Monica Lopez Lerma
Mónica is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Humanities at Reed College. She received a PhD in Comparative Literature and a Graduate Certificate in Film Studies from the University of Michigan. She also holds a Law degree from the University of Valencia (Spain) and a LL.M. in Jurisprudence from the European Academy of Legal Theory (Belgium). At Reed she teaches a variety of interdisciplinary courses in film theory, political documentaries, law and violence, justice and the senses, cinema and human rights, and comparative literature. She has also taught at the Faculty of Law of the University of Helsinki, the Peter A. Allard School of Law of the University of British Columbia, and the School of International Relations of the Kyrgyz State National University.
Mónica’s research interests include contemporary Spanish film and literature, with particular emphasis on film theory, gender, aesthetics, politics, memory, and cultural and theoretical aspects of law. She is the author of Sensing Justice through Contemporary Spanish Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics, Law (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), co-editor of Rancière and Law (Routledge, 2018) and editor of Cartografías in/justas: Representaciones culturales del espacio urbano y rural en la España contemporánea (Comares, 2024). She is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled Documentaries Against the Law: Evidence, Affect, and Reflexivity. From 2012 to 2017 she was editor-in-chief of No-Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice. She serves as an editorial board member of the Journal of Media and Rights.
Mónica’s research interests include contemporary Spanish film and literature, with particular emphasis on film theory, gender, aesthetics, politics, memory, and cultural and theoretical aspects of law. She is the author of Sensing Justice through Contemporary Spanish Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics, Law (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), co-editor of Rancière and Law (Routledge, 2018) and editor of Cartografías in/justas: Representaciones culturales del espacio urbano y rural en la España contemporánea (Comares, 2024). She is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled Documentaries Against the Law: Evidence, Affect, and Reflexivity. From 2012 to 2017 she was editor-in-chief of No-Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice. She serves as an editorial board member of the Journal of Media and Rights.
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Books by Monica Lopez Lerma
Desde una perspectiva transdisciplinaria, los objetivos de este libro son: (1) examinar los límites que la justicia, en su sentido más amplio, enfrenta en los procesos de producción capitalista del "espacio" español (2) visibilizar situaciones específicas que desafían estos límites y otorgan a la justicia una manifestación tangible, aunque sea momentánea; y (3) demostrar que los límites, ya sean físicos, espaciales, sociales, políticos, ecológicos, legales, económicos, culturales, estéticos, o teóricos, conceptuales e interpretativos, siempre pueden ser cuestionados, y en consecuencia, redefinidos, abriendo así posibilidades para crear nuevas formas de pensamiento, imaginación y acción.
Close analysis of films such as Pan’s Labyrinth, High Heels, Common Wealth, The Method, No Rest for the Wicked and Unit 7
Engages with legal theory, film studies, aesthetics and politics
Approaches law and film as multisensory, embodied practices
Draws on European case studies in a field largely dominated by Anglo-American discourse
Sensing Justice through Contemporary Spanish Cinema examines the aesthetic frames that mediate the sensory perception and signification of law and justice in the context of 21st-century Spain. What senses do these frames privilege or downgrade? What kind of subjects do they show, construct, and address? What kind of affective and ethical responses do they invite? What kind of judgments do they invite?
The book addresses these questions by moving away from the focus on narrative and through a close analysis of selected contemporary Spanish films. By creating new frames of perception and signification, the films analyzed challenge the senses of law and justice traditionally taken for granted and reconfigure them anew.
Papers by Monica Lopez Lerma
Judging Democracy in the 21st Century: Crisis or Transformation?
Alessandro Ferrara
Political Judgment for an Agonistic Democracy
Albena Azmanova
Neoliberal Politics of the ‘Market’
Sakari Hänninen
The Politics of Public Things: Neoliberalism and the Routine of Privatization
Bonnie Honig
The Democracy in Courts: Jeremy Bentham, 'Publicity', and the Privatization of Process in the Twenty-First Century
Judith Resnik
‘The Greatest Enemy of Authority’—Arendt, Honig and the Authority of Post-Apartheid Jurisprudence
Jaco Barnard-Naudé
BOOK REVIEWS
Desmond Manderson: Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law. The Legacy of Modernism. Routledge, Abingdon 2012.
Luis Gómez Romero
François Ost: Shakespeare. La Comédie de la Loi. Michalon, Paris 2012.
Through the work of Ann Laura Stoler and Rob Nixon, the goal of this article is to analyze how the termite metaphor invites us to rethink – figuratively, materially and affectively – systemic corruption as an ongoing process of ruination whose material effects do not unfold instantly, but slowly across space and time. By paying attention to the time gap between the cause of ruination and the eventual manifestation of its long-delayed effects, the documentary makes visible how systemic corruption slowly fades from public memory, resulting in political and legal inaction, and consequently, impunity. The article concludes by suggesting that while the termite metaphor gives systemic corruption a tangible materiality upon which viewers can act, the documentary’s call for the extermination of the termites as the ultimate form of resistance fails to capture its political message.
Desde una perspectiva transdisciplinaria, los objetivos de este libro son: (1) examinar los límites que la justicia, en su sentido más amplio, enfrenta en los procesos de producción capitalista del "espacio" español (2) visibilizar situaciones específicas que desafían estos límites y otorgan a la justicia una manifestación tangible, aunque sea momentánea; y (3) demostrar que los límites, ya sean físicos, espaciales, sociales, políticos, ecológicos, legales, económicos, culturales, estéticos, o teóricos, conceptuales e interpretativos, siempre pueden ser cuestionados, y en consecuencia, redefinidos, abriendo así posibilidades para crear nuevas formas de pensamiento, imaginación y acción.
Close analysis of films such as Pan’s Labyrinth, High Heels, Common Wealth, The Method, No Rest for the Wicked and Unit 7
Engages with legal theory, film studies, aesthetics and politics
Approaches law and film as multisensory, embodied practices
Draws on European case studies in a field largely dominated by Anglo-American discourse
Sensing Justice through Contemporary Spanish Cinema examines the aesthetic frames that mediate the sensory perception and signification of law and justice in the context of 21st-century Spain. What senses do these frames privilege or downgrade? What kind of subjects do they show, construct, and address? What kind of affective and ethical responses do they invite? What kind of judgments do they invite?
The book addresses these questions by moving away from the focus on narrative and through a close analysis of selected contemporary Spanish films. By creating new frames of perception and signification, the films analyzed challenge the senses of law and justice traditionally taken for granted and reconfigure them anew.
Judging Democracy in the 21st Century: Crisis or Transformation?
Alessandro Ferrara
Political Judgment for an Agonistic Democracy
Albena Azmanova
Neoliberal Politics of the ‘Market’
Sakari Hänninen
The Politics of Public Things: Neoliberalism and the Routine of Privatization
Bonnie Honig
The Democracy in Courts: Jeremy Bentham, 'Publicity', and the Privatization of Process in the Twenty-First Century
Judith Resnik
‘The Greatest Enemy of Authority’—Arendt, Honig and the Authority of Post-Apartheid Jurisprudence
Jaco Barnard-Naudé
BOOK REVIEWS
Desmond Manderson: Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law. The Legacy of Modernism. Routledge, Abingdon 2012.
Luis Gómez Romero
François Ost: Shakespeare. La Comédie de la Loi. Michalon, Paris 2012.
Through the work of Ann Laura Stoler and Rob Nixon, the goal of this article is to analyze how the termite metaphor invites us to rethink – figuratively, materially and affectively – systemic corruption as an ongoing process of ruination whose material effects do not unfold instantly, but slowly across space and time. By paying attention to the time gap between the cause of ruination and the eventual manifestation of its long-delayed effects, the documentary makes visible how systemic corruption slowly fades from public memory, resulting in political and legal inaction, and consequently, impunity. The article concludes by suggesting that while the termite metaphor gives systemic corruption a tangible materiality upon which viewers can act, the documentary’s call for the extermination of the termites as the ultimate form of resistance fails to capture its political message.
Justice in Tension: An Expression of Law and the Legal Mind
James Boyd White
Configuring Justice
Jeanne Gaakeer
To Avenge, to Forgive or to Judge? Literary Variations
François Ost
Speaking of the Imperfect: Law, Language and Justice
Marianne Constable
Justice and the Colonial Collision: Reflections on Stories of Intercultural Encounter in Law, Literature, Sculpture and Film
Rebecca Johnson
The Heart of Law
M. Paola Mittica
Having Gods, Being Greek and Getting Better: On Equity and Integrity Concerning Property an Other Posited Laws
Gary Watt
The Ethics of Testimony: Trauma, Body and Justice in Sarah Kofman's Autobiography
Ari Hirvonen
Judging Democracy in the 21st Century: Crisis or Transformation?
Alessandro Ferrara
Political Judgment for an Agonistic Democracy
Albena Azmanova
Neoliberal Politics of the ‘Market’
Sakari Hänninen
The Politics of Public Things: Neoliberalism and the Routine of Privatization
Bonnie Honig
The Democracy in Courts: Jeremy Bentham, 'Publicity', and the Privatization of Process in the Twenty-First Century
Judith Resnik
‘The Greatest Enemy of Authority’—Arendt, Honig and the Authority of Post-Apartheid Jurisprudence
Jaco Barnard-Naudé
BOOK REVIEWS
Desmond Manderson: Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law. The Legacy of Modernism. Routledge, Abingdon 2012.
Luis Gómez Romero
François Ost: Shakespeare. La Comédie de la Loi. Michalon, Paris 2012.
Benoît Dejemeppe
Here and Now: From ‘Aestheticizing Politics’ to ‘Politicizing Art’
Desmond Manderson
The Paradigm Case: Is Reasoning and Writing in Film Studies Comparable To (or With) Reasoning and Writing in Law?
Geoffrey Samuel
Law as Record: the Death of Osama bin Laden
Jothie Rajah
Forever Again: How Discursive Strategies Re-legitimate Torture in the US Senate Select Committee’s ‘Torture Report’ and the CIA’s Response
Kati Nieminen
Writing Contagion as Cancer: Law, Gender and HPV Vaccination in Australia
Joanne Stagg-Taylor
Charity Law and Religion—A Dinosaur in the Modern World?
Juliet Chevalier-Watts
BOOK REVIEWS
Jill Stauffer: Ethical Loneliness. The Injustice of Not Being Heard.
Columbia University Press, New York 2015.
Linda Ross Meyer
Alison Young: Street Art, Public City. Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination. Routledge, New York 2014.
Preeti Dhaliwal
Law & Society and the Politics of Relevance:
Facts and Field Boundaries in ‘Transnational Legal Theory in Context’
Peer Zumbansen
Law in the Flesh: Tracing Legitimation’s Origin to The Act of Killing?
Richard K. Sherwin
‘No Foundations’?
Mark Antaki
Pots, Tents, Temples
Angus McDonald
Is Justice for Sale? Further Readings on Saramago and the Law
Joana Aguiar e Silva
BOOK REVIEWS
Hanoch Dagan: Reconstructing American Legal Realism & Rethinking Private Law Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2013.
Andrew Halpin
Gary Watt: Dress, Law and Naked Truth. A Cultural Study of Fashion and Form. Bloomsbury, London 2013.
Leslie J. Moran
Richard Dawson: Justice as Attunement. Transforming Constitutions in Law, Literature, Economics, and the Rest of Life. Routledge, Abingdon 2014.
Jack L. Sammons
No Foundations is an international peer-reviewed journal committed to publishing interdisciplinary legal scholarship of the highest quality at the interface between law and justice. We encourage contributions from all areas of law and beyond, with the aim of bridging the gap once opened between law and other social and human activities and experiences.
On the assumption that law is a socially embedded phenomenon that cannot be fully understood as an autonomous discipline, we aim to connect law both with its real effects on the lives of individuals and societies, and with the realm of human aspirations and ideals that give it life and meaning. http://www.helsinki.fi/nofo/
On the assumption that law is a socially embedded phenomenon that cannot be fully understood as an autonomous discipline, we aim to connect law both with its real effects on the lives of individuals and societies, and with the realm of human aspirations and ideals that give it life and meaning.
No Foundations is currently accepting general submissions and book reviews for NoFo 13 (2016). To facilitate the review process please send us your manuscript before March 1, 2016. Please include an abstract of no more than 200 words with your submission.
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