With the legal protection of wolves in Sweden as an object of study, this dissertation examines how bodies often perceived as legal, social or natural entangle in a common co-production of law. The thesis begins with an analysis of how entanglements of nature, society and law have been discussed in environmental legal scholarship, with a main focus on the Uppsala Environmental Legal Method and Critical Environmental Law. Concepts from New Materialism and Legal Pluralism are then explored in order to contribute to the development of an understanding of law as co-produced in a mesh of entangled bodies in the landscape. Applying these concepts and discussions on legal protection of wolves, legal acts and institutions involved in the management of wolves are analysed through their entanglement with other bodies in the landscape. Special focus is set on legal hunting and a series of judgements concerning licenced hunting on wolves as well as on the entanglement of formal and informal norms in hunting communities. The wolf is reimagined as co-producing its legal protection through its entanglements with bodies such as human discourses and not least the law itself. The result is a reassembling of the legal protection of wolves in Sweden as a rhizome where law is co-produced through entanglements of multiplicities of bodies, only some of which are commonly viewed as legal. This understanding opens up legal analysis for a broader search for knowledges and solutions, which in turn can facilitate the co-existence of wolves and people in shared landscapes. The thesis also contributes to a general theory of entangled law by its discussion of a new materialist legal pluralism as well as the application of these theories on the issue of legal protection of wolves in Sweden.

Over the past decades, the wolves in Sweden have grown in numbers and their presence has produced a great many infected debates and conflicts. In this context, the wolves themselves have become powerless actants in larger wolf-bodies consisting of mainly human conflicts. In the legal discourse, however, the wolves are defined as juridical entities, detached from the wolf conflicts and the landscape. Hence, the rhizomes of political relations underlying the label ‘Wolf’ become veiled.  

This problem connects to the recurring challenge for legal scholarship in the Anthropocene: to deal with the inherent aim of law for complexity reduction in an ever more complex, uncertain, and always changing social-ecological reality. By using ideas from New Materialism and Legal Pluralism this thesis analyses the legal protection of wolves in Sweden as co-produced in a mesh of entangled bodies in the landscape. This makes it possible to return to the question of the wolves but with different tools. It enables a search for spaces, relations or issues in the landscape with potential for negotiations that can affect the situation of the physical wolves. The result is an enhanced understanding of the legal protection of wolves as well as a contribution to a general legal theory of entangled law.