Academic and creative outputs
In order to capture all potential contributions to the Queer Judgments Project, the editors collated the preferences of about 70 people interested in contributing to the project. Based on the responses, we decided that our first output will be an edited collection.
We also envisage a special journal issue with various contributions exploring many of the judgments we wish to analyze.
Our project, however, will not end with the production of an edited collection and special journal issue. In fact, many of our contributors are planning creative outputs. Through our conversations, we have amassed a wonderful group of people who have varying professional skills, scholarly interests, activist ambitions, and community aspirations. We want to hold space for all of them, and all their pursuits. We will also be encouraging other outputs as we grow: podcasts, theatre performances, talks, etc.
Professor Nuno Ferreira introduces The Queer Judgments Project
Edited collection out with Counterpress
The QJP edited collection has been published by Counterpress in January 2025. This edited collection is the first output of the project and the pages of this book re-imagine, re-write and re-invent judgments, from queer and other complementing perspectives. With an international reach and multi-disciplinary scope, this edited collection invites you to a queer dance through 26 judgments and commentaries.
We invite you to read us queerly and move these conversations
with us!
The book is available on open access basis here.
Queering migration and asylum judgments
To celebrate the LGBT+ History Month 2025, we have published a piece in the Sussex Centre for Migration Research Blog. Click below to read the whole piece.
'Emotional accountabilities: Affective autoethnography and writing queer judgments'
Journal article by Sen Raj, out in Sexualities, 2025
Queer encounters with legal accountability generate a range of tensions and paradoxes. In law, accountability materialises as a core feature of legal systems that seek to hold individuals and institutions responsible for their behaviour according to a set of predetermined state criteria. Queer scholars have approached legal logics of responsibility with scepticism as these logics are indexed by heteronormative state criteria. Queer legal work holds space for queer critique without necessarily abandoning normative criteria. It navigates queer scepticism through critiques, refusals, and calls for legal accountability across individual, interpersonal, and institutional contexts. This is emotional work. In this paper, I demonstrate narratively how emotions pervade how we (as queer legal scholars) imagine, conceptualise, and approach socio-legal questions of violence, discrimination, inequality, and exclusion facing LGBTQ + people and how we (as queer people, lawyers, and activists) work with or against legal institutions to seek accountability and realise our rights. This paper adopts an autoethnographic approach to invite scholars, lawyers, activists, and judges to explore the law’s capacity to both remedy and effect harm against LGBTQ + people by taking seriously how emotions mutually co-construct the normative dimensions of LGBTQ + rights alongside the critical forms of accountability rights claims generate. I do this through a close reading of R v Green, an Australian criminal law case that deals with “defences” for homophobic violence. Emotion offers an analytic lens to expose personal (queer person), scholarly (queer academic/lawyer), and political (queer activist) entanglements with various accountabilities generated by the case. I use affective autoethnography to draw together the normative and analytic dimensions of emotions across personal, scholarly, and political registrations of accountability by discussing the process of writing a “queer judgment” of R v Green. The queer judgment, as an exercise in accountability, is an affective object of law, method of critique, and space for ethico-political engagement. This creates space to pursue legal accountability in terms of care and imagination while also questioning or broadening the terms by which such accountability is delivered in law.
Queer Rights, Queer Futures: An Affective Experiment in Legal Form
Journal article by Sen Raj, out in Southwestern Law Review, 2025
This paper is an affective experiment in queering legal form and how we, as queer legal scholars, might re-imagine and recreate legal rights when casting judgment. It threads creative memoir with pop culture and critical analysis to reimagine the nature of a traditional legal essay. This piece flows in three parts. Drawing on an archive of experiences teaching, researching, thinking, and writing queer legal scholarship, I start the paper with a fictionalized recreation-what Saidiya Hartman calls "critical fabulation" to distill the emotions that materialize when navigating socio-legal issues that shape jurisprudential, pedagogic, and scholarly ideas about marriage equality and cultural norms about queer love. The next section combines critical theoretical engagements with law and form to reflect on the pedagogic, scholarly, and judicial possibilities of queer judgment making as a "reparative praxis." I argue that this queer engagement with legal form holds space for romance, risk, intimacy, love, and hope as we teach, research, and adjudicate rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other minoritized (LGBTQ+) people. I conclude that queer judgment is a romantic expression of queer legal form, one that offers us critical, normative, and creative space to represent how we conceptualize, critique, teach, and practice law.
