Dr Lucy Finchett-Maddock

Overview

Lucy joined Bangor as Reader in Law and Artistic Research in 2022.  Prior to joining, Lucy was Senior Lecturer in Law and Art at Sussex Law School (2013-2022), and held positions at Birkbeck School of Law University of London (2007-2012) and Exeter Law School (2012-2013).  Lucy has been a visiting scholar and researcher at Law School, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Jul 2023); WZB, Social Science Research Institute Berlin (Jun 2013), amongst others.

Lucy’s research is broadly concerned with critical legal and contemporary philosophical understandings of law in relation to practice and materialism.  Themes of aesthetics, property, entropy and resistance are key within Lucy's work.

Always with a desire to apply theory to practice, Lucy's work has focused in recent years on methodological and practice-based questions around the intersection of art, law, resistance and property (see 'Art' - New Trajectories in Law Series (series editors Adam Gearey and Colin Perrin) (forthcoming, 2024) (London, Routledge).

Since 2015 Lucy has been involved in developing the Economic and Social Resaerch Council and Socio-Legal Studies Association funded 'Art/Law Network', a meeting space between artists, activists, lawyers, practitioners and other such agitators. 

Part of Lucy's work is practice-based, including working with sound, video, sculpture and data sets, as part of British Art Network funded project 'Instrumenting(s)' in collaboration with Anders Hulkvist (University of Gothenburg) and Dann Hignell-Tully (Distant Animals). The practice-based element of her work is inspired by her work as a speculative artist whose work seeks to capture ontological questions around artificial and formal divides – the human/machine, subject/object, divisions between art and law.

Underlying her work is a philosophical probing of the nature of property, materiality and entropic forces of change. This culminated in monograph 'Protest, Property and the Commons: Performances of Law and Resistance' (Routledge, 2016) which theorises the intersection of property within law and resistance, interrogating the spatio-temporality and aesthetics of formal and informal laws, property (squatting and housing), commons and protest. Lucy uses the thermodynamic property 'entropy' to explain linear and nonlinear relations of matter, law, resistance, aesthetics informed by speculative realism, historical and new materialist philosophy and complexity theory.

l.finchett-maddock@bangor.ac.uk

Lucy is the convenor of LLM module Contemporary Issues in International Environmental Law, and undergraduate module Environmental Law.  She also convenes undergraduate module Law, Justice and Rights.

Select Works

Books and Edited Collections

Art - New Trajectories in Law Series (series editors Adam Gearey and Colin Perrin) (forthcoming, 2025) (London, Routledge)

The Practice and Process Art/Law Symposium Special Edition Law and Humanities with Jack Ky Tan (2022) 16(2) 156-280

Art, Law, Power: Perspectives on Legality and Resistance in Contemporary Aesthetics (2020) with Eleftheria Lekakis (London, Counterpress)

Protest, Property and the Commons - Performances of Law and Resistance (2016) Social Justice Books Series (London, Routledge)

Articles and Book Chapters

Instrumenting(s):  Accounting a Series of Repetitive Beats, with D. Hignell-Tully and A. Hultkvist, Amicus Curiae, Series 2, 6(2) (2025) 472-488.

Inside-Out: Autonomy, Formalism and the Legal Architectures of Outsider Art, in Sofia Stolk, Renske Vols, and Miriam Bak McKenna (eds.), International Law and Architecture (Edward Elgar Publishing, forthcoming, 2025).

Petrified Legality, Percolating Sovereignty: Entropic Aesthetics in Laws of Ice, in Helen Palmer and Charlie Blake (eds.) Special Issue, Thalatta! Thalatta! THE SEA, Angelaki:  Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (forthcoming, 2025).

Urban Surfaces Definition in Sabina Andron, Konstantinos Avramidis, Tom Ward (eds.), Urban Surfaces Research Network Volume 3 (2024) 16-19.

To Open Up: A performative rewriting of Pendragon v United Kingdom (1998) 27 EHRR CD 17 with Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos in Helen Dancer, Bonnie Holligan and Helena Howe (eds.) Earth Law Judgments Project (Hart, 2024), 251-262.

Bass, Slate and Spray Paint:  On the Edge of, and within, Trespass (2023) Nuart Journal 4(1) 24-35.

Forming the Legal Avant-Garde: A Theory of Art/Law (2023) Law Culture and the Humanities 19(2) 320-351.

Practice and/or Process? (In)Disciplining Law and Art (2022) in Lucy Finchett-Maddock and Jack Ky Tan (eds.) The Practice and Process Art/Law Symposium Special Edition Law and Humanities 16(2) 156-164.

A Poverty of the Spirit? Law, Property and Addiction (2021) in Maria Grahn Farley (ed.) Adam Gearey's Voices on Law and Activism: Addressing the Work of Adam Gearey (Uppsala, De Lege) 141-168.

In Vacuums of Law We Find- Outsider Poiesis in Street Art and Graffiti (2019) in D. Chappell and Saskia Hufnagel (eds.) Art Crime Handbook (London, Palgrave MacMillan) 855-880.

Continua of (In)Justice (2018) in Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (ed.) Handbook of Law and Theory (London, Routledge) 104-123.

Nonlinearity, autonomy and resistant law (2018) in Tom Webb and Stephen Wheatley (eds.) Complexity Theory & Law: Mapping an Emergent Jurisprudence, Law, Science and Society Series (London, Routledge) 213-233.

Speculative Entropy - Dynamism, Hyperchaos and the Fourth Dimension in Environmental Law Practice (2018) in Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and Victoria Brooks (eds.) ‘esearch Methods in Law Series (Handbook of Research Methods in Environmental Law) (London, Edward Elgar Publishing) 104-130.

Time's Up – Resisting Private Limitations on Rights to Housing and Protest (2016) in M. Vols and J. Sidoli del Ceno (eds.) Regulating the City: Contemporary Urban Housing Law (The Hague, Eleven Publishing) 81-107.

Letters on Legal Architecture (2016), with Léopold Lambert ARCH+ Legislating Architecture Berlin May 14-20 14-21.

The Case of the Naughty in Relation to Law (2013) in Elena Loizidou (ed.) Disobedience: Concept and Practice (London, Routledge) 83-97.

Seeing Red - Entropy, Property and Resistance in the Summer Riots 2011 (2012) Law and Critique 23(3) 199-217.

I am open to supervising PhD projects in areas related to my research with a particular interest in practice-based approaches relating to connections between art and law; and / or critical legal, contemporary theoretical and philosophical approaches to law.

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

  • PublishedContinua of (In)Justice
    Finchett-Maddock, L., 16 Aug 2018, Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory. Routledge
    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
  • PublishedNonlinearity, autonomy and resistant law
    Finchett-Maddock, L., 31 Jul 2018, Complexity theory & law: mapping an emergent jurisprudence. Routledge, p. 213-233
    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review

2017

2016

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2008

Lucy is Civic Engagement Lead for the School of History, Law and Social Sciences.