Critical Legal Conference 2025
Critical Legal Conference 2025
Unless otherwise stated, all seminar rooms and lecture theatres are in the Peter Chalk Centre, University of Exeter
Thursday, 4th September
| Rooms | ||
| 1.1 | Introducing econormativity Introduction to ‘Econormativities’ in the Future of Good Decisions project Connal Parsley (University of Kent) Margaret Davies (Flinders University) Conor Heaney (University of Kent) Generative group exercise: ‘Towards a Lexicon of Econormativity’ Connal Parsley (University of Kent) Conor Heaney (University of Kent) Margaret Davies (Flinders University) | Purple Lecture Theatre |
| 2.1 | Resisting Technological Extractivism in Arctic The Arctic, Underwater Noise Pollution and Post-Anthropocentric Modalities of Relation between Western Science and Traditional Indigenous Knowledge Tommaso Gerardini (Leiden University) 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) Arctic Ice as Home: Breaking, Refreezing, and the Troubles of Techno-Care Romain Chuffart (University of Akureyri) | Peter Chalk 1.1 |
| 8.1 | Hope from the Margins 1 Pluriversal Consciousness: In the Borderland: The Non-Male Experiences of Law in Postcolony Arpeeta Shams Mizan Law as resistance: Reimagining digital health data commons from the margins Tatenda Chatikobo Performing the Margin: (Neo)Colonial Realities in Global Biosafety and Biosecurity Governance Vorathep (Dev) Sachdev | Peter Chalk 1.3 |
| 11.2 | Legal Silence Rule of Law in Suspension: Colonial Legacies, Borderlessness, and Juridical Silence in the Question of Palestine Dimendra Liyanage 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), and Martin Ditkof (University of Colorado) Profit as Welfare: Legal Silence on Social Welfare Values in Company Law Sanna Ström (London South Bank University) | Peter Chalk 1.5 |
| 15.1 | Civilization, Race and Empire The hopeful futures of critical legal pedagogies of race and empire: the role of imagination and speculation Foluke Adebisi and Sahar Shah (University of Bristol) | Red Lecture Theatre |
The Impossibility of Decolonial Law: Arboreal Jurisdiction and Saltwater Law
Gina Heathcote, Professor of Public International Law, Newcastle University
| Rooms | ||
| 1.2 | Econormative reframings No Masters, No Money, No Markets! Rethinking Capitalism as Ecology Esther Edelmann (Leiden University) Econormativity and the issue of play: jurisdiction’s openness and its normative closure Frans-Willem Korsten (Leiden University) “When the trees have gone” – econormativity as event, process, and matter Stewart Motha (Birkbeck College) | Purple Lecture Theatre |
| 11.3 | Legal Narrative: Interrogating Dominant narrative Whose Stories? Decolonial Constitutionalism and The Caribbean Court of Justice Ronnie Yearwood (The University of the West Indies) The [2025] UKSC 16: The Inevitable Gender-Binary of Capitalist God Omose Agboaye (SOAS University of London) Criminal Law as Moral Policing: The Selective Protection of Honor in Brazilian Jurisprudence Alexander de Castro Hybrid Threats, Chinese ‘Rule by Law’ and Liberal Constitutionalism: On Legal Silence and Exclusion from a Postcolonial Perspective Ioanna Bagia, Donatella Casaburo | Peter Chalk 1.1 |
| 4.1 | Carl Schmitts’ Land & Sea on the Shores of the Postcolony 1 The Desire of Land & Sea Jaco Barnard-Naudé TBC Julia Chryssostalis | Peter Chalk 1.3 |
| 14.1 | Law Across Space and Time The Law-Space-Governmentality Nexus: Unpacking Cities’ Camouflaged Autonomy Amin Labbafi (University of Helsinki) Man. Land. Criminal Law. Chris Lloyd (Oxford Brookes University) 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) | Peter Chalk 1.5 |
| 15.3 | The Future, The Law School Could it be Where the Subaltern Speaks? Molly Bellamy (University of Law) Multiple Frivolities: Notes on Gender and Critical Legal Pedagogy Vijetha Ravi (National Law School of India University) and Malini Chidambaram (Melbourne) Who in the law school still cares about Gregson v Gilbert? Sahar Shah | Peter Chalk 2.1 |
| 16.1 | Law and Literature at Sea 1: Land, Sea and History How is Collective Memory Shaped by Political Structures in the Curation of Traumatic Histories? Elena Botts (Essex) The ‘Unknown World of “The Subject”’ in Conrad’s Lord Jim and ‘The Secret Sharer’ Tony Ward (Northumbria) 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) | Peter Chalk 2.3 |
| 12.1 | Wet Wet Wet – Water is All Around Oceanic Interconnection: A posthuman feminist legal approach to BBNJ Agreement Louisa Dassow (Newcastle University, UK) The ocean as management theatre: the problem of legacy plastic pollution Alex P. Dela Cruz (Tilburg Law School, Netherlands) New Agreement, New Terminology: Rethinking the Geographies of Marine Protected Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction Carol Dyck (Western University, Canada) Sovereignty in UNCLOS and its implications for the ecosystem and biodiversity Nina Boss (University of Bern, Switzerland) | Red Lecture Theatre |
| 19.1 | General Stream 1 Nation-State: Shifting from External to Internal Statelessness Bohdan Andriichuk (Birkbeck College, University of London) The Legal Context of the Holocaust: Legal Consciousness and Moral Conscience in the Nazi Genocide Simon Lavis (Open University) Between Borders and Burdens: The Legal-Environmental Complex of the Rohingya Crisis Anwayee Chakraborty (Premier University) | Peter Chalk 2.5 |
| Rooms | ||
| 1.3 | More-than-human law in environmental contexts Norms and justice beyond the human in peatland carbon markets Bonnie Holligan (University of Sussex) 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 Tracing econormativities in Swedish forests together with wolves Gustav Stenseke Arup (Karlstad University) | Purple Lecture Theatre |
| 2.2 | Antipodal Stories of (non)extractivism Antarctic Governance: Feminist and Plural Legal Perspectives Gina Heathcote (Newcastle University) Territory, Presence, and Ecocentrism: Towards a Governance of and by Human Absence in Antarctica Jordane Liebeaux (Bristol University) Geo-materialising Legal Imaginary through Antarctic Materialities within Geopower Rana Göksu (Kassel University) | Peter Chalk 1.1 |
| 14.3 | Utopias, Dystopias and the Law-to-come The Ethics of Nothing: On a Convergence of Queer and Conservative Thought in Guillaume Dustan and Michel Houellebecq Luiz Valle Junior (Northeastern University London) Utopia and Antagonism: Eco-Constitutionalism in the works of Kim Stanley Robinson Dennis Wassouf (Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia) After Law, After Event: when Badiou meets de Sutter Krzysztof Katkowski (University of Warsaw) | Peter Chalk 1.5 |
| 15.4 | Building Legal Ideas Zine Making as a Pedagogical Tool for Promoting Inclusivity and Facilitating Creative Collaboration in Legal Education Nicola McNulty (Bath Spa) Construction of vague legal concepts: the LEGO® experience Terezie Smejkalová (Masarykova Univerzita) The Prosecutor’s Law Jasmin Hannonen (Turku) | Peter Chalk 2.1 |
| 6.1 | Revolutionary Constitutionalism 1: Constituting Utopia, Instituting Revolution Anarchy vs. Sovereignty in the Classical Anarchist Tradition Prof. Alex Prichard (University of Exeter) Prof. Ruth Kinna (Loughborough University) Ernst Bloch, Utopia, and Gerrard Winstanley David Thomas Prefigurative Constitutionality: Organisational Means and Constitutional Ends Simon Thorpe Revolution as Institution: Legal Theory, Conflict, and Normative Project Pier Giuseppe Puggioni | Red Lecture Theatre |
| 11.4 | Legal Narrative : Reimagining and Rebuilding new narratives Sea-level Rise and the Territoriality Requirement for Statehood Nico Buitendag Profiling the Female Emigrant: The Legal Life of Letters in Migration to Fernando Po Rosemary Akpan 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 | Peter Chalk 2.3 |
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
Friday, 5th September
| 1.4 | Beyond the state–and beyond Sodabi, Survival, and Sovereignty: Norm-Making Beyond Colonial Law, 1920–1960 Enock Gbonsu (Independent Researcher) Law v Algorithmic Governance? A ‘layered’ ecology of social norms, laws, numbers, and computer code Zhenbin Zuo (University of Essex) Superseding the State? Scott Veitch (University of Hong Kong) | Purple Lecture Theatre |
| 16.2 | Law and Literature at Sea 2: Islands and Oceans Draw me an Island: The Normative Power of Insularity Louis Marius Bremond (UGent) and A. James Hannaford (UGent) Stories from The Deep: Afrofuturism, Science Fiction and Justice Katharine Cockin (Essex) Wavewriting the Lawscape in China Mieville’s The Scar Emma Patchett (Northumbria) | Peter Chalk 1.1 |
| 3.2 | Disruptive Technologies 2 Digital Humanitarianism as a Tool of Neo-Colonialism Safaa S. Jaber From Aerial Warfare to the Use of AI: A Tale of Exclusion and (in)Humanity Andrea Farres Jiménez Technological Solutionism and the Illusion of Empowerment Fatima Tatheer | Peter Chalk 1.3 |
| 14.2 | Algorithmic Power and Legal Futures 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) Against Linear Audit Will Mbioh, (University of Kent) Pandora’s Box: Artificial Intelligence and Unimaginable Futures Holly Swift (De Montfort University) | Peter Chalk 1.5 |
| 15.5 | Irreverent legalities Pedagogical experiences from Law & Art Course Juho Aalto (Turku) Multiple Frivolities: Crafting a Living Syllabus from Precarious Grounds Vijetha Ravi (National Law School of India University) and Malini Chidambaram (Melbourne) A Critical Legal Pedagogy for Teaching Law and Humanities Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilaça (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) | Peter Chalk 2.1 |
| 19.2 | General Stream 2 IT BE THE JUSTICE SQUID!! On the Shores of Rasterization Thomas Giddens (University of Dundee) Profiling the Female Emigrant: The Legal Life of Letters in Migration to Fernando Po Rosemary Akpan (Marquette University) Reconsidering the Definition and Function of Law: Lessons from the Pirahã Tribe and Linguistic Theory Melis Irem Kirkdisceoglu (University of Nottingham) | Peter Chalk 2.3 |
| 13.1 | Mutual dependencies, violence and vulnerabilities: Imagining International Law across terrains Charting the Course: Navigating the Complex Interplay of Legal, Commercial, and Geopolitical Forces in Global Maritime Trade Saurabh Sharma and Sakshi Mishra Ecological Justice and the Deep Seabed Commons Petra Gümplová Rethinking Treaty Compliance from the Periphery: Bangladesh, the Hong Kong Convention, and the Asymmetries of International Environmental Law Ishtiaque Ahmed Overturning the Concept of Aqua Nullius and Re-imagining Juridical Relations Between Indigenous Peoples and Waters as Hydrojustice Mark Harris Cartographies of Colonial Spatial Ordering: Rethinking Sovereignty and Law on a Drowning Coastline Amritanshi Rathore Coastal Identity, Imaginaries, and the Dominance of TNCs in International Law: A Critical Analysis for Environmental Protection of Marine Commons Banerjee Chakka and Shruti | Red Lecture Theatre |
| 6.2 | Revolutionary Constitutionalism 2: State, Revolution and Constituted Power State Violence and Legal Accountability: The Wait for Justice Dr Ceylan Begüm Yıldızi 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 ‘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 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) | Peter Chalk 2.5 |
Vito De Lucia, Professor of International Law, Norwegian Center for the Law of the Sea, UiT The Arctic University of Norway
| 1.5 | Theorising ecologies for normativity Revitalising Health with Canguilhem? Between Biological Normativity and the Biopolitical Conor Heaney (University of Kent) Aesthetics and the Order of Nature Swastee Ranjan (University of Exeter) Cybernetics in the Epistemology of Environmental Law Andreas Kostaskis (University of Kent) | Purple Lecture Theatre |
| 7.2 | Law and Process 2 Fear of The Flood: reading legislation through process theory Stephen Connelly Stranger Things: real abstraction, real hypostatisation and legal personhood’ Clair Quentin Dialectis of Juridification: Reading Pašukanis’s 100 Years on Rafał Mańko | Peter Chalk 1.1 |
| 11.1 | Exception as Order Legal Silence and the Violence of the Rule of Law: The Okinawa Henoko Landfill Litigation in Colonial Structure Kiwako Murata Land Expropriation for Public Purposes in the Occupied West Bank – A Critical Historical Perspective Nidal Daud Silenced Indigenous Rights of the Cham: Expelled from the Sea, Deprived of the Land Vadim Atnash | Peter Chalk 1.3 |
| 9.1 | Treasures found on Land , Treasure Lost at Sea: From Mining regulations to Laws of Salvage The Unobvious ‘Treasure Trove’ of Piracy: What can Pirates Teach us about Legal Theory? Mirosław M. Sadowski (University of Strathclyde) Digging for Trouble: Striking the Balance between Mining Profits and Indigenous Rights under Indian Law Satvik Sindhu and Ankit Malhotra Treasures of Law after Death: Preliminary Reflections on the ‘Death and Law’ Project Nevena Jevremović (Univeristy of Abderdeen) | Peter Chalk 1.5 |
| 17.1 | Reconceptualising borders and exploring migration fictions Migrating Forms, Crossing (B)Orders: Legal and Literary Subjects on the Move Peter Schneck & Laura Zander The Legal Constitutions of Borders Melanie Sadozai, & Marie Beyrich Beyond Borders: How Global Minimum Tax Challenges the Legal Theories of Border and State Sovereignty Avin Tiwari | Peter Chalk 2.1 |
| 3.1 | Disruptive Technologies 1 Escape Velocity: Transformational Technologies and Retreat of the Rule of Law Julia J.A. Shaw Legal Belonging in the Cloud: AI, Diaspora, and the Displacement of Identity Jasper Egbobamwonyi-Bedaux Invisible ink: Artistic Data and the Erosion of Cultural Agency Georgia Jenkins Hoist the Colours High: Reassessing the Digital Services Act in a Liberal Democratic Europe Tomáš Havlíček | Red Lecture Theatre |
| 10.1 | Dance/Law 1 Dance/law as a performance by a body that remembers: Everyday legal mobility, dance, and the city Jess Connolly-Smith (University of Lincoln) From techno to tekno, from law to nomos: How free parties are the new frontier of legal imagination Vittoria Becci (European University Institute) Contact as property Chrys Papaioannou (Independent scholar) | Peter Chalk 2.5 |
| 1.6 | Econormativities: Problems – past and future The Underlying and Wishful Times Jeremy Pilcher (NYU London) The Humanity Archive: Can AI turn outlaw? Adimaya Keni (Birkbeck College) Who Gets the Resources and Who Gets to Decide: a Treatise on Agricultural Ecology and Technological Ecology Michael Wallace (Independent Researcher) | Purple Lecture Theatre |
| 8.2 | Hope from the Margins 2 Storytelling From the Margins David McKeown, University of Bristol Protection from Below: Reimagining the Climate Refugee Subject Through Local Solidarity and Sanctuary Practices Irene Sacchetti Reframing marine sacrifice zones as spaces of hope? Law and struggles for marine and coastal spaces in Chile Sofie Elise Quist | Peter Chalk 1.1 |
| 7.3 | Law and Process 3 Institutions in Motion: Applying Maurice Hauriou’s Sociolegal Theory to International Organisations Matilde Masetti Placci International Law is not a thing. Justice becoming law, law becoming justice Jessica Elias Utilising a process-oriented approach to climate constitutionalism Gustav Stenseke Arup | Peter Chalk 1.3 |
| 19.3 | General Stream 3 The border between the land and the sea – searching for a litoris Harri Karpén (University of Helsinki) The Island After the Law: Reading Jurisprudence in Cassares’ The Invention of Morel Hayley Gibson (Open University) Postcolonial Law Between Speech and Violence: Inoperativity in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy Patrick Hanafin (Birkbeck College, University of London) | Peter Chalk 1.5 |
| 17.2 | Visible and invisible bordering effects and disruptive border practcies 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 Ireland’s Hidden Border Violence Niamh Keady-Tabbal Port state control and assigning places of safety as means to control and disrupt humanitarian search and rescue work Neil Graffin | Peter Chalk 2.3 |
| 15.6 | Critique within the University A Civilised Hypocrite: Navigating Contemporary Legal Academia Shahab Saqib (Brimingham) The CLS Educational Network Ruben Wissing (Ghent) Teaching a Critical Syllabus Maggie O’Brien | Red Lecture Theatre |
| 10.2 | Dance/Law 2 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) Between a glissade and a swim at Li Galli: a performance lecture on Dance/Law and the Sea Maria Federica Moscati (University of Sussex) | Peter Chalk 2.5 |
Coast Lines: The Audacity of the Beach
Anne Bottomley (Emeritus Reader, Kent Law School, University of Kent)
Saturday, 6th September
| Rooms | ||
| 4.2 | Carl Schmitts’ Land & Sea on the Shores of the Postcolony 2 Thermodynamic Appropriation: Sea-level Rise and International Legal Order Nico Buitendag The Plantation, Spatial Afterlives and Decolonial Constitutionalism in the Commonwealth Caribbean Ronnie Yearwood Law’s Commissaries? Irregular Fighters and their Relation to the Laws of War Juan Diego Dimaté | Purple Lecture Theatre |
| 17.3 | Externalisation, securitisation, and resistant border identities The Bermuda Triangle of Human Rights: the European Union, Migration Policy and the Pillars of Effectiveness Raquel Cardoso “No ID, no problem – the border guards are my brothers”: Kinship vs digital IDs in the Mizoram/Chin State borderlands Natalie Brinham Limbo, displacement, and ‘one in one out’: a critical semiotics of border control Emma Patchett | Peter Chalk 1.1 |
| 7.1 | Law and Process 1 Stiegler’s Process Philosophy of Technology & the Automation of Liberal Institutions Conor Heaney & Connal Parsley Law Unstill | Mycelium, Trans-Dividuation, Process-Oriented Ontology Korina (Kyriaki) Pavlidou Legal Categories in Flux: Rights of Nature and the ‘Ratio’ of Western Law Iris Pitkänen | Peter Chalk 1.3 |
| 11.5 | Stream Discussion on the Rule of Law, Colonialism and Legal Silence Kiwako Murato | Peter Chalk 1.5 |
| 15.2 | Playing with Law Playing with Reason: Using a Card Game to Emulate and Critique Common Law Reason Thomas Giddens (Dundee) and David Yuratich (Exeter) | Peter Chalk 2.1 |
| 19.4 | General Stream 4 Toward a Standardization of Political Finance Regulation: A European Legal Perspective Reald Keta (University of Tirana) 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) Drone Space and International Law in Gaza: An Alternative Understanding of (Air)Space Gail Lythgoe (University of Edinburgh) | Peter Chalk 2.3 |
| 10.1 | Dance Session | Peter Chalk 2.5 |