ALT An image of an article text, reading: ‘Sovereignty and the Persistence of the Aesthetic’: Some Thoughts on Academic Writing In moments of self-reflection, all legal academics must surely come to the realisation that much of the work they are obliged to read – and indeed write – is dense, obscure, monotonous, and repetitive. Surely our job is to clarify, to make complex topics more accessible. What makes by ‘Sovereignty and the Persistence of the Aesthetic’ – on its face, a well-crafted article – an exemplar of poor academic writing is not its stylistic shortcomings: it is its ignorance about the position it seeks to correct. Martin Loughlin