Patrícia Branco is a researcher at Centro de Estudos Sociais, University of Coimbra, in Portugal, where she has been a team member in several reAuthors’ Bionotes 283 search projects. Patrícia was the Principal Investigator in the Research Project « Courthouse architecture and access to law and justice: the case of family and child courts in Portugal ». She is currently a Post–Doctoral Fellow, developing the research project « Courts, their communities and citizens: the effectiveness in access to law and justice (territorial, spatial and symbolic) in the new judiciary’s organization reform » (financed by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Ref. SFRH/BPD/102236/2014). She was Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities « Recht als Kultur », University of Bonn, in Germany (in 2015). Her research interests include access to law and justice, in a broad perspective; courthouse architecture, spaces of justice and the administration of justice; the relations between law, culture and the humanities; and the mutations of family and child law and its connections with gender issues. She has published in Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, Liverpool Law Review, Droit et Société, Oñati Socio–Legal Series and Law Text Culture, as well as a number of chapters in edited books. Patrícia Branco has recently published the book Os tribunais como espaços de reconhecimento, de funcionalidade e de acesso à justiça (2015, Vida Económica). She also edited the book Sociologia do(s) Espaço(s) da Justiça: Diálogos Interdisciplinares (2013, Almedina).