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Law and Utopia (LAW-RT-LAWUTO-26)

LAW-RT-LAWUTO-26

Description

This seminar introduces utopian thought to law researchers by exploring how ideas of the possible, the desirable, and the not-yet-realised have informed projects of law-making, legal scholarship, and legal practice. Utopia will be approached not only as an imagined ideal society, but also as a literary genre, philosophical attitude, political desire, method of critique, and practice oriented towards transformation. Across five sessions, we will examine how utopia has been understood, what functions it has served, and how it has shaped the ways lawyers, scholars, and social movements imagine legal change. We will also ask how law responds to such imaginaries: which futures become recognisable as rigorous, realistic, responsible, or legally meaningful, and which are dismissed as naïve, excessive, dangerous, or beyond law’s proper concern. The seminar reflects on the value of utopian concepts and methods for legal scholarship and practice, while remaining attentive to their limits, risks, and political effects. It invites 2 Law and Utopia Madalena Simões, Marina S.Sáenz,¿Marlies¿Hofmann, Romy¿Peschl participants to consider how their own research relies on particular assumptions about legal possibility, institutional change, harm, responsibility, and repair. 

Learning objectives 

• Identify and distinguish different understandings of utopia, including utopia as literary genre, philosophical attitude, political desire, method of critique, and practice oriented towards transformation.
• Explain how utopian thought has informed projects of law-making, legal scholarship, legal practice, and legal mobilisation across different historical and doctrinal contexts.
• Analyse how law and legal scholarship construct, authorise, discipline, or reject particular visions of legal and political possibility.
• Critically assess the standards through which imagined legal futures become recognised as rigorous, realistic, responsible, or legally meaningful.
• Evaluate the uses, limits, risks, and political effects of utopian concepts and methods in legal scholarship and practice.
• Reflect on how their own research relies on particular assumptions about law, institutional change, harm, responsibility, repair, and possible futures.

Assignments
Participating researchers will be invited to produce a short tangible outcome connecting their own research interests to the themes of law and utopia. This may take different forms. Participants might reflect on the legal imaginaries their research draws upon, examine how particular doctrines or methods rely on assumptions about future legal or social orders, or engage with a literary, speculative, artistic, or political text that imagines a future relevant to their field of study. The aim is not to produce a fully developed paper, but to use the seminar as a space for experimentation and reflection. Participants will be encouraged to ask what kinds of futures their research makes visible, what forms of legal change it presupposes, and what alternatives it may open or foreclose. Depending on the number of participants, these contributions may be presented briefly during Sessions 2–5 or brought together in the final session as part of the collective reflection on the uses, limits, and possibilities of utopian thought for legal research.

First, Second & Third Term: registration from 21 to 25 September 2026

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