Abstract
Law is often understood as an instrument of justice, protection, and rights. Yet it has also functioned as a technology of erasure, producing the conditions through which peoples, territories, histories, and ways of life become invisible, disposable, or available for appropriation.
This session explores law's role in shaping exclusion and recognition, domination and resistance, dispossession and emancipation. It asks how legal institutions produce inequality and political invisibility, while also serving as sites where claims for dignity, justice, and social transformation are articulated.
Can law move beyond its histories of exclusion and extraction to become an instrument of social emancipation, or are its transformative possibilities inevitably constrained by the political and economic orders from which it emerges?
Invited Speakers
Rob Knox
Robert Knox is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool. He co-authored Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine with Adam Hanieh and Rafeef Ziadah. He focuses on the relationship between capitalism, imperialism, and international law, offering a critical perspective on how these forces interact and influence global and regional conflicts.
Tatiana Lujan
Tatiana Luján is an environmental lawyer and is currently the Materials Systems Lead for Europe at ClientEarth. Her work combines legal advocacy and litigation to tackle plastic pollution and strengthen corporate accountability, including legal challenges to INEOS’s expansion in the Port of Antwerp. Before joining ClientEarth in 2018, she practised environmental law in Colombia and researched how China–Latin America relations influence environmental regulation at the London School of Economics.
Elias Van Marcke
Elias is an environmental lawyer. He works for Dryade, an NGO that uses the power of the law to protect nature. At Dryade, he specialises in environmental law, with a particular focus on water and climate-related issues. He is also a voluntary research assistant at the Centre for Environmental Law at Ghent University.
Moderated By
Tomaso Ferrando
Tomaso Ferrando is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Antwerp and the spokesperson for the Law and Development Research Group. He holds a PhD in law from Sciences Po University (Paris) and has been a visiting fellow at Harvard University Law School, the University of São Paulo and the University of Cape Town. His main line of academic research focuses on the link between law and food, with particular attention to the international dimension (trade, investments and the human right to food) and the implementation of local practices. He was part of the HLPE Drafting Team for the 2025 report on 'building resilient food systems' and acted as legal advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Professor Hilal Elver, from 2016 to 2020. He is a member of the Legal Committee of the Global Legal Action Network (glanlaw.org) and was actively involved in the Extraterritorial Obligation Consortium (ETOc) for the Maastricht Principles of the Rights of Future Generations. He often acts as a consultant and pro bono advocate on questions relating to the right to food, food policies, and the right to land.