11:00
Cambridge University
June 8
Alison Richard Building
This interdisciplinary conference explores the relationship between law, literature, and cultural production in an age increasingly defined by ecological, social, and economic crisis. Bringing together scholars from law, the humanities, and the social sciences, it examines how narratives shape, challenge, and reimagine legal responses to what has been described as the contemporary polycrisis. At the heart of the conference lies a critical engagement with the concept of sustainability. Rather than treating sustainability as a stable or self-evident goal, we approach it as a negotiated and evolving framework through which futures are imagined, governed, and distributed. Legal systems frequently invoke sustainability as a guiding principle, yet its meanings remain multiple: it may signal preservation, adaptation, resilience, or transformation. Cultural texts—literature, film, art, and digital media—play a crucial role in interrogating these meanings, revealing both the possibilities and the limitations of sustainability as a legal and ethical paradigm. Moving beyond traditional approaches to “law and literature,” this conference considers aesthetic texts as sites of legal imagination and critique. Literature and other cultural forms are understood not merely as reflections of law, but as spaces in which legal norms are tested, reshaped, and even produced.