LAW’S COBBLER: A LAW JOURNAL EDITOR’S

AUTOETNOGRAPHIC JOURNEY, FROM «ACTIVE READING»

TO «LAWSCAPING»

Luigi Russi*

Abstract
This essay undertakes an autoethnographic recollection
of the author’s experience of helping to found, in the year
2008, what is now Bocconi Legal Papers, while he was a
student at Bocconi Law School. The experience of setting
up a student-edited academic publication brought into
focus for him the practice of «active reading», with which
the author had become familiar earlier in the course of
his legal education. This, in turn, provided access to an
intuitive understanding of the porosity of the law to the
interpretive efforts of its «active readers», as they
conjure law’s direction for another first time. If every
reading of the law involves a crisis and a re-
accommodation of its path, what other «active readers»
of the law might be found, outside the circle of
professional jurists? For this purpose, the author
summons the notion of the «lawscape» to develop this
line of questioning in a spatial direction, by reinscribing
the law as a material actor that both affects, and is stirred
by, the bodies it meets.

Keywords: autoethnography, editing, lawscape,

materiality, joint activity

Introduction
«More or less, that’s fifty euros a year». I noticed a flutter
of amused disbelief in the listening eyes of Prof. Giovanni
Iudica, who was then director of Bocconi School of Law. I

**
Luigi Russi was the Founding Editor, in 2008, of what is now
Bocconi Legal Papers. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the
University of Exeter, and helps convene the Research-in-Action
community at the Schumacher Society. The author would like to
thank Matteo Mattioni, Ishupal S. Kang, and Patricia Shaw for their
encouragement and helpful comments on earlier versions of the
manuscript.

1
had just mentioned to him the level of financial support
that would be needed for the School of Law to «adopt»
the new student editorial project, of an academic nature,
I had been setting up with other classmates – which
would have meant picking up its webhosting expenses.
That’s how the journey began.
Italian Legal Scholarship Unbound Working Paper
Series was the original title of what has now become
Bocconi Legal Papers: the brainchild of my restless final
year as a law student at Bocconi. By then, the rhythm of
six-monthly oral examinations – which had been my
routine for the previous four years – had really begun to
take its toll. In other words, I was listless. If the
publication’s original title discloses anything of my mood
as I was helping to found it,1 it is that I felt bound, and
stuck, and needed a different way to rekindle my waning
interest in what I had been studying till then. So, with the
feverish pace of a restless twenty-two-year-old looking for
stimulation, I launched into a new venture, with a mix of
joyful enthusiasm, and a smattering of previous editorial
experience.2

1
Throughout this paper, I deliberately use the locution «help to
found» when describing my contribution to the establishment of the
journal, because without the insight and acumen of the entire
original editorial board, it’s highly unlikely events would’ve
unfolded the way they have. In retrospect, I would claim that I
articulated the idea thanks to my previous editorial experience (see
note 2 below), and had enough web editing skills to prototype it by
creating a functioning website. I provided an initial push, but what
was set in motion from it wasn’t something I could equally claim for
myself. For instance, the slow but crucial work of publishing the
first papers and putting together the inaugural printed volume, of
recruiting the second editorial board, of laying down a house style,
and of seeking official affiliation with the Law School – all of which
were essential in providing continuity to the joint enterprise –
benefitted from the leadership and brightness of the entire board. I
would like to remember them here, with gratitude and affection:
Federico Longobardi Lamarina, Matteo Mattioni, Jacopo Busnach
Ravenna, Federica Longo, Valentina Miscia, Federico Mottola
Lucano, and Paola Pellini.
2
I had, in fact, already been serving as Assistant Editor for the
now-defunct International Journal of Communications Law & Policy
(ISSN 1493-6262), a joint venture between the University of
Muenster and the Yale Information Society Project. In 2007, the
Editor-in-Chief was based in Milan and I was invited to get involved

2
 In this essay, I wish to go over some moments that
belong to this window of my personal history, in order to
share them with the current faculty, editors, and law
students at Bocconi Law School, on the eve of its
twentieth anniversary. However, rather than being a
purely nostalgic recollection, the retrospective retrieval
of events and exchanges will serve as my take on
autoethnographic method.3 Autoethnography
acknowledges that personal histories and affiliations
often reveal issues that are shared with a broader
constituency of people, who partake in shared
circumstances of life (in my case, these might be current
and past law students, but also faculty and university
administrators reflecting on the future direction of their
work in education).
At the time of my conversation with Prof. Iudica, I
did not know how long the experiment was going to last. I
was even less aware of what that project was starting to
disclose about the nature of my own curiosity. A curiosity
that was beginning to find, in the study of the law and in
the experience of law journal editorship, a plaything – a
palestra – through which to exert and develop itself. It is
an untold secret that our biographies hide the roots of
our intellectual pursuits, and in this paper I retrace my
steps in the genesis of what is now Bocconi Legal Papers
as an event that also held the seed of my subsequent –
and ongoing – inquiry into how the law finds its footing
amidst the contingent flow of life.
The gist of my argument is that the experience of
«active reading» that I became aware of as a law student
in the journal after we met. I owe the folks at IJCLP, and especially
to the former Editor-in-Chef Simone Bonetti, a lot of what I begun
to learn about academic publishing.
3
Autoethnography is a qualitative research method in the social
sciences, by which the researcher’s personal experience is not
erased from view. Rather, it becomes the entry point to track
his/her first-person experience of socially occurring phenomena,
which affect the researcher alongside other participants: «When
researchers do autoethnography, they retrospectively and
selectively write about epiphanies that stem from, or are made
possible by, being part of a culture and/or by possessing a
particular cultural identity» (C. ELLIS, T.E. ADAMS, A.P.
BOCHNER, «Autoethnography: An Overview», Forum Qualitative
Sozialforschung, Vol. 12(1), 2011).

3
and, subsequently, as a law journal editor (Section 1),
transformed my encounter with the law into one of
participation in a jointly created endeavour, to which
many possible actors might be able to contribute –
beyond the circle of professional jurists. Some years down
the line, this experience has nurtured an interest in the
notion of the «lawscape», which gestures towards a
relationship of reciprocity and co-creation between the
law and actual bodies situated in physical space: through
concepts such as the lawscape, the law appears more
«porous»4 to the bodies that move in response
(sometimes complying, sometimes not) to law’s direction
(Section 2). In the conclusion, I draw out from my
experience a few questions, with the hope they might
help advance the ongoing pedagogical development of
legal education. If, as Prof. Iudica wrote in the first
printed volume of the school’s student publication, law
lives (also) in the practice of jurists,5 questions of
pedagogy and method will only feature more prominently
when looking out to the coming twenty years of the future
of Bocconi School of Law, in particular, and of legal
education, more generally.

1. The law journal as palestra in active reading

Palestra is Italian for «gymnasium»: it describes a place
of training, of formation, a preparation towards
participation in an event. This word readily comes to
mind as I mull over the names by which Bocconi’s student
law journal first went by. The original title, as I
remembered in the introduction, was Italian Legal
Scholarship Unbound Working Paper Series. This was
changed to Bocconi School of Law Student-Edited Papers,
after affiliation with the law school was obtained. 6

4
I take this expression from A. GREAR, «Foregrounding
vulnerability: materiality’s porous affectability as a methodological
platform», in A. PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS, V. BROOKS,
Research Methods in Environmental Law: A Handbook, Edward
Elgar, Cheltenham, 2017.
5
G. IUDICA, «Law and Globalization», in BOCCONI SCHOOL OF
LAW STUDENT-EDITED PAPERS (eds.), Law and Globalisation:
Making Sense of a Connected World, VDM Publishing,
Saarbrücken, 2009, p. 27.

4
 The choice of the word «papers» in both titles was
deliberate. As I discussed the idea of setting up a journal
with Federico Longobardi Lamarina, who would be its
first Vice Editor-in-Chief, we felt that it might have been
too risky to begin with a law journal proper, i.e. a venue
of final publication of scholarly articles.7 Particularly so in
a context – such as Europe – where scholarly publication
has historically been dominated by peer-reviewed
journals. This is a tendency that has only become further
entrenched in recent years, with the inclusion of indexed
publications in faculty selection and promotion
procedures. For this reason, Federico and I tried to
imagine what a European way might have been to
student-edited journals, and we came up with the
following idea:

[S]tudent‐edited law reviews could be seen as a

complementary resource to peer-reviewed
journals in Europe, rather than a substitute, by
offering avenue of «first publication», possibly
in the form of student‐edited working paper
series. It would involve a first round of
6
The ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) for this
publication was 1973-9303. The Italian Legal Scholarship Unbound
Working Paper Series was registered in 2008, from my home
address in Cuneo. The change of name after official affiliation can
still be retraced by consulting the publication’s entry on the
Catalogue of Italian Periodicals maintained by the University of
Bologna, see «Italian Legal Scholarship Unbound Working Paper
Series», Catalogo Italiano dei Periodici, March 2008, available at
http://acnp.unibo.it/cgi-ser/start/it/cnr/df-p.tcl?
catno=3109482&libr=&person=false&B=2&proposto=NO&year_p
oss_from=&year_poss_to=.
7
The current form of Bocconi Legal Papers as a law journal (rather
than as a working paper series), its successful indexation in such
services as HeinOnline and EBSCO, and the string of student
journals that followed suit at other Italian universities only goes to
show that our fear wasn’t fully borne out in reality. Important
allies, such as Bocconi University’s academic press Egea, have in
all likelihood made a difference that cannot be overlooked to the
prestige and dissemination of the publication. This
notwithstanding, I still wish to relate this backstory: it reveals
something important about what it is that I, and other students
with me, had in mind, with a view to begin articulating our
incipient awareness of the potentials of «active reading».

5
 feedback, both formal and substantial. After
this initial «chisel» work, published papers
could then be submitted to peer‐reviewed
journals, in an attempt for authors to obtain
additional substantial feedback, for the further
improvement of the article.8

In other words, our hope was to set up a palestra where

legal arguments could be explored with authors, in order
to facilitate the deepening and refinement of their
research questions, with a view to eventual journal
publication of their work in peer-reviewed outlets. With
the benefit of hindsight, I can now discern the intuition
behind this proposition. Namely, this grew out of my
experience of poring over law textbooks in the previous
four years as an undergraduate and early gradate law
student. My personal style of textbook study was not
dissimilar to that of a glossator of medieval memory: my
books tended to be heavily underlined and rich in notes
on the margin. Reading had become an activity of
bridging the gap between the text and me, the reader,
and I had come to see my own role as not merely that of a
passive receptor, but of someone, like a midwife, who
helped the meaning of a text come to life. In sum, I had
come to understand reading as an act of co-creation of
meaning: what the author meant to say, and the meaning
of «the law» as he/she described it, could only come into
being through my own engagement with – and completion
of – his/her textual utterance. This intuition is, in fact, in
line with many contributions in the sociology of science to
this day, although I wasn’t aware of that then. For
example, John Law, writing in the tradition of Science and
Technology Studies («STS»), points to the role of a
hinterland of background capacities and procedures,
which collaborate in making it possible to distinguish a
particular event or entity in the first place.9 Seeing – and
8
L. RUSSI, F. LONGOBARDI, «A tiny heart beating: student-edited
legal periodicals in good ol’ Europe», in German Law Journal, vol.
10(4), 2009, p. 1129.
9
J. LAW, After Method: Mess in Social Science Research,
Routledge, Oxford, 2004, pp. 27ff. Another term that has been used
in the literature to gesture to the process of co-creation of meaning

6
reading – are never neutral veils over the experience,
textual or not, which they actively nurture into being.10
For this reason, the intuition that my own reading might
constitute a practice of breathing life into a text made me
think that this quality of readership could benefit other
budding scholars. Indeed, their work might have been
enriched precisely by such close and active engagement
from an attentive group of law students equipped with a
penchant for logical argument, and a restless thirst for
coherence. Since then, I have come to appreciate more
generally how the same level of engaged reading is a
crucial resource for nurturing a collaborative milieu for
research, well beyond the boundaries of legal academia.
Whenever one finds readers who will walk closely
alongside one’s drafts, without judging them (as all too
often happens in journal peer-review), and who will
instead take the time to lose and find themselves again in
the meanders of one’s argument: that’s how unexpected
ways forward become available to one’s inquiry, through
the grace of another’s generative curiosity.
The implications of this intuition, on the importance
of active and creative engagement with legal argument,
are rich for understanding the status and possibilities of
law as social phenomenon, and will be explored more
fully in the next section. In this autoethnographic section,
however, I want to draw readers’ attention to the
significance of active reading in the context of the
existential experience of being a student. I, like many
others I’m sure, had often felt great apprehension at

is apparatus. In her monograph Meeting the Universe Halfway,

sociologist of science Karen Barad tries to describe precisely how
the appearance of entities as separate «things» is always the
outcome of an apparatus that involves the application of
instruments, tacit knowledge, as well as specialist training by
which «things» can actively be distinguished. See K. BARAD,
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Duke University Press,
Durham NC, 2007, pp. 141ff.
10
The deep philosophical origin for this view lies in the tradition of
phenomenology. For a discussion of how seeing involves an active
step of understanding in order to enable the appearance of a
phenomenon, see H. BORTOFT, «Catching Saying in the Act», in
Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in
Goethe and European Thought, Floris Books, Edinburgh, pp. 128ff.

7
having to commit tomes to memory, for the purpose of
passing oral examinations that are the hallmark of Italian
university education. More frustrating than the sheer
mnemonic effort demanded of me, however, was the
sense that I was a passive container. An empty shell, in
other words, in which knowledge was being poured. 11
Existentially, my student experience had flattened into a
feeling of invisibility, despite my high grades: what I was
missing was a sense of personal authorship that could
have made those grades truly feel like milestones along
my learning journey. Editing scholarly papers helped me –
and I hope others, too – to begin seeing myself as a
participant in a joint enterprise, in which I finally made a
difference.
An encounter comes to mind, which helped me bring
home this sense of research as a joint exploration. As the
journal was nearing completion of the first «test» printed
issue in the summer of 2009,12 an author withdrew his
paper from publication at the last minute. This meant we
needed to find a replacement to reach the amount of
contributions we had hoped would feature in the final
volume. At the time, I had access to a repository of
unpublished papers that was being test-run by the
Washington and Lee Law Library. Parsing various
submissions, I became engrossed in a paper on the
conflict between the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT) and the Convention on International Trade
in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)
by two Indian authors, Ishupal S. Kang and Charulata
Chaudhary. In it, they asked whether free trade ought to
be pitted against wildlife protection, and environmental
preservation more generally, or whether a deeper
integration of wildlife conservation concerns in the WTO
framework might have been possible.13 This interest led
me to ask the authors if we could place their piece in our
11
To put things into perspective, this is the sort of assumption that
endures today in the near totality of higher educational institutions.
For a pedagogical critique of this approach, in favour of one that
stresses the student’s autonomy and active role in the learning
process, see, e.g. P. FREIRE, Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
Continuum, London, 2000, pp. 71ff.
12
BOCCONI SCHOOL OF LAW STUDENT-EDITED PAPERS (eds.),
op. cit.

8
production process, with a view to including it – if
accepted – in our forthcoming volume. The authors, who
were law students from Rajiv Gandhi National University
of Law in Patiala, India, accepted. Ishupal and I remained
in touch well after the volume came out. As I was
attempting to reconstruct the trajectory of our
subsequent interactions for this essay, I stumbled on a
reference letter I wrote, to allow him to attend graduate
studies at the International University College of Turin.
This letter retrospectively fills out some of the gaps in my
memory, revealing a research collaboration that outlasted
the circumstances of our initial encounter:

My acquaintance with [Ishupal] dates back to

the summer of 2009, during which time I was
editing a book entitled «Law & Globalization:
Making Sense of a Connected World», in my
capacity as Executive Editor of Bocconi School
of Law Student-Edited Papers. Among the
chapters of the book … was also a co-authored
contribution by Ishupal and a fellow student of
his.
….
Such was the excellent impression that I
gathered from working with Ishupal on that
occasion, that I have been acting as an
informal mentor in the years to follow. In this
capacity, for instance, I have also had the
opportunity to read and comment on the
paper he presented at the Indian Journal of
International Economic Law International
Student Essay Competition. The paper, a
thoughtful analysis of the impact of TRIPS-
plus agreements on the global trade regime,
was awarded the first prize by a panel
comprised, among others, of Professors Carlos
Correa and Jean-Philippe Gervais.14
13
I.S. KANG, C. CHAUDHARY, «Protection of Endangered Species
Versus Free Trade: An Overview Through the CITES-GATT
Conflict», in BOCCONI SCHOOL OF LAW STUDENT-EDITED
PAPERS (eds.), op. cit., pp. 232ff.
14
L. RUSSI, «Reference letter for Ishupal S. Kang», Personal
correspondence, on file with author (published with Ishupal S.

9
Ishupal gained admission, and went on to continue his
graduate studies in subsequent years at the University of
Kent, before undertaking a PhD at Sciences Po Law
School. Our connection has been punctuated by meetings
in Canterbury, New Delhi, and Turin, and we have
remained friends to this day. As I look back, what strikes
me most about the unpredictable evolution of what was
born as an editorial acquaintance is that Ishupal and I
both made a difference to each other’s lives (as well as to
each other’s understanding of legal argument), so that
our lives have become less individual trajectories as a
result, and more co-respondent lines that – as they met –
produced entanglements and harmonies that neither
could have foreseen individually.15 Through the editing,
the text of our lives and scholarly journeys got mixed, and
found a richer voice because of that encounter. The sense
of law, research and life as jointly created endeavours
that arise in the space between – in concerted activity
alongside others – sits comfortably with me as I type
these lines into my computer. That sense of spontaneous
and responsive participation in a jointly authored inquiry,
which came to me through practicing the craft of law
journal editorship, has equally had a decisive impact in
the development of my research, to which I turn in the
next section.

2. Lawscaping
Shortly after founding the working paper series, as it still
bore the name Italian Legal Scholarship Unbound, I
persuaded fellow editor and classmate Matteo Mattioni to
co-author a piece on legal dogmatics.16 I cannot follow the
specifics of our argument today, even as I re-read that
paper, such is the distance between the self that penned
that piece and the self that reads it today. However, what
I glean from it is the sense of an underlying
Kang’s permission).
15
For my understanding of co-respondence, I refer to N. PERULLO,
Ecologia della Vita Come Corrispondenza: Frammenti per la
Spoliazione del Senso, Mimesis, Milano-Udine, p. 45.
16
L. RUSSI, M. MATTIONI, «Le premesse implicite: struttura del
diritto e formante extralegale in Italia», ILSU Working Paper No.
2008-05/IT, on file with author.

10
preoccupation to hold up a positivistic notion of the law
as a self-contained, absolute Leviathan, unscathed by
confrontation with the messiness of real-life
entanglements.
It is interesting to witness this preoccupation with
holding up an edifice of abstract legal concepts, alongside
the incipient awareness I have just described, concerning
my own active role as a contributor to the legal enterprise
in an editorial capacity. The way I can square together
this emerging consciousness with my enduring deference
– at the time – to legal dogmatics is by understanding that
what Matteo and I were attempting in that paper was to
try our hand at a very peculiar manner of expressing
creativity in legal argument. Namely, one in which the
lawyer addresses novel circumstances without
acknowledging his/her original contribution to the
recombination of existing legal materials, in such a way
that they manage to mean something in the face of novel
situations. What the lawyer does, more often, is simply
claim to have «found» something that was «implicit» all
along. This peculiar fiction, whereby what is «made» is
claimed to have simply been «found», is one of the
essential registers of legal creativity, and one which has
found a compelling articulation – for example – in the
work of American legal realists like Karl Llewellyn. 17
In many ways, a preoccupation with the limits and
possibilities of formalism has accompanied me to this day,
and my response has gone from one of deferential
acceptance of the strictures of conceptual architectonics,
in favour of a more discerning attitude towards the
unpredictability of real life situations, such that they
often demand deviation from form in order to gain a
footing on which to stand.18 In this trajectory, the work of

17
K. LLEWELLYN, The Bramble Bush: On Our Law and Its Study,
Oceana, New York, 1930.
18
This shift has been recently recast in a provocative new light by
Ugo Mattei and Fritjof Capra in their recent book The Ecology of
Law (F. CAPRA, U. MATTEI, The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal
System in Tune with Nature and Community, Berrett-Koehler,
Oakland CA, 2015). Where I differ from their view is that I am less
keen to locate the origin of our orderings in «ecological principles»,
as if they were another set of rules that could be named explicitly
in advance. Instead, I am more interested in the quality of presence

11
glossing and editing law journal articles, which I first
undertook in the law school’s student publication,
contributed a fundamental touchstone to orient the
direction of my search. The quote below is an annotation
from my recent personal notes, as I reflect on the practice
of editing legal arguments – something I undertake to this
day in a professional capacity. I believe this excerpt
conveys well the sense of law as an enterprise that is less
self-contained than it might at first appear, and more
porous to the peripheral interventions of its «active
readers»:

My vantage point for spying on the secret life

of the law is that of an editor. I make a living
by editing papers for publication in law
journals. I liken what I do with papers to the
work of a cobbler: I fix their shoes, so they can
walk more comfortably. My practice often looks
like this: I start facing what appears – initially –
as an intractable jumble of text, which I am
required to enter and «do something with».
What I actually do, is I begin reading whatever
text is in front of me, and I edit as I go along. I
don’t read the whole text first, but I find it
more exciting to just get «stuck in». Initially,
what I do looks like re-arranging words and
and relationship through which we encounter the others that meet
us, amidst circumstances that remain irreducibly singular. This
leads me to place more attention on the liminality of startling
encounters, where contingency and novelty bubble up in
surprising, jointly created forms, and to ask: how does one engage
creatively with genuinely unpredictable social figurations that
cannot be reduced to mere outcomes of pre-existing principles? On
the startling encounters that liminality yields, see, e.g., M.
JACKSON, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness,
Religiosity, and the Real, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2009,
p. 202. For a fuller discussion and critique of the work by Mattei
and Capra, see L. RUSSI, «Ecolaw Now! For a Generative
Understanding of Legal Culture, From Law-as-Pillar to Law-as-
Tree», Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest,
Vol. 4(1-2), 2016. This critique of the work of Capra and Mattei is
based primarily on J. SHOTTER, «Agential realism, social
constructionism, and our living relations to our surroundings:
sensing similarities rather than seeing patterns», Theory and
Psychology, Vol. 24(3), 2014, p. 316.

12
 enforcing grammar rules that feel strained. As
I progress, however, I start meddling with the
text in ways less bound to the tools I bring with
me – mostly some knowledge of grammar and a
knack for word choice. Rather, as I go on, the
text starts providing pegs for me to grip on, a
bit like those a wall of rock yields to the
searching hands of a climber. I am referring to
an experience other readers will be familiar
with, namely that of finding natural pauses, or
clearings, in the rhythm of an argument. […] At
that moment I feel invited to articulate some
incipient understanding of where the piece
might be going, what its direction of argument
might be. When such pauses occur, I also sense
a calling to respond to the piece by re-
arranging sentences and rephrasing
propositions more boldly: I begin to enter in a
two-way dialogue with it […] Oftentimes, the
entire experience is one of profound
disorientation, punctuated by occasional sighs
when I reach a natural pause in the textual
flow. No matter how sharp the tools I may have
to begin with, I do not know in the beginning
how – and if – I will manage to get to the end,
and what that end might look like («will this be
a fruitful pursuit or a meaningless wander?»).
My editing tools are just a part of the story,
which is really one of how to move over shifting
grounds. Eventually, my «doing things with the
text» populates […] a space I can eventually
manage from start to finish. It becomes a
walkable landscape.

As I make my way through the text of a legal argument,

the legal argument comes alive for another first time
through my responsive engagement with it. My editing
conjures law’s direction once more from a dormant state.
As it becomes re-actualised in my reading of it, law’s re-
presentation yields something new and different each
time. There’s a porosity to the law that one can
appreciate by fixing its shoes, much like an editor/cobbler

13
might do. Which means, in turn, that the path the law
might take also depends on what the editor does in the
margins of a legal argument. Could it be, then, that the
law emerges from, and is continuously remade in,
situated encounters with its readers? And who might the
«readers» of the law be, in the wider world? Back in my
law school days, I understood those readers to be
essentially legal practitioners, people skilled in the
professional use of the law.19 However, that grouping has
broadened out, for me, as I went on to study for a Ph.D. in
sociology.
Early on in my Ph.D. studies, for example, I became
fascinated at the translation20 of what seem to be purely
textual legal constructions – take derivative contracts, for
example – into actual material activities, such as farming
practices. In particular, I looked at how derivative
contracts gave rise to possibilities for financial trading of
foodstuffs, and for the benchmarking of their profitability
to that of other investment options, which fundamentally
19
The first time I read about this idea, that the law isn’t so much an
abstract entity, but a practice that lives in the work of the people
that make and re-make it, was in Prof. Giovanni Iudica’s
contribution to the journal’s first printed volume, in which he
wrote:

In the advent of globalization and with the crisis of

traditional legal forms, we are facing not only a return of
custom (the Cinderella of all legal sources) on a
worldwide scale, but also a revival of the role of jurists.
Namely, the latter have once again become creators and
ministers of law, in the capacity of both counsellors of the
mercatores and adjudicators of their controversies. (G.
IUDICA, op. cit., p. 27).

At the time, my preoccupation with legal dogmatism didn’t quite

allow me to get what he was after, but I remain indebted to the
lingering question, which his piece gifted me with.
20
I use this term in the sense in which it is used in STS scholarship,
as the work of «tracking» how interventions deployed in the social
field are transformed as they enrol new actors, and activate their
unpredictable responses. For a fuller discussion of how tracking
the «translation» of the law into the sites of its embodiment can
enrich legal inquiry, see E. CLOATRE, «Actor-network theory and
the empirical critique of environmental law: unpacking the
bioprospecting debates», in A. PHILIPPOPOULOS-
MIHALOPOULOS, V. BROOKS (eds.), op. cit., pp. 80ff.

14
pressure the manner in which food might come to be
produced on the ground.21 That work showed me that the
ramifications of the law often branch deep into the brown
earth: they produce material corridors, striations of
space, through which physical bodies have to move.
Equally, however, the movement of bodies is only ever
partly domesticated by the law, as bodies in their moving
stir the law into crisis, afford new distinctions, and
demand alternative directions. The law asks questions of
bodies, and is in turn questioned by the bodies it
touches.22
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, one of the
most prominent voices in the emerging conversation on
«spatial justice», has coined a neologism to describe this
reciprocal feature of the law: its becoming-embodied as it
gets translated into action, and its becoming-unsettled as
it is met by the unruly straying of other moving bodies –
these might be swarms of humans (such as social
movements) and of plants and animals (from invasive
plant species to straying migratory trails prompted by
climate change), or chemical and geological formations
(from fossil fuels to pollution). As a consequence of this,
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos situates the law as merely
one participant, embedded deep inside what was often
regarded as separate from it: the landscape. In its stead,
he dares to speak of the «lawscape», to describe the
sense in which the law inhabits the same materiality in
which it meets other bodies, making it impossible
seriously to hold the distinction between law and
landscape, as they are woven instead in a continuous law-
scape.23 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos additionally uses
the verb «lawscaping» to describe the activity of bodies

21
See, e.g., L. RUSSI, T. FERRANDO, «‘Capitalism A Nuh’ Wi
Frien’. The formatting of farming into an asset, from financial
speculation to international aid», Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum,
Vol. 6, 2015.
22
I have written elsewhere on this co-creative aspect of the legal
enterprise in L. RUSSI, «’A legge d’‘o munno: Three sketches on
spatial justice», Global Jurist, Vol. 16(1), 2016.
23
A. PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS, «Epistemologies of
doubt», in A. GREAR, L KOTZÉ (eds.), Research Handbook on
Human Rights and the Environment, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham,
2015.

15
as they translate, stir and re-settle the law through their
spatial position-taking.
A few examples can help clarify the sort of shift in
thinking about the law that becomes available through
such notions as the «lawscape». For instance, one can
describe a pollution flow as a body vying for the same
spatial position as, say, a nearby residential dwelling: the
conflict between these bodies seeking to «take place» at
the same time generates a demand for (legal)
accommodation, which finds its rationale in the
composition of their conflicting spatial positionings. The
law, therefore, appears as a phenomenon that arises in
the effort to coordinate lines of movement in physical
space. Another example of law developing creatively, in
response to the flow of bodies vying for place, might be
found in the notion of «collective urban civic use», which
was devised by the municipality of Naples to provide legal
standing to collectives engaged in various forms of
cultural production (such as in theatre, art, and
education) inside abandoned public spaces, after those
collectives had reclaimed and revived them. Rather than
vesting a «right» of use on a legal «subject», the notion of
«collective urban civic use» gestures to the possibility for
the law to engage with flows of activity coursing through
space, in order to support processes of social and cultural
regeneration (literally) «taking place» inside previously
abandoned buildings.24
Seminal for understanding this spatial turn in the
study of the law has been, for me, that first experience of
being an «active reader», as I engaged constructively
(and sometimes destructively) with legal arguments in
their making. This offered back a sense of my own active
participation in the legal enterprise, eroding the sense of
law as a dogmatic Leviathan that lives outside of this
world. I would say I moved from a bureaucratic
conception of the law, to one of law as «a way of talking
about real events and actual people in the world […][,] a
way of telling a story about what has happened in the

24
On the genesis of the notion of «collective urban civic use» see G.
MICCIARELLI, «Pratiche di commoning nel governo dei beni
comuni: il caso dell'ex Asilo Filangieri», Il Tetto, Vol. 306-307,
2015.

16
world and claiming a meaning for it by writing an ending
to it».25 To take that shift seriously has meant, over the
years, also to take seriously the agency of everyone else
that engages with – and contributes to articulate – the
law, whether they be a law student, a peasant, a legal
editor, a community member, a social media user, a
judge, a street seller, or an undocumented migrant.
This has brought an acknowledgement that the law
isn’t so much owned by someone over others, but that it
is fundamentally a jointly undertaken endeavour, for
which everyone is responsible as an «active reader»
striving to find his/her way inside law’s texture. 26 Law
comes into being as it is read and translated by the
community of bodies that receive – and that take it upon
themselves to respond to – law’s direction.

Conclusion: field experiences and new beginnings

At the end of this brief autoethnography starting, for me,
in the co-founding of what has now become Bocconi Legal
Papers, I ask myself what that pedagogical experiment
has shown me, and what directions it might offer for
taking legal education at Bocconi into the next twenty
years.
The entry point to a spatial understanding of law as
a jointly created field shaped by the practices of different
groups of «active readers» lies in the incessant iteration
25
J. BOYD WHITE, «Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law: The Arts of
Cultural and Communal Life», The University of Chicago Law
Review, Vol. 52(3), 1985, pp. 691-2 (italics added). In the cited
piece, James Boyd White – the founding voice behind the «Law and
Literature» movement – argues precisely that law is better
understood (not as a bureaucratic system of social control, but) as
a jointly undertaken search for direction, in which a community of
actors become involved as they try to stabilise accounts of their
experience, and to position themselves in relation to that
experience, as they endeavour to draw out its meaning by
discerning what further interventions it might suggest.
26
This amounts to the possibility of looking at the law as an
orienting device, funded from communal experience, which works
as an aid in helping mankind negotiate its place alongside other
biological species. For a further exploration of this hypothesis
using the work of Michel Serres, see D. MANDIC, «Listening to the
world: sounding out the surroundings of environmental law with
Michel Serres», in A. PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS, V.
BROOKS (eds.), op. cit., pp. 526ff.

17
of this one question: what does the law look like from this
vantage point? What does «the law» mean to actors
whose existences are shaped by it, and whose movements
interfere with and complicate what the law might
achieve? In my own experience of sociological fieldwork,
an effective avenue for translating this question into
practice involves imagining ways for budding lawyers to
meet the reality of the law in its messy place in the world,
joining other bodies as they try to negotiate their
standing in the face of it. In this respect, for instance,
Jane Holder and Donald McGillivray’s experiment of
engaging students in «collective case studies» shows both
promise and good precedent.27 This involves students
with civil society and community groups navigating
access to legal protection, engaging future lawyers in the
effort of jointly crafting a legal formulation of issues that
are experienced by other non-professional users of the
law.28 Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos has taken his
teaching practice one step further, by asking students to
track how the law is registered by their own bodies, as
they roam and negotiate the crossings and back alleys of
London, bringing with them such questions as: «[W]here
is the law in the city? Do you see it determining where
you can walk and where not? [H]ow you walk? When you
walk and when you stop? What distance you keep from
things/people? What senses you can use?».29 However,
these are just particular experiments that strive to
respond to the broader question I voiced earlier, namely:
how to train future lawyers to see the law as a jointly
undertaken enterprise, developing a keener awareness of
27
J. HOLDER, D. MCGILLIVRAY, «Bringing environmental justice to
the centre of environmental law research: developing a collective
case study methodology», in A. PHILIPPOPOULOS-
MIHALOPOULOS, V. BROOKS (eds.), op. cit., pp. 184ff.
28
On the importance of fieldwork-like experiences for lawyers’
training, see also J. GILLESPIE, «Engaged inquiry in environmental
law: understanding people/place connections through a
geographically informed human rights lens», in A.
PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS, V. BROOKS (eds.), op. cit.,
pp. 265ff.
29
A. PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS, «Mapping the
Lawscape: Spatial Law and the Body», in Z. BANKOWSKI, M. DEL
MAR, P. MAHARG (eds.), The Arts and the Legal Academy: Beyond
Text in Legal Education, Routledge, Oxford, 2016, p. 126.

18
how their «active reading» merges with the «active
reading» of other participants, as they jointly edit –
without purporting to own – law’s texture, as it meets the
world.
On a closing note, as I come to think of it, Bocconi
Legal Papers is the most durable project I have helped set
up so far: its more than decennial life outlasts the trail of
many other pursuits I have attempted, both personal and
academic. Interestingly enough, it is also one of the few
genuine attempts at founding a community I took part in:
at the time, in fact, I was a brilliant, but hopelessly
isolated, young man. As a member of a journal, instead, I
was first seen by others for the difference I could make: it
provided me with the indelible experience of contributing
to an inter-subjective space that was simultaneously held
and affected by everyone that joined in its fold – whether
as an editor, as faculty reviewer, or as an author. The
sense of possibility this has brought to my life, and the
direction it has provided for my ongoing inquiry around
the place of law in the flow of life, has become even more
apparent to me as I sat down to compose this short
autoethnographic essay. If my experience resonates and
provokes you, the reader, into a renewed appreciation of
your role in midwifing law’s embodiment in the world, or
catalyses the intuition of novel possibilities for actively
responding to law’s direction, then I will have succeeded
in giving back at least a spark of the «new beginning»,
which I was offered through participation in the first
cohort of law journal editors at Bocconi. The affirmation
of law as a jointly edited conversation about our common
life is, indeed, a new beginning. One which brings to
visibility our right and capacity «to say what we think is
really good about what is good in our world and what is
really terrible about what is terrible»;30 to reappropriate,
in other words, our always present abilities of personal
judgment and collective discernment.

30
J. BOYD WHITE, op. cit., p. 701.

19