Birkbeck Law School has been recognised as an international centre of research excellence, specialising in legal theory and theoretically informed socio-legal research and pioneering critical approaches to scholarship.
Birkbeck Law Press aims to develop a distinct publishing profile by addressing the legal challenges of late modernity. Globalisation and the move towards universal legal values, which should respect cultural specificities and local conditions, has created the urgent need for greater dialogue and understanding between the major schools of thought and legal systems in the world. Most legal publishing, driven by the needs of specialisation and the state-based nature of positive law, has not systematically addressed these concerns.
By Jacques de Ville
June 10, 2019
This book advances a new reading of the central works of Carl Schmitt and, in so doing, rethinks the primary concepts of constitutional theory. In this book, Jacques de Ville engages in a close analysis of a number of Schmitt’s texts, including Dictatorship (1921), The Concept of the Political (...
Edited
By Maria Aristodemou, Fiona Macmillan, Patricia Tuitt
June 15, 2018
This book opens up a range of important perspectives on law and violence by considering the ways in which their relationship is formulated in literature, television and film. Employing critical legal theory to address the relationship between crime fiction, law and justice, it considers a range of ...
Edited
By Thanos Zartaloudis
April 25, 2018
This book is a collection of essays honouring and engaging with the work of the late Professor Patrick McAuslan. It is a collection that narrates, analyses and critiques McAuslan’s contributions, as well as offering substantive perspectives on how his work has impacted the legal fields in which he ...
By Stephen Connelly
November 11, 2016
Against jurisprudential reductions of Spinoza’s thinking to a kind of eccentric version of Hobbes, this book argues that Spinoza’s theory of natural right contains an important idea of absolute freedom, which would be inconceivable within Hobbes’ own schema. Spinoza famously thought that the ...
By William Rasch
August 18, 2004
This book argues for the centrality of conflict in any notion of the political. In contrast to many of the attempts to re-think the political in the wake of the collapse of traditional leftist projects, it also argues for the logical and/or ontological primacy of violence over 'peace'. The notion ...
By Drucilla Cornell, Karin van Marle, Albie Sachs
August 26, 2015
Many critical theorists talk and write about the day after the revolution, but few have actually participated in the constitution of a revolutionary government. Emeritus Justice Albie Sachs was a freedom fighter for most of his life. He then played a major role in the negotiating committee for the ...
By Francisco Ortega
June 09, 2015
This book examines the confusions and contradictions that manifest in prevalent attitudes towards the body, as well as in related bodily practices. The body is simultaneously our reference for the certainties of nature and the locus of a desire for transformation and reinvention. The body is at ...
Edited
By Johan Van der Walt
March 02, 2006
In the wake of apartheid, Law and Sacrifice draws on the uniquely expansive protection of fundamental rights now entrenched in the South African Constitution to outline a new theory of law. The South African Constitution not only protects the rights of people against abuses of power by the state, ...
Edited
By Chiara Bottici, Benoît Challand
December 17, 2012
The Politics of Imagination offers a multidisciplinary perspective on the contemporary relationship between politics and the imagination. What role does our capacity to form images play in politics? And can we define politics as a struggle for people’s imagination? As a result of the increasingly ...
Edited
By Matthew Stone, Illan Wall, Costas Douzinas
July 05, 2012
New Critical Legal Thinking articulates the emergence of a stream of critical legal theory which is directly concerned with the relation between law and the political. The early critical legal studies claim that all law is politics is displaced with a different and more nuanced theoretical arsenal....
By Katherine Maynard, Jarod Kearney, James Guimond
August 18, 2011
In the wake of Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary renditions, and secret torture centres in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, Revenge versus Legality addresses the relationship between law and wild or vigilante justice; between the power to enforce retribution and the desire to seek revenge. Taking up a ...
By Tarik Kochi
May 27, 2010
The Other's War is an intervention into a set of contemporary moral, political and legal debates over the legitimacy of war and terrorism within the context of the so-called global War on Terror. Tarik Kochi considers how, despite the variety of its approaches – just war theory, classical realist, ...
