João Freitas Mendes

"João Freitas Mendes (b. 1992, Portugal) is a PhD candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel since October 2022, with Prof. Laurent de Sutter.  His doctoral work has been presented in Brussels, London and Frankfurt. His thesis aims to find a notion of sociability, within three veins: socialism, psychoanalysis and literature. João's notion of sociability received praises in written reviews made public by Fabian Steinhauer and by Adam Gearey. 

His work got him a doctoral scholarship from FCT(Portugal); a 6-month Fellowship at Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory; two scholarships from Doctoral School of Human Sciences of VUB, and the opportunity to teach Transformative Lawyering at the University of London (Birkbeck) on the Winter Term. 

He co-organized "Letters and objects that let" at MPILHLT. This May 2025 he co-organised a two-day workshop at VUB: Law without Lawyers. Beforehand, he wrote his MA thesis at Universidade de Lisboa where he taught for two years.  There he chaired a weekly workshop with students and published a pamphlet,  "Princípio da Injustiça", where he exposed moral harassment, nepotism, and elitism of his legal education in relation with the conservative notion of fairness apparently adopted by Portuguese courts.

Contact: joao dot tiago dot freitas dot mendes at vub dot be 

Office: B 4.08