There is something essential that modern law seems to dislike about bodies in space. The plural is important here, not ‘a body in space’, but the act of gathering together: the heaving mob, the density of the crowd, the rhythms and movement of the mass. What best explains this suspicion? Is it the generativity of crowded feeling, that growing sense of (counter)power, the instability of crowded moods, the way the pre-givens of spatiality are redrawn? As a way into this suspicion of bodies in space, we will look at the category of ‘atmosphere’. Atmospheres operate from the background. They are an ambient force in which capacities and affordances are framed. In common usage, atmosphere denotes a set of spatialised affects that are recognisable when they reach a particular threshold of intensity: the bustle of a rush hour train station, the roar of a stadium, the hue of a seascape as the sun sets, blood red. Bodies in space are deeply atmo-genic, but also deeply subject to atmospheric changes. Atmosphere gives us a non-reductive way of thinking about bodies in space, which emphasises a protean sharing. 

Illan Wall joined the School of Law at the University of Galway in 2024. Previously, he was Professor of Law at Warwick Law School, where he co‐directed the Centre for Critical Legal Studies. He holds an Honorary Professorial Fellowship from the University of Warwick.

Illan works on critical legal theory, particularly through legal geography, affect studies and post‐structural theory. He applies these insights to questions of rights, protest, strikes, revolt, policing and security. He has published on key debates around sovereignty, constituent power and legal affect. He is the author of Law and Disorder (Routledge, 2021) and Human Rights and Constituent Power (Routledge, 2012), and editor of The Critical Legal Pocketbook (2021) and New Critical Legal Thinking (Routledge, 2012). He has published in leading cultural studies, socio‐legal and critical legal journals.

Illan is also one of the founding editors of the blog criticallegalthinking.com and a Managing Director of the open‐access publisher Counterpress.