Experimental Justice and Legal Poetics: From Mention to Demonstration

This article introduces and demonstrates two disciplines absent from conventional legal scholarship: experimental justice and legal poetics. Rather than defining them abstractly, the paper presents three documented cases spanning more than a decade—interactions with the President of Ukraine, the Constitutional Court, and various judicial bodies—that embody these approaches in practice. Experimental justice is understood as the empirical testing of legal structures by placing institutions in conditions that expose their implicit assumptions and contradictions. Legal poetics, in turn, designates a mode of constructing legal texts that reveals the semantic, aesthetic, and logical tensions inherent within law. The article argues that these approaches are not methodological instructions but dispositions toward legal reality that make institutional structures visible and, at times, unexpectedly solvable. The unpredictability of outcomes—ranging from procedural breakthroughs to ironic collapses of legal reasoning—constitutes a central feature of both disciplines. A translation of the author’s 2009 submission to the Constitutional Court of Ukraine is provided as an appendix. Despite its unconventional style, the petition was accepted, examined, and granted; the resulting decision became one of the most viewed legal documents in Ukraine at the time and remains one of the very few successful individual petitions ever considered by the Court. Together, these episodes serve as practical demonstrations of how experimental justice and legal poetics operate within—and against—the framework of modern legal systems.