About

The Legal Humanities Association (LHA) aims to foster a common ground in cultural understandings of law. It nurtures humanities-inflected legal scholarship, seeking innovative forms of legal knowledge and analysis.

‘Humanities’ and ‘cultural studies’ are broadly understood as involving transdisciplinary engagements with ‘culture’ (deliberately undefined). They incorporate insights from fields such as film, theatre, art, and media studies, philosophy, theology, literary studies, feminist studies, queer and gender studies, rhetoric, critical theory, race studies, history, and postcolonial studies, amongst many others.

The LHA encourages an open and non-instrumental approach to law and legal knowledge. It aims to move beyond sedimented doctrinal assumptions about the nature of law and society, to inspire enriched critical approaches, and new creative or heterodox practices and spaces of encounter. Drawing from diverse traditions, genealogies, legacies, and histories, the LHA aims to connect and generate new research agendas and methodologies and support intellectual experimentation. It will nurture reflexive critiques of existing methods and knowledge, and be a space for the exploration of alternative legalities, prefigurative politics, utopian projects, speculative horizons, possibilities for thinking otherwise, and for pure enjoyment.

The LHA will be a home for scholars, research students, and practitioners working across law, humanities, and cultural studies areas. It also aims to include those who do not feel they have a place for their work within orthodox disciplinary scholarship or traditional law schools. The LHA will provide a space to connect diverse individual scholars, research clusters, centres, and schools. Events will provide meeting places for collegiality and scholarly community. The LHA will produce a newsletter with the latest publications, reviews, and other community matters, and will publicise and support relevant work.

Seeking to generate opportunities for creative and critical encounters, the LHA  will be a nurturing space, developing fresh disciplinary training and supporting scholarly development across all career stages. It will develop accounts of how humanities-inflected legal scholarship is conducted for a broad audience, inspiring new forms of scholarship, building and connecting research communities, and providing institutional legibility.

The LHA will facilitate a range of activities, including, for example: major thematic and general conferences; smaller specialist workshops; collaborative encounters and research, bringing different kinds of expertise and interests together; reading and discussion groups; work-in-progress sessions; amongst other activities.

The Legal Humanities Association is now open for individuals to join as inaugural members, ahead of the nomination and election, by members, of its inaugural Governance Committee.

About the Interim Committee

The Legal Humanities Association has been developed by an interim committee of volunteers, drawn from the law and humanities academic community. This committee was created through the distribution of an open call, with all respondents to that call making up the committee’s membership. The LHA Interim Committee’s task is to establish the association and then dissolve itself.

So far, the LHA Interim Committee has:

  • Collectively written the above description of the association’s intellectual context and its general aims and rationale
  • Established the name of the association
  • Drafted and approved the LHA Constitution
  • Put in place the corporate and financial provision required for the association to function

The LHA Interim Committee is currently overseeing the practical implementation of the association’s manifestation. This consists of administering the growth of an inaugural membership and the election by that membership of the inaugural Governance Committee.

For more on the story of forming the LHA, see this post on Critical Legal Thinking.

A Note on Process

Once an initial membership has been established, an inaugural general meeting will take place (online) at which members will nominate and elect the LHA’s first Governance Committee.

All members will be eligible to put themselves forward to be elected members of the Governance Committee, with no preference given to members of the Interim Committee. Elected positions for which members can nominate themselves will include the various officer roles detailed in the Constitution (e.g. Secretary, Finance Officer, and Membership Officer), as well as the Chair of the Association.

The LHA Interim Committee will administer the process as established in the LHA Constitution. Nomination and election to the Governance Committee takes place through a general meeting of members. See ss 21-23 of the LHA Constitution for the details of this appointment process.

The Interim Committee will dissolve itself once the inaugural Governance Committee is in place.

 

Interim Committee Members

  • Nour Benghellab (European University Institute)
  • Henrique Carvalho (University of Warwick)
  • Stephen Connelly (University of Warwick)
  • Maria Drakopoulou (University of Kent)
  • Katherine Ebury (University of Sheffield)
  • Julen Etxabe (British Columbia University)
  • James C Fisher (Australia National University)
  • Julia Gaunce (University of Tromsø)
  • Thomas Giddens (University of Dundee)
  • Robert Herian (University of Exeter)
  • Gavin Keeney (ZRC SAZU)
  • Bárbara Lobo (Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa)
  • Angus McDonald (Staffordshire University)
  • Shaun McVeigh (Melbourne and Kent)
  • Susy Menis (Birkbeck College, University of London)
  • Fred Motson (Open University)
  • Amanda Muniz Oliveira (Universidade Federal de Juiz Fora)
  • Connal Parsley (University of Kent)
  • Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (University of Westminster)
  • Mitch Travis (University of Leeds)
  • Andrew Ventimiglia (Illinois State University)
  • Illan Wall (University of Galway)
  • Ekaterina Yahyaoui (University of Galway)
  • Ceylan Begüm Yildiz (University of Greenwich)
  • Thanos Zartaloudis (University of Kent)