About The Workshop
SW 75- Normative Address and Legal Subjectivity:Who Are Legal Norms For?
Convenors: Yoko Hasegawa; Akiko Nozaki; Tatsuya Yokohama
Contact:hasegawa.yoko.zf@teikyo-u.ac.jp; a-nozaki@dokkyo.ac.jp ; yokohama.tatsuya@shizuoka.ac.jp
Description
Legal and political philosophy has long presupposed that legal norms are addressed to subjects capable of recognizing, responding to, and being bound by them. Much of the theoretical literature on legal normativity, political obligation, and legal authority begins from the assumption that legal subjects—citizens, residents, or otherwise legally recognized persons—are already constituted. The existence and boundaries of legal subjecthood are therefore often treated as a stable background condition rather than as an object of inquiry in their own right.
This workshop proposes to reconsider this presupposition. Instead of starting from already constituted legal subjects, it focuses on the prior question of how subjects of law and normativity come to be constituted in the first place. In particular, the workshop centers on the notion of normative address: the ways in which legal norms call upon certain agents as subjects capable of obligation, responsibility, and response.
From this perspective, the key issue is not only how legal authority is justified or how legal norms should be interpreted, but how certain agents come to be positioned as the addressees of those norms. Legal norms do not simply apply to pre-existing subjects; they also participate in the formation and delineation of legal subjectivity. The question of “who legal norms are for” therefore becomes a foundational problem for jurisprudence and legal theory.
Contemporary legal contexts increasingly expose tensions within the assumption of a unified and stable legal subject. Migration regimes, differentiated legal statuses, and contested forms of legal recognition reveal situations in which individuals are only partially included, ambiguously addressed, or differently positioned within legal orders. These developments raise fundamental questions: who counts as a subject of law, who can be addressed by legal norms, and who can be held responsible under legal and political institutions.
Such questions concern not merely policy design or distributive justice but the conceptual foundations of normativity and legal order itself. While many contemporary debates focus on epistemic injustice, vulnerability, or distributive fairness, this workshop directs attention to the prior structural question of how subjects of legal norms are constituted as such.
The workshop therefore aims to bring together scholars working on jurisprudence, legal theory, and related areas of political philosophy to explore how legal subjectivity is formed and how normative address operates within modern legal systems. By examining the conceptual, institutional, and social conditions under which agents become subjects of law, the workshop seeks to clarify the foundations of legal obligation, authority, responsibility, and membership.
In doing so, the workshop also aims to create a space for dialogue between different strands of legal and political philosophy. Discussions of political obligation, citizenship, migration, and membership will be brought into conversation with more fundamental theoretical inquiries into the constitution of legal subjectivity and the structure of normative address.
Topics and Questions
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
•The constitution of legal subjectivity and normative agency
•Normative address, responsibility, and accountability
•Political obligation under contested forms of membership
•Citizenship, migration, and differentiated legal statuses
•Partial, marginal, or contested forms of legal subjecthood
•Agency and responsibility under constrained legal conditions
•Implications for theories of legal normativity, authority, and legitimacy
•Conceptual approaches to subjectivity in jurisprudence and legal theory
Format
The workshop will consist of 4–6 presentations, each followed by discussion.
Contributors will be selected through an open call for papers.
Submission
Please submit an abstract of up to 300 words and a brief CV by 30 May 2026.
Submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
Language: English
