Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Veronica Pecile
2022-2023
Discipline(s)
Law
Theme(s)
Behavior & Cognition; Human Rights; Identity
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Veronica Pecile (born 1989 in Udine, Italy) is interested in sociolegal studies, critical theory, postcolonial studies, and theories of spatio-temporality. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. She obtained her PhD in Law and Social Sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) in 2019.
Veronica is currently working on her first book based on her doctoral thesis, tentatively titled Law, Social Movements and the Politics of the Commons: Lessons from Southern Italy. And since September 2023, she has been a resident at the Istituto Svizzero of Rome, working on a project titled Law as Material: The Making of Italian Colonies through Legal Fiction.
Research Project
Representing the Non-Human: The Law beyond Linear Time and the Individual Subject
During her time at the Collegium, Veronica explored legal avenues to represent the interests of both existing and future non-human entities.
First, she mapped developments in constitutions, legislation, and jurisprudence that have given legal status to the natural world in recent years. Second, she conceived legal discourses and tools that make it possible to think of a legal subject which does not have the anthropocentric traits of the conventional subject of modern Western law. As for the second part, which was the core of the research, Veronica mapped a set of legal techniques that are already present in the existing legal systems and that allow for a decentering of the modern legal subject in order to recognize instead the “not-one,” the assembled, and the hybrid, focusing in particular on the possibilities offered by private law.
Research Interests:
non-human entities; legislation; jurisprudence