Patrick Hanafin (Birkbeck College, University of London)

Samuel Beckett’s Molloy is a resolutely postcolonial novel. In the first half of the novel Beckett evokes the arid landscape of postcolonial Ireland. Molloy himself is a typical postcolonial Irish subject, constantly at odds with the law. His only defence is his inability to follow the law. In Beckett’s Molloy the eponymous character is incapable of forming a response to the forces of law who ask him to provide an account of himself and, in so doing, to define himself. His co-character Moran is more amenable to doing what the law wants of him. It appears that Moran is Molloy in an earlier period of his life, an ordered bourgeois who then becomes the vagrant Molloy ending up in a ditch. The law wants to make of Molloy an “avowing subject”. However, Molloy does not co-operate or cannot co-operate. He was always saying less than what was expected, always saying something other than what would allow the machine to function properly. He is inoperative in Agamben, Nancy and Blanchot’s term. He is pure excess and workless and opposes this to the ordering biopolitical demand to name and form him. Like most of Beckett’s characters Molloy is errant. He escapes the letter of the law. This destituent nature of Molloy and the later Moran points to a refusal to do the work allocated to them. This leads to a situation in which Beckett’s characters are living in the unconscious and the underside of the law and in the process resisting postcolonial Irish law.

19.4 General Stream 4 (Chair: TBC)

Date: Saturday, 6^th September

Time: 12:00- 13:30
Venue: Peter Chalk 2.3

Toward a Standardization of Political Finance Regulation: A European Legal Perspective

Reald Keta (University of Tirana)

The legal framework governing political finance is receiving growing attention across democratic states, both emerging and consolidated. Despite notable similarities in addressing certain issues, regulatory approaches often remain fragmented, shaped by national specificities and political contexts. This observation also holds for European countries, including those within the European Union.

While the acquis communautaire and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights have laid down certain standards, they have largely refrained from substantive engagement with core political and electoral matters. Political finance regulation, in the European spirit, remains largely within the remit of national sovereignty. However, contemporary developments increasingly challenge this hands-off approach.

The historical trend of private financial influence over political representation has deepened, driven by the rising economic power of individuals and interest groups. The threat of “state capture” looms larger, not only through lawful financing but also through illicit flows.

Beyond traditional concerns, global trends present sharper challenges: the rise of anti-establishment movements, disinformation campaigns, and foreign interference—all enabled by opaque financial networks—are testing even the most established democracies. These challenges are often met on a case-by-case basis, but lack a coherent and holistic regulatory vision.

This paper argues that, at minimum, a theoretical and comparative debate is needed on the potential for standardizing political finance regulation within the EU framework. It aims to outline existing EU legal standards and identify the normative and institutional gaps where further harmonization might be envisaged.

Drone Space and International Law in Gaza: An Alternative Understanding of (Air)Space

Gail Lythgoe (University of Edinburgh)

The systematic violence and torture of drone use in Gaza is widely documented. These ‘techno-legal machines’ of war often have names associated with airspace, whether birds, light or gods: Herons, Ziks (‘ray of light’), Skylarks, Thors and so on. The gaze associated with drones is that of the drone operator, where ‘the target’ disappears in a ‘puff of smoke’. This gaze is fetishized; it is new, different. In contrast, the gaze of those on the ground at the time and in the aftermath is ordinary. (This trauma should not be ordinary.) Gaze is fundamental, but international law fails to comprehend its role in the constitution of space.

Considering this, the paper outlines international law’s understanding of space (sans gaze) enabling drone-usage in Gaza and an alternative account of space, socio-legal relations, and socio-technological assemblages, creating a better vantage point to comprehend what is occurring.

To that end, first, I explain the orthodox legal imaginary of space, especially airspace, and its role enabling the use of drones and sanctioning the colonial and patriarchal gaze. I argue it is this imaginary that maintains the authority of law in sanctioning IDF drone usage. Moreover, given its physicalised conceptualisation, law produces an understanding of occupation as ‘boots on the ground’, obscuring the Israeli occupation of Gaza persisting after the supposed military withdrawal in 2005.

Second, I propose an alternative way of ‘seeing’ space, suggesting a scopic regime better understands the brutal control of Gaza. Thinking scopically and spatially, allows us to realise the role law plays in the relations approving of drone usage in the current context of genocide and against whom the spatialised assemblage is weaponised. Drawing on a gendered and anti-colonial analysis of space, this argument rejects the ambivalent concept of territory in law and assumed objectivity of the drone. It argues the drone is part of the occupier’s subjectivity and a racialised and gendered assemblage in its own right, which cannot be rendered spatially and temporally distinct from some supposedly a priori airspace that it then occupies. Rather it constitutes this (air)space. As such, law must urgently recognise the drone as constitutive of a scopic-spatial regime, rather than assuming it is an object to be governed in some objective spatial backdrop.

Legal Realism or Realisms? Revisiting the debate on the definition of Legal Realism in light of its reemergence in contemporary sociolegal thought

Panagiotis Develekos (University of Berlin)

The starting point of the present paper is the observation that the turn of the 21st century signifies a “return to legal realism” (Priel 2018) within (socio)legal scholarship. Key indicators of this trend are the emergence of two new movements: New Legal Realism (NLR), and Law and Political Economy (LPE). Although NLR and LPE draw on different realist legacies – simplistically legal empiricism and legal institutionalism, respectively – they share a common observation. Both frame the current academic debate as a revival of the academic landscape of the 1920s, positioning Law and Economics as the new legal formalism (K. Sabeel Rahman 2017, Nourse and Shaffer 2009). However, this kind of re-claiming of the “realist legacy” begs the question: why do epistemologically distinct movements invoke the same term, namely legal realism (LR), rather than referring to their more recent and epistemologically closer predecessors?

To address these questions, I firstly revisit the long-standing debate about the definition of legal realism. The premise I want to support is that differentiating analytically between different realist legacies, is the position that not only respects the epistemological differences that existed within realist scholarship from the outset but also explains the different ways in which NLR and LPE lay claim to the realist legacy. Based on this argumentation, I argue that views defining legal realism in a monothematic manner – for example as a descriptive theory of adjudication (Leiter 2005) – cannot stand the test of time, as they fail to explain why the term LR is currently claimed in diverse ways.

The above analytical differentiation is essentially accompanied by a second premise: despite their differences, the distinct LR legacies share a common understanding of what the realist legacy signifies in sociopolitical terms; the dissatisfaction of a group of legal scholars with law’s and legal academia’s capacity to respond to the societal needs of their respective historical moments.