Sarah Marusek
Sarah Marusek (PhD, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Political Science 2008) is Professor of Public Law at the University of Hawai‘i Hilo. Her research examines how law happens in everyday life through the fields of visual jurisprudence, legal semiotics, legal landscapes, socio-legal cultural aesthetics, automobilities, and the constitutive approach to law and society. She has published numerous articles and chapters in the areas of legal semiotics, legal geography, public memory, everyday jurisprudence, constitutive legal theory, and law and society.
She has written three books. Her first book, Politics of Parking: Rights, Identity, and Property (Ashgate 2012), considers how parking spaces govern. Her second book, Law and the Kinetic Environment: Regulating Dynamic Landscapes (Routledge 2021), examines the instability of the natural landscape that challenges law's ability to govern. Her latest book, Law, Space, and the Vehicular Environment: Pavement and Asphalt (Routledge 2023), explores the pavementalities and pavementeering in legal roadscapes. Her current book project under contract with Routledge examines the ecosystems of legal materiality found in the surfaces and textures of public infrastructure. She is also co-authoring a book on the fluidity of law with Anne Wagner.
Dr. Marusek is the Associate Editor for the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law and co-edits two Law Book Series Law and Visual Jurisprudence (Springer) and Living Signs of Law (Springer). She has been invited as Visiting Researcher at Université de Lille (France), Queensland University of Technology (Australia), Örebro Universitet (Sweden), Università Degli Stidu Roma Tre (Italy), Australian National University (Australia), and the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center at Mount Holyoke College. She has conducted grant-funded research in Iceland, California, Oregon, and locally on Hawai‘i Island.
She has edited and co-edited several volumes, including Research Handbook on Legal Semiotics (Elgar, 2023), Handbook on Cyber Hate, the Modern Cyber Evil (Springer 2024), Synesthetic Legalities: Sensory Dimensions of Law and Jurisprudence (Routledge 2016); Street-Level Sovereignty: The Intersection of Space and Law (Lexington, 2017); Digesting the Public Sphere (Routledge 2017); Sensing the Nation's Law: Historical Inquiries into the Aesthetics of Democratic Legitimacy (Springer 2018); Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative: Public Memory, Identity, and Critique (Springer 2021; and the Research Handbook of Legal Semiotics (Edward Elgar 2023).
Professor Marusek is a Recipient of the University of Hawai‘i Frances Davis Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. She teaches courses in law and culture, environments of law, everyday jurisprudence, visual politics, and constitutional law. She is the Coordinator for the Pre-Law Certificate at UH Hilo.
ORCID: 0000-0002-7589-9503
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