Abstract

This article seeks through a postcolonial optic to problematize a series of premises that tend to guide and define the exercise of the law; it considers the limits of the Western legal apparatus when exposed to subjects, histories and cultures it has not authorized as autonomous liberal subjects and agents. Such extraneous matters, for example today located in the juridical spaces of the Mediterranean Sea, and on the ‘illegal’ bodies of migrants from the south of the planet, raise fundamental ques-tions about rights and justice, while registering the brutal limits of European hu¬manism and citizenship.