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.
Edited
By Johan Van der Walt
November 28, 2005
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 05, 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 06, 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 15, 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 26, 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, ...
By Paulina Tambakaki
March 02, 2010
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 ...
By Jeanne Lorraine Schroeder
February 01, 2010
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...
By Jack Anderson
January 18, 2010
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 ...
By Michael Stolleis
October 27, 2008
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 ...
By Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
September 12, 2008
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....
By Judith Pryor
September 18, 2007
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 ...
By Louis E. Wolcher
September 27, 2005
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 ...