Matilda Arvidsson

Lund University, Sociology of Law, Faculty Member

Lund University, Law, Alumna

Luleå University of Technology, Department of Business Administration, Technology and Social Sciences, Faculty Member

Catholic University of Lille, Law, Adjunct

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I’m a legal and interdisciplinary scholar based in Lund, Sweden. I am an associate professor of international law, senior lecturer in jurisprudence, and sociology of law researcher. I study how law, technology, flora and fauna interact.

I am particularly interested in how humans and non-humans, technologies, and institutions produce and embody law and justice. To this end, I use qualitative research methods to better understand these phenomena.

I am an editor of the Routledge book series on AI, Law and Society, a co-editor in chief of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, and a member of the editorial boards of the Feminist Legal Studies journal, the International Journal of Law in Context journal and the journal Law, Technology and Humans.

An award-winning legal scholar, my research has been funded by e.g. the Swedish Research Council (Sweden), NordForsk (Nordic Council), Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Sweden), Vinnova (Sweden’s National Innovation Agency), WASP-HS (humanities and social science AI research, Sweden). and Horizon 2020 (the European Commission). I have been awarded the Swedish Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities Bernadotte fellowship (2019) for my interdisciplinary work in the social sciences and humanities, and the Albert Wallin Prize in Scientific Excellence (2024), awarded by the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Gothenburg (KVVS), Sweden, for my interdisciplinary work on AI, law and feminist, de-colonial history.
Address: Fjelievägen 9C
22763 Lund

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77 Papers
3 Conference papers
8 Journal Articles
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Papers by Matilda Arvidsson

Constituent Power: Law, Popular Rule and Politics

The Presence of Absence: Everyday Conditions of Practicing Law

Social Science Research Network, 2008

would like to thank Peter Svensson for engaging in the project of writing this article through a ... more would like to thank Peter Svensson for engaging in the project of writing this article through a series of conversations during the fall of 2007, taking place in Copenhagen, Malmö and Lund, and through his critical comments and suggestions on the text. I would also like to thank all the individuals who at different stages of my fieldwork have advised and supported me, especially senior colleagues who have talked me through many of my experiences at the court, and who have offered me their own experiences as a reference for my observations and analysis.

format_quotePracticing law led to a loss of personal identity, turning the lawyer into an object while simultaneously calling on their subjective will through signatures.format_quote

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Exclusion by inclusion, the discourse of the other (Respondent-paper på Jakob Skovgaard-Petersens paper ”Sharia and the constitutional debate in Egypt”)

Att göra skillnad: Maskuliniteter i den internationella humanitärrätten och ICRC:s film ”International Humanitarian Law: A Universal Code

Abstract in Undetermined I detta paper analyserar jag maskuliniteter i relation till den internat... more Abstract in Undetermined I detta paper analyserar jag maskuliniteter i relation till den internationella humanitarattens (IHL) materiella innehall som sadant samt i relation till ICRC:s tolkning och framstallning av IHL i filmen ”International humanitarian law: A universal code”. Analysen utgar fran Connells Masculinities, Pettmans Worlding Women, samt antar ett intersektionellt perspektiv i analysen av over/underordning av maskuliniteter i relation till kon, genus och hudfarg. Utifran den analys som jag gor i papret menar jag att det ar mojligt att identifiera hur en rad olika maskuliniteter konstrueras i och genom den materiella ratten (IHL), samt hur dessa synliggors i filmen pa ett satt som tydligt pekar pa over/underordning av maskuliniteter i en (post)kolonial kunskapsproduktion som ICRC och filmen ar en del av. (Less)

Preservation and transformation: The political theology of international law of belligerent occupation

The international law of belligerent occupation and the Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq: Scene of address, impingement, and excess

Constituent Power: Popular Rule, Constitutional Law, and Politics

Animal Law and Jurisprudence in the EU and Beyond The Role of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights

Verfassungsblog, 2025

Animals have largely been left out in EU law scholarship and environmental law studies, with few ... more Animals have largely been left out in EU law scholarship and environmental law studies, with few exceptions. The role of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights has not been discussed to any greater extent. In this symposium, we discuss the pros and cons of the EU Charter for securing sufficient animal protection in the Member States. More specifically, the contributions in this symposium explore a number of questions such as that of the legal standing of animals and animal rights in the context of the EU, and reflecting on the relationship between animal rights and the EU. It grows out of a workshop we held at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, titled “Animal Law Jurisprudence in the EU and Beyond”. The motivation for the workshop was to try to bridge the discussions between law and theory. So, coming from a variety of perspectives, the symposium brings together EU constitutional law, jurisprudence, and transnational legal theory to reflect on the role of the EU Charter for securing animal rights and protection.
https://verfassungsblog.de/animal-rights-charter/

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The Regular Complex and the Advanced Complex: Écriture Feminine as Translation of a Life with Jurisprudence through Coding a Knitting Pattern and then Knitting It

Socio Legio Light: Liber Amicorum for Panu Minkkinen, 2025

This essay explores the intersection of translation, jurisprudence, and artistic practice through... more This essay explores the intersection of translation, jurisprudence, and artistic practice through the lens of Hélène Cixous’ écriture féminine. It narrates an intellectual and creative journey shared with Panu, my co-conspirer whose work (and who) is always either "regular complex" or "advanced complex". The project, on which essay is based, translates a black-and-white photo of Panu into two knitting patterns, one Regular Complex and one Advanced Complex, using digital tools (KnitPro 2 and StitchFiddle). These patterns serve as a mode of translation of our joint body of work in academia.
Drawing on Cixous’s theory of translation as an ongoing process between the corporeal, the aesthetic, and language, I situate knitting as an act of self-writing and becoming. The methodology of the project involves first coding the knitting patterns, then executing them, and finally documenting the process through a photographic essay. This iterative process of translation tease out the complexities of academic life and labor, where ones’ body of work is constantly being reworked, shared, and reshaped. The essay also challenges traditional notions of jurisprudential scholarship, which often privileges text over embodied practice, arguing for a jurisprudence that embraces embodied feminist methodologies and artistic practices as forms of legal inquiry. Through the essay, and by knitting the Regular Complex Panu knitting pattern that is part of the project, I materialize the intellectual and affective ties that bind academic collaborations, practicing, showing and inviting others to join a more inclusive and embodied approach to knowledge production and becoming.

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The Inhuman as the Human

Critical Legal Thinking, 2024

In this roundtable we focus our attention on the technological and infrastructural inhuman that t... more In this roundtable we focus our attention on the technological and infrastructural inhuman that tacitly operates as the human. Rather than suggest that the inhuman is not or is always in totality a part of the human, I wonder if that entangled relationship is constantly changing and developing. The inhuman is entangled with the human in different ways at different times and in varying spaces. Three ways we might see this is: human co-evolving with technology; technology mediating life; technology shaping how we are entangled with and within the cosmos. We need more conceptual, theoretical, and pragmatic interventions that help us better understand the porous nature of the human and our entanglements in the world, which include technological arifacts. They will help us question, critique, and reimagine legal concepts and ideas

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Kerstin Anér, Pioneering Thinker of Data Power -Towards A Critical Reimagining the History of Data Law and Policy

Critical Legal Thinking, 2024

Questions of data, law, feminism and the environment are not new, and contrary to popular percept... more Questions of data, law, feminism and the environment are not new, and contrary to popular perceptions, were not discovered as a field of critical thought by contemporary scholars. These debates were already taking place in national and international fora in the 1960s and the 1970s. Among the most prolific European figures in those pioneering discussions, stood out the feminist, environmentalist, and critical thinker of computers, data and their relation with power, Kerstin Anér. While mostly forgotten today, Anér's contribution to international and national debates on data law and politics are central also to contemporary debates on data, artificial intelligence and law. In this essay we set out how and why.

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Gendering Public and Private International Law: Transversal Legal Histories of the State, Market, and the Family through Women's Private Property Rights

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International Law and Posthuman Theory

Routledge eBooks, Dec 19, 2023

Posthuman Feminism as a Theoretical and Methodological Approach to International Law

Routledge eBooks, Dec 19, 2023

Marine Ecosystem Bodies as Entangled Environments and Entangled Laws: Drones and the Marine Environment

AJIL unbound, 2023

The adoption of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) 1 and the steady developmen... more The adoption of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) 1 and the steady development of international environmental law in the twentieth century shaped the marine environment as an object of legal protection. However, the exponential growth of substantive obligations to protect the marine environment, conserve marine biodiversity, and prevent marine pollution, has been largely ineffective due to lack of enforcement. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) deployed for marine environmental protection are seen, in scholarship and policy, as a means to close the enforcement gap, thereby revolutionizing the field by significantly increasing states' maritime awareness. 2 In contrast, our tentative analysis shows that while UAVs can translate complex environmental concerns into data readily available for analysis and action, such datafication of marine environments comes with high risks. More specifically, datafication enables multiple uses of gathered data, including for surveillance, military, and commercial purposes. These concerns tend to fall outside current debates on the international regulation of the use of UAVs in marine environments. In our essay, we explore whether international law recognizes the possibilities and risks involved in deploying UAVs into the marine environment. We draw on doctrinal and posthuman feminist legal approaches 3 to analyze how UAVs interact with the wider context of "marine ecosystem

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Introduction to International Law and Posthuman Theory

Routledge eBooks, Dec 19, 2023

Ordering Human–Other relationships

Routledge eBooks, May 11, 2023

format_quoteAfter Vietnam, IHL recognized the natural environment as a protected entity, highlighting increasing awareness of war's environmental impacts.format_quote

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Decision Making in Asylum Law and Machine Learning

Nordic Journal of International Law

This article avails an autoethnography of the authors’ attempt to construct a post hoc interventi... more This article avails an autoethnography of the authors’ attempt to construct a post hoc intervention machine learning (ml) system responsive to the problem of discrimination in asylum law decisions. In the article we revisit the conjunction of law as a slow hermeneutic, against the fast-paced pull of ai and commercial imperatives to ask whether a ml-driven post hoc intervention system such as the one set up in the research project reduces the overall risk of discrimination emerging from human discretion in legal decision making on asylum. We conclude that a ml-driven ‘anti-discrimination machine’ will displace rather than reduce that overall risk. We warn that similar attempts at using ml as part of legal decision making, decision support, and post hoc interventions, in international law and beyond, may need to take seriously the risks of human discretion embedded in ml design and data selection.

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Artificial Intelligence, Decision Making and International Law

Nordic Journal of International Law

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Subjecthood in Cyberspace and the Uncanny Valley of International Law

Nordic Journal of International Law, 2023

In this article the authors build on Masahiro Mori’s 1970s essay “The Uncanny Valley”, psychoanal... more In this article the authors build on Masahiro Mori’s 1970s essay “The Uncanny Valley”, psychoanalysis and critical legal pluralism, to analyse how the uncanny in international law is exposed through law’s encounter with the a-human, non-human and more-than-human phenomena challenging legal subjecthood in cyberspace. Discussing autonomous decision-making, dwellers and encounters in international law’s uncanny valley the article proposes that international law needs to cater to a spectrum of non-human subjectivities, entities, laws and normativities. In short, international law needs to ‘get over itself’ and its constant anxiety in the face of the plurality of laws and Others.

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Matilda Arvidsson

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