Power and justice
Power and justice is one of the four focal areas of research at the Faculty of Law. We analyze law as a field of power, authority, and contestation. Our research addresses criminal justice, questions of gender, indigeneity, and racialization, migration, victimhood, (state-)corporate crimes, and social harms. We employ doctrinal, empirical, and interdisciplinary approaches to examine how law is used to legitimize or resist hierarchies, rethink justice, and imagine transformative futures of accountability and social change.
Law is a powerful social institution that shapes and is shaped by the broader societal and material contexts in which it operates. Law does not exist in isolation, but emerges through historical, political, economic, and cultural processes that determine how legal norms are created, applied, and contested. Law is closely tied to power, authority, and violence. Its role in legitimizing, challenging, or reproducing social hierarchies is a central concern in contemporary legal scholarship.
We critically examine law in its contexts, challenging doctrinal and conventional theoretical understandings of law. Our work covers a broad spectrum of theoretical, empirical, interdisciplinary, comparative and heterodox approaches, and also draws on internal critiques of legal systems. The themes we work on include criminal justice, gender, race, indigeneity, marginalized groups, law-making, migration, victimhood, (state)-corporate crimes, social harms, and violence. Across these areas, we explore how law operates as a site of power and contestation, rethinking legal imaginaries in pursuit of justice, accountability, and social transformation.