Playful Provocations: creativity and queer legal work
Dr Sen Raj, Reader of Human Rights Law at Manchester Metropolitan University, will be providing a public lecture on the 'Queer Judgments Project', playing with legal form and norms to shape judgments.
What does it mean to ‘queer’ law creatively? How might such creativity emerge in the space of making legal judgments? How might we creatively queer judgments in ways that are legible to legal systems while being accountable to our communities? In bringing queer and creative methods together, this lecture will discuss the Queer Judgments Project. This project emerges as a collaborative experiment in legal form and substance, queer friendship and community, and love and justice. Queer judgment writing brings together scholars, activists, creatives, lawyers, and judges to re-imagine and re-create legal cases relating to minoritised sexual and gendered communities. Building on critical judgments initiatives like Feminist Judgments: From Theory to Practice, this project plays with legal form and norms to shape judgments that prioritise the safety, freedom, dignity, and wellbeing of queer and trans people, as well as other minoritised groups.
This lecture will discuss the process of critical judgment writing as a creative queer legal endeavour and use the example of R v Green (an Australian case infamous for legitimising the ‘homosexual advance defence’). While that case has been the subject of much academic and community criticism for excusing lethal violence against gay men and has since been superseded by statutory reform, my re-written judgment draws out the different expressions of fear, anxiety, and disgust in that case to jurisprudentially rethink questions of sexual harm, institutionalised homophobia, and criminal responsibility. The work of critical judgment writing from a ‘queer’ perspective is important for legal academics and practitioners, as well as queer scholars and activists, who are engaging with creative approaches to social justice and are interested in alternative ways of litigating, judging, contesting, reforming and/or dismantling law.
Sen’s academic and advocacy work take an intersectional approach to examining the relationship between emotion, culture, race, gender, sexuality, and law across different jurisdictions. He is the author of Feeling Queer Jurisprudence: Injury, Intimacy, Identity (Routledge, 2020) and The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms: Repairing Law (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). He is the co-editor of The Queer Outside in Law: Recognising LGBTIQ People in the United Kingdom (Palgrave, 2020) and Queer Judgments (Counterpress, 2025). He currently serves on the editorial board of Feminist Legal Studies and Palgrave’s Socio-Legal Studies Book Series. Sen is also the former chair of Amnesty International UK.
Following Sen's public lecture there will be an opportunity for further discussion, questions and answers. If you would like to submit a question in advance, please email this to the event organiser, Dr Max Morris: maxmorris@brookes.ac.uk