Birkbeck Law Press
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.
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Anarchy in the System
Law and Power in a Global World
Anarchy in the System: Law and Power in a Global World critically engages the belief that the state and law can bring about peaceful order. Globalisation itself puts into question this belief, as it reveals the inability of these essentially modern mechanisms to address contemporary conditions of...
To Be Published December 14th 2013 by Birkbeck Law Press
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Corporeality, Medical Technologies and Contemporary Culture
Series: Birkbeck Law Press
Corporeality, Medical Technologies and Contemporary Culture engages the confusions and contradictions in current attitudes to, and practices of, the body. On the one hand, the body is where we turn for the certainties of nature; yet, on the other, it is the locus of a desire for permanent...
To Be Published October 29th 2013 by Birkbeck Law Press
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New Critical Legal Thinking
Law and the Political
Series: Birkbeck Law Press
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....
Published July 4th 2012 by Birkbeck Law Press
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The Politics of Imagination
Series: Birkbeck Law Press
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...
Published June 15th 2011 by Birkbeck Law Press
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Revenge versus Legality
Wild Justice from Balzac to Clint Eastwood and Abu Ghraib
Series: Birkbeck Law Press
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...
Published April 7th 2010 by Routledge-Cavendish
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Human Rights, or Citizenship?
Series: Birkbeck Law Press
While human rights have been enjoying unprecedented salience, the concept of the citizen has been significantly challenged. Rising ethical concerns, the calling into question of state sovereignty, and the consolidation of the human rights regime, have all contributed to a shift in focus: from an...
Published January 24th 2010 by Birkbeck Law Press
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The Other's War
Recognition and the Violence of Ethics
Series: Birkbeck Law Press
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,...
Published February 19th 2009 by Birkbeck Law Press
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The Eye of the Law
Two Essays on Legal History
Series: Birkbeck Law Press
Written by the eminent German legal historian, Michael Stolleis, these two ‘Essays on Legal History’ offer an original and compelling history of the symbolism through which law is characterised as being 'above' us. In ‘The Eye of the Law’, the history of this metaphor is followed from...
Published September 16th 2008 by Birkbeck Law Press
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Being Against the World
Rebellion and Constitution
Series: Birkbeck Law Press
How can we save politics from the politician? How can we save ourselves? This book looks at the example of those who leave the city and break the social contract, rebellious exiles and freedom fighters escaping the wheel of necessity, and learns from them....
Published July 14th 2008 by Birkbeck Law Press
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The Four Lacanian Discourses
or Turning Law Inside Out
Series: Birkbeck Law Press
This book proposes a taxonomy of jurisprudence and legal practice, based on the discourse theory of Jacques Lacan. In the anglophone academy, the positivist jurisprudence of H.L.A. Hart provides the most influential account of law. But just as positivism ignores the practice of law by lawyers, even...
Published June 24th 2008 by Birkbeck Law Press
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Constitutions
Writing Nations, Reading Difference
Series: Birkbeck Law Press
Bringing a postcolonial perspective to UK constitutional debates and including a detailed and comparative engagement with the constitutions of Britain’s ex-colonies, this book is an original reflection upon the relationship between the written and the unwritten constitution. Can a nation have an...
Published August 8th 2007 by Birkbeck Law Press
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The Legality of Boxing
A Punch Drunk Love?
Series: Birkbeck Law Press
The first book of its kind dedicated to an assessment of the legality of boxing, The Legality of Boxing: A Punch Drunk Love? assesses the legal response to prize fighting and undertakes a current analysis of the status of boxing in both criminal legal theory and practice. In this book, Anderson...
Published April 25th 2007 by Birkbeck Law Press
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Law and Sacrifice
Towards a Post Apartheid Theory of Law
Series: Birkbeck Law Press
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,...
Published November 27th 2005 by Birkbeck Law Press
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Beyond Transcendence in Law and Philosophy
Series: Birkbeck Law Press
What is the law of the law? What produces our craven subservience to linguistic norms, and our shocking indifference to the phenomenon of universal suffering? In a path-breaking new work of philosophy, Louis Wolcher seeks to answer these questions from the standpoint of Zen Buddhism. Bringing an...
Published September 26th 2005 by Birkbeck Law Press
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Sovereignty and its Discontents
On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political
Series: Birkbeck Law Press
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...
Published August 17th 2004 by Birkbeck Law Press