New Book Series: Law, Culture and Justice (Bristol Uni Press)

by Admin | 10 Oct 2025

We are delighted to announce a new series to foster critical, theoretically and methodologically innovative, culturally informed work on law and justice. The pursuit of social order and aspirations of justice have always been articulated within a cultural context in which narratives, myths, fantasies, imaginaries and modes of representation are central to the construction and dissemination of legal meanings. There has been a recent flourishing of scholarship that recognises and explores the richness of the cultural lives of law and justice, attending to the aesthetic, affective and symbolic dimensions of legal texts, practices and institutions.

This series will provide a home for work that examines the cultural significance of law and justice, and will support the development of this new, urgent and creative strand to legal and social thought.

This series aims to publish and support work that is:

Critical, in the sense that it seeks to scrutinise, problematise, unsettle and/or uproot dominant positions and understandings both within and beyond specific fields of scholarship;
Theoretically and methodologically innovative, providing rich and nuanced accounts and expressions of ideas, practices, processes and experiences, as well as their trajectories, genealogies and legacies;
Concerned with the cultural dimensions of law and/or justice, including studies of narratives, storytelling, imaginaries, myths, aesthetics, affect, emotions, materiality, and so on;
Informed by a broad and contextual understanding of ‘law’ and/or ‘justice’, in which legal and/or justice processes, practices and institutions are understood to be key sites in the construction, reproduction, representation and dissemination of socio-cultural meaning;
Pluralistic in its understanding and appreciation of culture, embracing a variety of cultural artefacts and modes of analysis, and that actively resists elitist gatekeeping stances, especially those associated with so-called ‘high culture’. This pluralistic approach will be reflected both in the content and form of the work published in the series.

Series Aims and Policy

This series will recognise and support an emerging area of scholarship which examines the cultural dimensions of law and justice. While there is much work published in this area, it is often seen as isolated efforts within fields dominated by alternative approaches. Alternatively, culturally informed work is frequently subsumed under other, either narrower fields such as ‘law and literature’, or within broader categories like ‘law and society’ or ‘socio-legal studies’. This series seeks to acknowledge the distinctiveness of research that takes up explicitly cultural themes and problematics but aims to move beyond an approach that puts two or more disciplines into conversation, as much ‘law and…’ scholarship tends to do. Instead, the series will champion an understanding of law and/or justice as an indispensable aspect of cultural life and will therefore prioritise perspectives and methodologies that draw on aesthetics, affect, narratives, imaginaries, storytelling and so on as necessary dimension to understanding the meaning and significance of law and justice. The series seeks to foster and promote such efforts as part of a coherent, original and invaluable field of thought and research.

Books in the series will examine critical and cultural approaches to law and/or justice. Although we anticipate most books will be authored by scholars working in or around legal studies, we will also actively pursue contributions from scholars in cognate fields, particularly criminology, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and in disciplines such as cultural studies, sociology, politics, philosophy, geography and history.

Send us your proposals if this sounds like your kind of project!

Book proposals will undergo an initial assessment by the Editors, followed by reviews from two members of the Advisory Board.

Email the Series Editors: