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In the existing literature on depoliticization, the increasing use of law as a medium to tackle social and political issues is deemed to be detrimental to the legitimacy of political processes. Against this view, I argue that this trend – which some scholars call 'juridification' – can be key to giving life to new forms of politics. First, I show why juridification is a political more than a legal process. Second, I illustrate recent critiques of the dangers inherent in the particular type of juridification that involves the growing use of rights. Third, while concurring with these critiques, I make the case that other facets of juridification are often underrated that can ignite a novel kind of politics. On this account, I go on by elaborating on the idea of self-organization of social groups vis-a-vis the state that is entailed in this notion of politics. Finally, I discuss the recognition of non-conventional family networks to exemplify how a politics of uridification could work. The conclusion is that, while juridification calls for a thorough revision of the tasks of politics, it does not thwart it. Rather, traditional representative politics could and should take stock of how it involves social actors in the creation of new bodies of regulation.

This article takes issue with the criticism against those that I call "sinister accounts", that is, analyses contesting pieces of legislation, policy measures and judicial decisions that are generally considered as steps towards a more equal and free society. According to some scholars, such a radical, hypercritical attitude, typical of many queer critiques, tends to produce pedantic and dismissive readings of politi-cal and legal advancements and thus fails to capitalize on the limited resources of Western liberal de-mocracies. Even more importantly, from a social-theoretical perspective, sinister accounts are charged with draining social agents of any autonomy and self-awareness in that they are described as uncon-sciously complying with invisible hegemonic forces. With reference to accounts of the detrimental ef-fects of non-conventional relationship recognition and in the light of a particular notion of the work of concepts in social life, I try to rebut this criticism by showing that sinister accounts contribute to open-ing fissures into the vision of social agents in order for the latter to (re)discover the silenced alterna-tives that various processes of normalization and naturalization inevitably conceal.

This article centres on Pierre Bourdieu's conception of social critique and its political potential. It first examines important objections to his view of the way in which critique works, particularly from those scholars who claim that it implies an objectivist notion of people's cognition and agency. It continues by clarifying that this objection rests on a misplaced understanding of Bourdieu's idea of the levels at which critique takes place. It then explores his understanding of the semantic struggle that social critique requires and what it takes to change the dominant configuration of the social. The analysis finally claims that this conception of critique, although far from objectivism, still retains an intellectualist inclination.

Since their inception, queer theories have had a remarkable influence on how we think of law's effects on social reality. In particular, in the past three decades the debates and polemics that have arisen in this burgeoning subject area have shed a critical light on how the law grants social speakability and political agency to forms of sexuality and types of relationships that become 'respectable', insofar as they gain access to legal recognition and state protection. As this access comes at a price, queer theorists acknowledge the importance of legal recognition, but are alert to its costs. This is why they have variously explored the tacit dynamics of negotiation and adjustment that this recognition requires. This chapter homes in on such a notable contribution to the analysis of these tacit dynamics. It commences by illustrating the meaning of the queer as a signifier and why it has become such an important field of study. Although reductive, for the sake of clarity I will look at three lines of the queer lineage (to wit, Freudo-Marxism, radical constructivism and antisocial theories) and will briefly foreground how they think of law and its relation to sexuality. I will then focus almost exclusively on the second line insofar as it captures the ambivalence of legal recognition. To cut deeper into this ambivalence, I will touch upon the same sex marriage debate and will dwell on the heated contrapositions that still surround it. This discussion will tease out the fine line between resignification and assimilation; that is, how claims to legal recognition affect the law in a transformative manner and to what extent these very claims are reabsorbed into a constrictive lexicon that effaces the challenging character of same sex sexuality. The chapter will conclude by gesturing to a more recent version of the queer (postcritical queer theory), one that draws significantly from the second line but innovates it in some significant respects.

This essay foregrounds the relevance of Italian jurist Santi Romano's theorizing to today's political and legal debates on the relation between state and non-state laws. As Romano's classic book L'ordinamento giuridico (1917–1918) has finally been translated into English, the Anglophone readership can take stock of one of the most enlightening contributions to institutional thinking in the last centuries. Romano put forward a theory of legal institutionalism that has legal pluralism as a basic corollary and contended that the legal order is naturally equipped to temper and overcome conflicts between bodies of law. The present contribution argues that this approach unravels the riddles of recent multiculturalist paradigms and provides invaluable insights on the way the state could and should manage the conflicts between competing normative orders that lay claims to legislative and jurisdictional autonomy.

This article deals with the issue of resignification to advance a hypothesis on the way in which social practices are transformed with recourse to the language of institutions. It first discusses the transition from gay liberation to same-sex marriage equality by exploring the trajectory of homosexuals' rights claims. The article continues by providing a theoretical interpretation of what brought this shift about, that is, what the author calls a movement 'from the street to the court': in both civil law and common law jurisdictions, legal means are increasingly being used by individuals and groups to make their claims audible to political institutions and to society at large. Then, an analysis is offered of the shape that social struggles take when socio-political claims are articulated with recourse to the legal language. The conclusion is that reliance on the law as a device to achieve political goals and construct same-sex group identity risks producing but a feeble resignification of the conventional heterosexual matrix. In light of that, a more effective way to defy this matrix is to create awareness of what is gained and what gets lost in becoming legally visible.