Critical Legal Theory has conventionally been traced to the social, political, and philosophical movements of the 1960s and, before that, to the early-twentieth-century realist critique of modern jurisprudence. In truth, however, its origins go back to classical and pre-modern thought, and to their acknowledgement of the centrality of law in attempts to conceive of the good life, or the just polity a centrality that is, moreover, also discernible in the recent gravitation of a number of contemporary philosophers and theorists (such as Habermas, Derrida, Agamben, Luhmann, Latour) towards law.

Against the restricted and conservative character of modern jurisprudence, Critical Legal Theory constitutes a return to this more general interest in law and legality. Exceeding (if not exploding) the limits of jurisprudence, it has, moreover, drawn upon the most ancient and most contemporary traditions of critical thought in order to pursue new ways of understanding, living, and imagining the law.

Critical Legal Theory is now an established if heterogeneous and controversial field of study, represented by numerous international journals, regional organizations, and global conferences. As the field continues to flourish as never before, this new title in Routledge s Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Law, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature. Indeed, it is a landmark collection of Critical Legal Theory s principal sources, orientations, movements, and themes.

The first volume in the collection ( Critical Legal Origins ) illuminates the foundations of Critical Legal Theory in contemporary continental thought, as well as providing an account of its institutional history. Volume II ( Critical Legal Orientations ), meanwhile, examines the ways in which Critical Legal Theory has addressed and problematized conventional jurisprudential ideas about law, drawing upon the insights of philosophy, as well as other disciplines. Volume III ( Critical Legal Movements ) assembles the best and most influential research to provide an overview of the movements that characterize the field. The scholarship assembled in the final volume ( Critical Legal Themes ) brings together the key work to explore a range of substantial themes with which Critical Legal Theorists have engaged.

Supplemented with a full index and comprehensive introductions, newly written by the editors, which situate the collected material in the context of more general theoretical traditions, as well as in critical relation to jurisprudence, Critical Legal Theory is destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital resource.

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. Combining grand theory with a concern for grounded political interventions, the various contributors to this book draw on political theorists and continental philosophers in order to engage with current legal problematics, such as the recent global economic crisis, the Arab spring and the emergence of biopolitics. The contributions instantiate the claim that a new and radical political legal scholarship has come into being: one which critically interrogates and intervenes in the contemporary relationship between law and power.

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. Combining grand theory with a concern for grounded political interventions, the various contributors to this book draw on political theorists and continental philosophers in order to engage with current legal problematics, such as the recent global economic crisis, the Arab spring and the emergence of biopolitics. The contributions instantiate the claim that a new and radical political legal scholarship has come into being: one which critically interrogates and intervenes in the contemporary relationship between law and power.

Erudite and timely, this book is a key contribution to the renewal of radical theory and politics. Addressing the paradox of a contemporary humanitarianism that has abandoned politics in favour of combating evil, Douzinas, a leading scholar and author in the field of human rights and legal theory, considers the most pressing international questions.

Asking whether there 'is an intrinsic relationship between human rights and the recent wars carried out in their name?' and whether 'human rights are a barrier against domination and oppression or the ideological gloss of an emerging empire?' this book examines a range of topics, including:

• the normative characteristics, political philosophy and metaphysical foundations of our age
• the subjective and institutional aspects of human rights and their involvement in the creation of identity and definition of the meaning and powers of humanity
• the use of human rights as a justification for a new configuration of political, economic and military power.

Exploring the legacy and the contemporary role of human rights, this topical and incisive book is a must for all those interested in human rights law, jurisprudence and philosophy of law, political philosophy and political theory.

"Laws of Postmodernity" applies postmodern jurisprudence to the analysis of a number of areas of law. In analyzing the cultural significance of law, the editors show how critical jurisprudential analysis undermined attempts to support a normative viewpoint of the legal order. In addition, they criticize contextual, sociological accounts of legal phenomena in order to highlight the repression of psychoanalysis within. The contributors explore the blasphemy laws in the wake of the Salman Rushdie affair, and French critical legal theory, particularly the work of Pierre Legendre, jurisprudence. Through detailed discussion of rights, the law of evidence, copyright, authorship and metaphors of writing, it clearly illustrates the practical as well as the theoretical significance of postmodern jurisprudence.

"Laws of Postmodernity" applies postmodern jurisprudence to the analysis of a number of areas of law. In analyzing the cultural significance of law, the editors show how critical jurisprudential analysis undermined attempts to support a normative viewpoint of the legal order. In addition, they criticize contextual, sociological accounts of legal phenomena in order to highlight the repression of psychoanalysis within. The contributors explore the blasphemy laws in the wake of the Salman Rushdie affair, and French critical legal theory, particularly the work of Pierre Legendre, jurisprudence. Through detailed discussion of rights, the law of evidence, copyright, authorship and metaphors of writing, it clearly illustrates the practical as well as the theoretical significance of postmodern jurisprudence.

After 1989 human rights have expanded into a vernacular touching every aspect of social life. They are seen as the key concept in morals and politics and a main tool for forging individual and collective identities. They are the ideology after 'the end of ideologies' - the only values left after 'the end of history'. The response of the left to the rights revolution has been muted and unsure. Classical Marxist critiques of (natural) rights have made the left justly suspicious, and this is still the case today. Elaborating and addressing a series of foundational paradoxes of rights, this book - the third in Costas Douzinas's human rights trilogy, following The End of Human Rights and Human Rights and Empire - provides a long-overdue re-evaluation of the history and political uses of rights for the left. The book examines the history and philosophy of the (legal) person, the subject, the human and dignity from classical Rome to postmodern Brussels. It traces the gradual abandonment of right, virtue and the common good for individual rights and self-interest. The limited and distorted conception of rights of liberal jurisprudence is contrasted with an alternative that sees rights as a relation involved in the struggle for recognition and an everyday utopia. The right to resistance and revolution, prohibited but regularly returning like the repressed, rescues law from sclerosis and presents a case study of the paradoxical nature of rights. Finally, the book offers a brief examination of law's encounter with radical politics informed by the author's strange experience as an 'accidental' politician in the first radical left government in Europe. The book's radical concept of legal philosophy and public law will be of considerable value to legal theorists, political philosophers and anyone with an interest in thinking and acting in ways that go beyond the limits of liberal, and neoliberal, ideology.

After 1989 human rights have expanded into a vernacular touching every aspect of social life. They are seen as the key concept in morals and politics and a main tool for forging individual and collective identities. They are the ideology after 'the end of ideologies' - the only values left after 'the end of history'. The response of the left to the rights revolution has been muted and unsure. Classical Marxist critiques of (natural) rights have made the left justly suspicious, and this is still the case today. Elaborating and addressing a series of foundational paradoxes of rights, this book - the third in Costas Douzinas's human rights trilogy, following The End of Human Rights and Human Rights and Empire - provides a long-overdue re-evaluation of the history and political uses of rights for the left. The book examines the history and philosophy of the (legal) person, the subject, the human and dignity from classical Rome to postmodern Brussels. It traces the gradual abandonment of right, virtue and the common good for individual rights and self-interest. The limited and distorted conception of rights of liberal jurisprudence is contrasted with an alternative that sees rights as a relation involved in the struggle for recognition and an everyday utopia. The right to resistance and revolution, prohibited but regularly returning like the repressed, rescues law from sclerosis and presents a case study of the paradoxical nature of rights. Finally, the book offers a brief examination of law's encounter with radical politics informed by the author's strange experience as an 'accidental' politician in the first radical left government in Europe. The book's radical concept of legal philosophy and public law will be of considerable value to legal theorists, political philosophers and anyone with an interest in thinking and acting in ways that go beyond the limits of liberal, and neoliberal, ideology.

Does the apparent victory, universality and ubiquity of the idea of rights indicate that such rights have transcended all conflicts of interests and moved beyond the presumption that it is the clash of ideas that drives culture? Or has the rhetorical triumph of rights not been replicated in reality? The contributors to this book answer these questions in the context of an increasing wealth gap between the metropolitan elites and the rest, a chasm in income and chances between the rich and the poor, and walls which divide the comfortable middle classes from the 'underclass'. Why do these inequalities persist in our supposed human rights-abiding societies? In seeking to address the foundations, genealogies, meaning and impact of rights, this book captures some of the energy, breadth, power and paradoxes that make deployment of the language of human rights such an essential but changeable part of so many of our contemporary discourses.

Human rights are considered one of the big ideas of the early twenty-first century. This book presents in an authoritative and readable form the variety of platforms on which human rights law is practiced today, reflecting also on the dynamic inter-relationships that exist between these various levels. The collection has a critical edge. The chapters engage with how human rights law has developed in its various subfields, what (if anything) has been achieved and at what cost, in terms of expected or produced unexpected side-effects. The authors pass judgment about the consistency, efficacy and success of human rights law (set against the standards of the field itself or other external goals). Written by world-class academics, this Companion will be essential reading for students and scholars of human rights law.

Erudite and timely, this book is a key contribution to the renewal of radical theory and politics. Addressing the paradox of a contemporary humanitarianism that has abandoned politics in favour of combating evil, Douzinas, a leading scholar and author in the field of human rights and legal theory, considers the most pressing international questions.

Asking whether there 'is an intrinsic relationship between human rights and the recent wars carried out in their name?' and whether 'human rights are a barrier against domination and oppression or the ideological gloss of an emerging empire?' this book examines a range of topics, including:

• the normative characteristics, political philosophy and metaphysical foundations of our age
• the subjective and institutional aspects of human rights and their involvement in the creation of identity and definition of the meaning and powers of humanity
• the use of human rights as a justification fora new configuration of political, economic and military power.

Exploring the legacy and the contemporary role of human rights, this topical and incisive book is a must for all those interested in human rights law, jurisprudence and philosophy of law, political philosophy and political theory.

This highly original collection brings together some of the most important minds in both contemporary art history and theory, and law and legal history. The result is a fascinating discussion of the diverse relationships between law and the artistic image.
The essays draw on the critical procedures of law, art history, and cultural studies in order to create a new interdisciplinary field of visual culture and law. In exploring the hidden interdependence of law and art, the writings refute the generally held conception that law is fixed and rational while the judgment of art is autonomous and ambiguous. Among the topics addressed are the history of the relationship between art and law, the ways in which the visual is made subject to the force of the law, and the complex relations between law, the image, and identity.
With its groundbreaking ideas from a variety of intellectual traditions and disciplines, this book puts law and art into a new and exciting conversation that will introduce a new field of study and spark international debate.
Contributors are: Georges Didi-Huberman, Costas Douzinas, Hal Foster, Peter Goodrich, Piyel Haldar, Martin Jay, Mandy Merck, Lynda Nead, Jonathan Ribner, Katherine Fischer Taylor.

Does the apparent victory, universality and ubiquity of the idea of rights indicate that such rights have transcended all conflicts of interests and moved beyond the presumption that it is the clash of ideas that drives culture? Or has the rhetorical triumph of rights not been replicated in reality? The contributors to this book answer these questions in the context of an increasing wealth gap between the metropolitan elites and the rest, a chasm in income and chances between the rich and the poor, and walls which divide the comfortable middle classes from the 'underclass'. Why do these inequalities persist in our supposed human rights-abiding societies? In seeking to address the foundations, genealogies, meaning and impact of rights, this book captures some of the energy, breadth, power and paradoxes that make deployment of the language of human rights such an essential but changeable part of so many of our contemporary discourses.

Human rights are considered one of the big ideas of the early twenty-first century. This book presents in an authoritative and readable form the variety of platforms on which human rights law is practiced today, reflecting also on the dynamic inter-relationships that exist between these various levels. The collection has a critical edge. The chapters engage with how human rights law has developed in its various subfields, what (if anything) has been achieved and at what cost, in terms of expected or produced unexpected side-effects. The authors pass judgment about the consistency, efficacy and success of human rights law (set against the standards of the field itself or other external goals). Written by world-class academics, this Companion will be essential reading for students and scholars of human rights law.

The introduction of the Human Rights Act has led to an explosion in books on human rights, yet no sustained examination of their history and philosophy exists in the burgeoning literature. At the same time, while human rights have triumphed on the world stage as the ideology of postmodernity, our age has witnessed more violations of human rights than any previous, less enlightened one. This book fills the historical and theoretical gap and explores the powerful promises and disturbing paradoxes of human rights. Divided in two parts and fourteen chapters, the book offers first an alternative history of natural law, in which natural rights represent the eternal human struggle to resist domination and oppression and to fight for a society in which people are no longer degraded or despised. At the time of their birth, in the 18th century, and again in the popular uprisings of the last decade, human rights became the dominant critique of the conservatism of law. But the radical energy, symbolic value and apparently endless expansive potential of rights has led to their adoption both by governments wishing to justify their policies on moral grounds and by individuals fighting for the public recognition of private desires and has undermined their ends. Part Two examines the philosophical logic of rights. Rights, the most liberal of institutions, has been largely misunderstood by established political philosophy and jurisprudence as a result of their cognitive limitations and ethically impoverished views of the individual subject and of the social bond. The liberal approaches of Hobbes, Locke and Kant are juxtaposed to the classical critiques of the concept of human rights by Burke, Hegel and Marx. The philosophies of Heidegger, Strauss, Arendt and Sartre are used to deconstruct the concept of the (legal) subject. Semiotics and psychoanalysis help explore the catastrophic consequences of both universalists and cultural relativists when they become convinced about their correctness. Finally, through a consideration of the ethics of otherness, and with reference to recent human rights violations, it is argued that the end of human rights is to judge law and politics from a position of moral transcendence. This is a comprehensive historical and theoretical examination of the discourse and practice of human rights. Using examples from recent moral foreign policies in Iraq, Rwanda and Kosovo, Douzinas radically argues that the defensive and emancipatory role of human rights will come to an end if we do not re-invent their utopian ideal. CONTENTS PART 1 THE GENEALOGY OF HUMAN RIGHTS 1 The Triumph of Human Rights 2 A Brief History of Natural Law I: The Classical Beginnings 3 A Brief History of Natural Law II: From Natural Law to Natural Rights 4 Natural Right in Hobbes and Locke 5 Revolution and Declarations: The Rights of Men, Citizens and Few Others 6 The Triumph of Humanity: From 1789 to 1989 and from Natural to Human Rights PART 2 THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN RIGHTS 7 The Classical Critiques of Rights: Burke and Marx 8 Subjectum and Subjectus: The Free and Subjected Subject 9 Law's Subjects: Rights and Legal Humanism 10 Hegel's Law: Rights and Recognition 11 Psychoanalysis Becomes the Law: Rights and Desire 12 The Imaginary Domain and the Future of Utopia 13 The Human Rights and the Other 14 The End of Human Rights

Do not be afraid, join us, come back! You've had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it-time to get serious once again!-Slavoj Zizek Responding to Alain Badiou's 'communist hypothesis', the leading political philosophers of the Left convened in London in 2009 to take part in a landmark conference to discuss the perpetual, persistent notion that, in a truly emancipated society, all things should be owned in common. This volume brings together their discussions on the philosophical and political import of the communist idea, highlighting both its continuing significance and the need to reconfigure the concept within a world marked by havoc and crisis.

Jurisprudence is the prudence of jus, law's consciousness and conscience. Throughout history, when thinkers wanted to contemplate the organisation of society or the relationship between authority and the subject, they turned to law. All great philosophers, from Plato to Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Weber had either studied the law or had a deep understanding of legal operations. But jurisprudence is also the conscience of law, the exploration of law's justice and of an ideal law or equity at the bar of which state law is always judged. Jurisprudence brings together 'is' and 'ought', the positive and the normative, law and justice. But after a long process of decay, legal theory is today characterised by cognitive and moral poverty. Jurisprudence has become restricted and academically peripheral, a guidebook to technocratic legalism and a legitimation of the existent. Critical jurisprudence returns to the classical tradition of a general philosophy of law and adopts a much wider concept of legality. It is concerned both with posited law and with the law of the law. All legal aspects of the economic, political, emotional and physical modes of production and reproduction of society are part of critical jurisprudence. This widening of scope allows a radical rethinking of the nature of rights, justice, sovereignty and judgement. A political philosophy of justice today must examine the political economy of law; transitions from Empire to nation; ideological and imaginary constructions through which we understand ourselves and relate to others; ways in which gender, race or sexuality create forms of identity that both discipline bodies and offer sites of resistance. Law's complicity with political oppression, violence and racism has to be faced before it is possible to speak of a new beginning for legal thought, which in turn is the necessary precondition for a theory of justice. Critical Jurisprudence offers an ethics of law against the nihilism of power and an aesthetics of existence for the melancholic lawyer.

This highly original collection brings together some of the most important minds in both contemporary art history and theory, and law and legal history. The result is a fascinating discussion of the diverse relationships between law and the artistic image.
The essays draw on the critical procedures of law, art history, and cultural studies in order to create a new interdisciplinary field of visual culture and law. In exploring the hidden interdependence of law and art, the writings refute the generally held conception that law is fixed and rational while the judgment of art is autonomous and ambiguous. Among the topics addressed are the history of the relationship between art and law, the ways in which the visual is made subject to the force of the law, and the complex relations between law, the image, and identity.
With its groundbreaking ideas from a variety of intellectual traditions and disciplines, this book puts law and art into a new and exciting conversation that will introduce a new field of study and spark international debate.
Contributors are: Georges Didi-Huberman, Costas Douzinas, Hal Foster, Peter Goodrich, Piyel Haldar, Martin Jay, Mandy Merck, Lynda Nead, Jonathan Ribner, Katherine Fischer Taylor.