Discussions about the law, including its reform and its analysis, are often understood under the guise of neutrality, particularly by those who benefit from it. Neutrality as the default—whether with respect to who is drafting the law and/or who is applying the law—has serious consequences on communities and individuals who exist at the margins of their intersectional identities. Despite being understood as having no context, emotion or imagination, the law is a contextual imagination that has emotional resonance.

I am a Black queer nonbinary femme whose legal practice and its articulation engage imagination as justice work. I also have deep feelings about individual, institutional and systemic misogynoir in Canada, including, but not limited to, the ways in which “[…] complex layers of racialized, gendered, and xenophobic state violence […] are regularly enacted on Black cis and transgender women by the state”Footnote ² and infiltrate the law in both insidious and overt ways. When the law is reminiscent of the colonial legacy of control, oppression and violence, there is no room for a “tempered” emotion, nor should the requirement of “respectability” be met; Canadian law is anything but neutral, and its impact on the lives and livelihood of Black queer, trans and nonbinary women and femmes in Canada renders justified anger and other emotions.

Senthorun Sunil Raj, in The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms: Repairing Law, gives language to what we know in our bodies and powerfully models embodied writing and analysis, by centering the personal as political (individual, scholar and activist) and leans deeply into a reparative scholarly approach that “focus[es] instead on allying law with the narratives of (racial) minorities who are marked by oppression” (p. 3). Raj does this by developing a “reparative theory of emotional analysis that attends to the emotional claims of institutions that seek to repair harms faced by LGBT people” (p. 19). Raj’s meaningful introduction of “emotional grammar” in the context of LGBT rights and reforms is not only an analytical lens, but also an invitation to interrogate the power relations that structure tensions over LGBT law reforms in a way that challenges, and unsettles, conventional legal understandings (p. 6).

Repairing Law operates across several underpinnings. Theoretically, the work is grounded in queer theory in and through an intersectional framing. Methodologically, Raj employs doctrinal and sociolegal analysis to surface the aggressive dimensions of LGBT rights adjudication and legislative construction. Conceptually, emotional grammar is a meaningful contribution to queer legal scholarship and discourse, not merely as deconstructive, but as orientated toward repairing LGBT rights. For example, Raj’s discussion of “emotional history or concepts” (p. 1), “emotional constellation of queer expectations and experiences” (p. 2) and “emotional legacy” acts as a necessary entry point for thinking more expansively about how both individual and interpersonal emotional conflicts about LGBT rights make meaning of institutional repair efforts to end state violence against queer, trans and nonbinary people (p. 3). For Black queer femme legal scholars such as myself, who conceptualize imagination as justice/justice as imagination, Raj invites us to consider emotional grammar as a caring intervention and, in my view, also as a caring invention.

Law is a colonial creation and imagination is the gateway for justice making and disruption. For Raj, emotional scholarship (and realities) cannot be separated from the process of repairing harmful lawmaking and law-enacting writing:

The dynamics of conflict and repair in these sociolegal contexts therefore require accountability in every sense. In considering what caring in(ter)vention looks like, Raj, in Repairing Law, encourages us to consider the following: “[A]sk who is doing the listening when those who are marginalized are speaking. What if the listener and speaker are marginalized (in different ways)? What are the conditions necessary to enable ethical engagement between differently positioned groups when addressing histories of inequality, violence, dispossession and discrimination?” (p. 11). Raj’s scholarship thus reveals LGBT rights as affective projects governed by unspoken emotional rules that shape whose harms are legible.

The concept of “emotional grammar” as embodied practice both enriches transformative possibilities in the law by situating the discussion within a “reparative legal politics” framing (p. 29) and demands careful ethical calibration. Raj’s analysis is particularly useful because it exposes the affective assumptions embedded in rights-based legal systems and offers an articulation for diagnosing why formal equality often fails to deliver substantive justice. At the same time, this approach raises important challenges for legal ethics generally and ethical principles for judges specifically. By unsettling ideals of neutrality and emotional restraint, it calls into question how ethical decision-making ought to account for emotion without reproducing assimilation bias, arbitrariness or new forms of burden on queer, trans and nonbinary people—particularly those who are uniquely and acutely marginalized by institutional and system decision-making legal processes.