Books

Sensing Justice through Contemporary Spanish Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics, Law. Edinburgh University Press, 2021.

Sensing Justice examines the aesthetic frames that mediate the sensory perception and signification of law and justice in the context of 21st-century Spain. This book does not treat justice as an abstract category or universal disposition that we all share as humans; nor is it a set of procedures for reaching substantive decisions or outcomes felt to be fair and legitimate. The senses of justice–in its procedural, retributive, and/or distributive dimensions– always come mediated by the sensory perceptions and affects produced by the narrative, symbolic, and visual frames that give them meaning.  Attention to these frames raises questions such as: What kind of sense of justice do these frames create? What kind of subjects do they show and address? What affective and ethical responses do they produce? What kind of relationship do they establish between self and other? What material and corporeal effects do they generate? What kind of judgments do they invite? In answering these questions, Sensing Justice is concerned not so much with what the sense of justice is, but with how that sense is produced and experienced. By creating new frames of perception and signification, the films analyzed challenge the senses of law and justice traditionally taken for granted and reconfigure them anew.
 

Rancière and Law (co-edited with Etxabe J.), Nomikoi Critical Legal Thinkers, Routledge, 2018.

Rancière and Law is the first to approach Jacques Rancière’s work from a legal perspective. A former student of Louis Althusser, Rancière is one of the most important contemporary French philosophers of recent decades: offering an original and path-breaking way to think politics, democracy, and aesthetics. Although Rancière does not pay specific attention to law—and there is a strong temptation to identify law with what he terms the "police order"—much of Rancière’s historical work highlights the creative potential of law and legal language, with important legal implications and ramifications. 

Rather than excavate the Rancièrean corpus for isolated statements about the law, this volume reverses such a method and asks: what would a Rancière-inspired legal theory look like? Bringing together specialists and scholars in different areas of law, critical theory and philosophy, the volume rethinks law and socio-legal studies through Rancière and engages with a range of contemporary legal topics, including constituent power and democracy, legal subjectivity, human rights, practices of adjudication, refugees, the nomos of modernity, and the sensory configurations of law.