Towards epistemic justice: a case for creative methods in legal research

Abstract This article makes a case for creative methods in legal research that is both analytical and moral. Beginning with an information-theoretical account of legal evolution, I propose a shift from ‘law as language’ and ‘law as communication’ to the more foundational unit of information coded by legal language. I conceptually clarify ‘legal coding’ as the process by which legal meanings get constructed and conceptualised, and position the legal academy as an active site of legal coding. Critically examining the information that is excluded from legal codes (because of ignorance, irrelevance, or illegibility) opens pathways to reveal, challenge, and shift the selective and patterned tendencies of legal coding processes to reinforce epistemic injustice. Positioning the legal academy as a site of legal coding further helps in understanding legal research as a practice of legal coding. I argue that expanding our methodological toolkits can enable a more holistic coding of social reality. By expanding the form of legal codes, creative methods equip us to capture new (or previously excluded) information about lived realities that remain on the margins of meanings. The analytical case for coding social reality more holistically, by including new forms of information through a creative praxis, is complemented by a moral case to include alternative perspectives and hermeneutically misunderstood lives. I demonstrate these arguments through a self-produced short film ‘(IN)VISIBLE’ that captures the working lives of Indian women legal experts, towards a grounded theory of legal evolution from the south. The film combines embodied, poetic, sonic, and visual analyses to capture and analyse legal coding from the point of view of my research participants. My discussions on the process and output of the film show how a phenomenological analysis can help reveal the structural, allowing for a more complete and just coding of social reality, from within the academy.