David Garcia Jivegård
About David Garcia Jivegård
I am a lawyer specialising in social law and general jurisprudence, working as a lecturer in social work and a doctoral candidate in legal science. My work is situated at the intersection of law and social work, where I mainly teach law to social work students through pedagogical forms that integrate legal method, critical pedagogy and a professional perspective.
My doctoral project examines the role of law in the production of social order and disorder. The dissertation analyses how law participates in the creation of the “disorderly” through two cases, one historical and one contemporary: the vagrancy legislation and local bans on begging. To enable this analysis, I develop a concept of governing logics grounded in the legal relation rather than the legal norm, and in efficiency rather than legitimacy. Efficiency is here understood as emerging when legal techniques of governance interact with social techniques of governance – when law operates through other social orders rather than alongside them.
By bringing together legal theory, social analysis and critical theory, my research highlights the productive dimension of law – its capacity to organise social relations, distinguish the normal from the abnormal, and establish boundaries for participation and responsibility. A central theme concerns how legal concepts – such as the legal subject, the principle of proportionality or social rights – function as techniques of governance that shape both individual positions and the order of the social.
Beyond my doctoral work, my research interests include law’s relationship to social transformation, particularly through Deleuzian philosophy and legal theory. I explore how concepts such as immanence, flows and segmentation can be used to understand law as a productive force, and how a jurisprudential immanent critique can serve as a method for revealing the interplay between legal and social orders. I am also interested in the transformative potential of social rights and their role in building community and social inclusion.
Looking ahead, I aim to deepen my research on the conceptual foundations of welfare law, focusing in particular on the concept of standard of living. I am interested in how this concept has functioned – and perhaps no longer functions – as an organising logic for the Social Services Act and for the normative practice of social work. By tracing how the notion of standard of living changes over time, I seek to examine how the language of law structures ideas of need, participation and welfare, and what happens when this logic is challenged by new governing ideals.
Selected Publications
Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals
From Exploitation Through Justice Towards Exploiting Justice: Conceptions of Justice in the Closing of a Suburb School in Sweden, Nordic Journal on Law and Society, 2020.
Sociala rättigheters kausala kedjor. Skisser till en förklaring av icke-monetära sociala rättigheters horisontala plan (Causal Chains of Social Rights: Sketches Toward an Explanation of Non-Monetary Social Rights on a Horizontal Plane), Retfærd – Nordic Journal of Law and Justice, 2020.
(With Elin Sandegård) Kritik av den kritiska rättspositivismens kritik (Del 1): Den heliga apriorismen (Critique of the Critique of Critical Legal Positivism, Part 1: The Sacred Apriorism), Retfærd – Nordic Journal of Law and Justice, 2021.
(With Elin Sandegård) Kritik av den kritiska rättspositivismens kritik (Del 2): Rättsvetenskaplig immanent kritik (Critique of the Critique of Critical Legal Positivism, Part 2: Jurisprudential Immanent Critique), Retfærd – Nordic Journal of Law and Justice, 2022.
Book Chapters
Från behov till proportionalitet – En ny ideologisk giv? (From Need to Proportionality – A New Ideological Turn?) in Proportionalitet. Idéer och uppslag till forskning om proportionalitetens nya innebörder inom olika rättsliga fält, (Proportionality: Concepts and Research Directions on Its Emerging Meanings in Different Areas of Law), ed. Patrik Emblad och Urban Strandberg, Jure Förlag, 2024.
Revolutionär rättsvetenskap: relationer kommer först (Revolutionary Legal Science: Relations Come First) in Festskrift till Eva-Maria Svensson (Liber Amicorum for Eva-Maria Svensson), ed. E. Björling et al., Iustus Förlag, 2024.
Edited Volume
Forthcoming: Det sociala arbetets juridik (The Law of Social Work), Gleerups, 2026, ed. D. Garcia Jivegård, D. Ryffé & E. Sandegård.