Legal Moves engages in a project of epistemological disobedience, boldly suturing concepts of dance studies—kinesthetic awareness, fleshly memory, and techniques of the body—to the field of the legal humanities. What opens when we expand our disciplinary methods of law—from the lettered to the embodied? Might we locate a more complete portrait of law, its logic, and its impact for the construction of the human?

Anna Jayne Kimmel combs the laws and law-making logics of French imperial order and its postcolonial legacy to surface the already-embedded corporeal attentions and choreographic features of legal studies. The book moves from analysis of seventeenth century French legal codes of conduct that structured race and empire within the metropole and its overseas horizons, to twentieth century scenes of police and gendarme violence during anti-colonial protest in France, to twenty-first century anxieties of assembly in postcolonial Algeria, to contemporary embodied aesthetics contained within human rights discourse and international law more globally.

Kimmel argues laws have long operated as a societal score which script movements and conscript citizens into racialized categories of (non)being. Legal Moves calls to reimagine the human within Western jurisprudence of the body.