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 seeks to be a home for scholars, research students, and practitioners working across law, humanities, and cultural studies areas. It is welcoming of those who do not feel they have a place for their work within orthodox disciplinary scholarship or traditional law schools. The LHA provides a space to connect diverse individual scholars, research clusters, centres, and schools. Events will provide meeting places for collegiality and scholarly community. The LHA administers a mailing list with the latest publications, reviews, and other community matters, and publicises and supports relevant work.

Seeking to generate opportunities for creative and critical encounters, the LHA  aims to be a nurturing space, developing fresh disciplinary training and supporting scholarly development across all career stages. It will help 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.

A key goal of the LHA is to 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 open for membership: how to join.