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Examines how sovereignty inures us from the challenges associated with the climate crisisEngages with the work of Bruno Latour, Simone Weil, Clive Hamilton, Jacques Rancière, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Stuart Elden and othersPresents an innovative theory of sovereignty's 'aesthetics' that contributes to contemporary debates in legal and political theoryOutlines the key challenges for law and politics provoked by the Anthropocene epochIn this book, Daniel Matthews shows how sovereignty – the organising principle for modern law and politics – depends on a distinctive aesthetics that ensures that we see, feel and order the world in such a way that keeps the realities of climate change and ecological destruction largely 'off stage'. Through analysis of a range of legal, literary, ecological and philosophical texts, this book outlines the significance of this aesthetic organisation of power and explores how it might be transformed in an effort to attend to the various challenges associated with the Anthropocene, setting the grounds for a new, ecologically attuned, critical jurisprudence.The Anthropocene thesis contends that human impact on the environment has become so extreme that the earth system as a whole has been tipped into a new state. This new geological epoch demands sensitivity to the forces that traverse human and nonhuman life, the geological, ecological and atmospheric

The Anthropocene thesis contends that the earth has entered a new geological epoch, dominated by human action. This article examines the Anthropocene in relation to law and aesthetics, arguing that the concepts of law and the stories of law's origins that we mobilise in this context play a significant role in rendering us sensitive or insensitive to the multifarious challenges that the Anthropocene poses to social life. In arguing against aspects of Earth Jurisprudence scholarship, which has developed a novel understanding of the 'rights of nature', this article argues that it is through an attention to obligations, rather than rights, that a sensitivity to the forces and relations that define the Anthropocene might be fostered. The shift from rights to obligations entails a commensurate movement from aesthetics – where questions of form, integrity and harmony predominate – to aesthesis, the study of the somatic, sensory and affective dimensions of human experience. The article concludes by arguing that it is within the contemporary city, understood as a discrete form of human and infrastructural association, that an aesthesis of obligations in the context of the Anthropocene can be most acutely perceived.

Since the financial crash of 2008, the strategy of occupation has been widely deployed as a means of expressing and mobilizing political dissent. Within legal studies, responses to this mode of protest have remained wedded to a statist perspective that fails to assess the normative commitments immanent to occupations themselves. Rather than examining the strategy of occupation through a legalistic lens, this article approaches a recent occupation through the theoretical apparatus of the 'nomosphere'. This term – originally coined by David Delaney but substantially expanded here – allows for an assessment of the spatial, narrative and atmospheric orderings of the Umbrella Movement, a pro-democracy campaign that sustained a 79-day occupation in Hong Kong's city centre in late 2014. This 'nomospheric inquiry' assesses the forms of ordering that animated the movement from within and seeks to foreground the lived and felt reality of the occupation rather than focus on its legalistic or constitutional significance alone.

Through the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, and following recent publications that champion the theoretical significance of jurisdiction, this article reads jurisdiction as a technique of legal fiction-making and as capable of exposing an originary ontological category of "being-with." Rather than thought of purely as an expression of the law's sovereign authority, it is argued that jurisdiction is a privileged point at which we can see the law's fragility and thus open to critical intervention and interruption. Following Nancy's understanding of "writing" and "literature" as that which exposes being-with, I suggest that we might name such strategies of creative intervention "juriswriting." This account of jurisdiction, developed by thinking with Nancy's account of ontology, is explored with reference to the common law constructions of jurisdiction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.