You are here:

This is an experimental text that performs the rhizomatic by combining multiple voices in a mycelium-type spread. The concept behind the text is to perform the law textually as rhizome, namely as a multiplicity of endings that connect to each other in ways that cannot always be traced. I argue that this way of understanding law is an inevitable turn, both positive and negative, towards a de facto insurmountable legal complexity. Inevitable because ontologically, law has irreversibly moved towards that way of communication (namely beyond real scrutiny, spectacularised and aestheticised as atmospheric law). Any attempt at imposing structure on it is an epistemological conceit which has outrun its necessity. Rhizomatic law both liberates law from structures and enslaves law in a self-limiting function that can only be checked against social and regular media opinions and reactions. However, I reserve a tender spot in this critique for the potential that accepting the rhizomatic nature of law has in thinking of law in mycelic terms that create the conditions for a polyamorous conception of justice.

Speaker: Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is an academic/artist/fiction author. He is Professor of Law & Theory at the University of Westminster, and Director of The Westminster Law & Theory Lab. His academic books include the monographs Absent Environments (2007), Niklas Luhmann: Law, Justice, Society (2009), and Spatial Justice: Body Lawscape Atmosphere (2014). His short story collection The Book of Water (2023) and his novel Our Distance Became Water (2024) are published by Eris. His art practice includes performance, photography and text, as well as sculpture and painting. His work has been presented at Palais de Tokyo, the 58th Venice Art Biennale 2019, the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale 2016, the Tate Modern, Inhotim Instituto de Arte Contemporânea Brazil, Arebyte Gallery, and Danielle Arnaud Gallery. For more information see andreaspm.com

Discussant: Dr Jess Connolly-Smith is LHub Visitor 2024-25 and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln. She is an interdisciplinary legal scholar with research interests in the areas of legal geography, law and everyday life, and law and the senses. Her research explores how law engages in abstract and material practices of meaning-making to produce identities which construct, shape, and permeate our experience of everyday life. Jess is the author of Law, Registration, and the State: Making Identities through Space, Place, and Movement (Routledge, 2023) - awarded the Hart-SLSA Prize for Early Career Academics 2024. She is co-editor of ‘Registering the Everyday: Documents, Bureaucracy, and the Socio-Legal’, a special section of Social & Legal Studies. Her research has been also published in Feminist Legal Studies, Journal of Law and Society, and The Sociological Review. 

Chair: Dr Johah Miller,  LHub, King's College London & King's College, the University of Cambridge.

This talk draws on a chapter from Hydrojustice, forthcoming with Cambridge: Polity Press, 2025. 

The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants.


This event is free to attend, but booking is required.