Critical Practices of Law

The judicial field has emerged as an arena on which political and social contestations over racism and structural inequalities increasingly are taking place in Sweden. This article is part of a larger project which aims to understand what kind of space the law provides for protection from, and debate about racism, and how anti-racist and migrants’ rights activism relate to this space. Based on part of the material (interviews with legal practitioners) this paper explores what we understand as “critical practices of law”. While the interviewees are practicing within the institutions of the law, many of them underscore that their participation is hesitant and filled with tensions. Within this tension we find different strategic re-articulations of legal practices and the interviewees’ understandings of what legal practice can be/create in terms of spaces, communities and framings. Theoretically, the paper engages in feminist and intersectional critique of law and the state.