For more than a century, law schools have trained students to 'think like a lawyer'. In these times of legal crisis, both in legal education and in global society, what does that mean for the rest of us? In this book, thirty leading international scholars - including Louis Assier-Andrieu, Marianne Constable, Yves Dezalay, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Bryant Garth, Peter Goodrich, Duncan Kennedy, Martti Koskenniemi, Shaun McVeigh, Samuel Moyn, Annelise Riles, Charles Sabel and William Simon - examine what is distinctive about legal thought. They probe the relation between law and time, law and culture, and legal thought and legal action; the nature of current legal thought; the geography of legal thought; and the conditions for recognition of a new 'contemporary' style of law. This work will help theorists, social scientists, historians and students understand the intellectual context of legal problems, legal doctrine, and jurisprudential trends in the current conjuncture.

This book is concerned with a central question in contemporary legal theory: how to describe global law? In addressing this question, the book brings together two features that are different and yet connected to one another: the conceptual description of contemporary law on the one hand, and methods of taking concrete perspectives on law on the other hand. The book provides a useful concept for describing global law: thinking of law spatially. It illustrates that space is a concept with the capacity to capture the relationality, dynamics, and hybridity of law. Moreover, this book investigates the role of topological thinking in finding concrete perspectives on law. Legal Spaces offers an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to law.

In a world in which racism and xenophobia are endemic, what is the role of international law? To the extent international rules are thought to have any relevance at all, the typical approach characterizes international law as on the side of racial justice. Human rights instruments like the United Nations' International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are paradigmatic, offering the world international agreements in which governments are directed to avoid racist behavior and promote antiracist action. In The Right to Exclude, Justin Desautels-Stein goes against the grain and asks whether certain rules of international law might actually produce structures of racial hierarchy, rather than limiting them. The intellectual fulcrum for this production, Desautels-Stein argues, lies in the ideological structures of sovereignty and property, the right to exclude that is shared in those twinned precincts, and the border regimes that result. Applying critical race theory to contemporary problems of migration, nationalism, multiculturalism, decolonization, and self-determination, Desautels-Stein expounds a theory of "postracial xenophobia", a structure of racial ideology that justifies and legitimates a pragmatic account of racialized foreignness, a racial xenos.

Are the general and the particular separated in legal rhetorics? What is the function of singular events, facts, names in legal argumentation and what is their relationship to legal normativity? This collection of 11 essays takes a diachronic approach to address these questions from the perspective of contemporary legal discourse.

Critical theory, characteristically linked with the politics of theoretical engagement, covers the manifold of the connections between theory and praxis. This thought-provoking Research Handbook captures the broad range of those connections as far as legal thought is concerned and retains an emphasis both on the politics of theory, and on the notion of theoretical engagement. The first part examines the question of definition and tracks the origins and development of critical legal theory along its European and North American trajectories. The second part looks at the thematic connections between the development of legal theory and other currents of critical thought such as; Feminism, Marxism, Critical Race Theory, varieties of post-modernism, as well as the various ‘turns’ (ethical, aesthetic, political) of critical legal theory. The third and final part explores particular fields of law, addressing the question how the field has been shaped by critical legal theory, or what critical approaches reveal about the field, with the clear focus on opportunities for social transformation.

Explores the ideological, political, and economic stakes of struggles over international law's history and its relation to empire and capitalism.

In this unique volume, James Hackney invites readers to enter the minds of 10 legal experts that in the late 20th century changed the way we understand and use theory in law today. True to the title of the book, Hackney spent hours in conversation with legal intellectuals, interviewing them about their early lives as thinkers and scholars, their contributions to American legal theory, and their thoughts regarding some fundamental theoretical questions in legal academe, particularly the law/politics debate. Legal Intellectuals in Conversation is a veritable “Who’s Who” of legal thought, presented in a sophisticated yet intimate manner.

Kantianism, Postmodernism and Critical Legal Thought presents a challenging alternative theory of legal philosophy. The central thesis of the book suggests an accommodation between three of the most influential contemporary theories of law, Kantianism, postmodernism and critical legal thought. In doing so, it further suggests that the often perceived distance between these theories of law disguises a common intellectual foundation. This foundation lies in the work of Immanuel Kant. Kantianism, Postmodernism and Critical Legal Thought presents an intellectual history of critical legal thinking, beginning with Kant, and then proceeding through philosphers and legal theorists as diverse as Heidegger and Arendt, Foucault and Derrida, Rorty and Rawls, and Unger and Dworkin. Ultimately, it will be suggested that each of these philosophers is writing within a common intellectual tradition, and that by concentrating on the commonality of this tradition, contemporary legal theory can better appreciate the reconstructive potential of the critical legal project.

The editors of this unique collection of essays exploring the relationship of St. Paul and the natural law bring together contributions by scripture scholars, theologians, philosophers, and international lawyers. Inspired by the special Jubilee Year from June 2008 to June 2009 – proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI to celebrate the 2,000-year anniversary of the birth of St. Paul – the chapters in this book are the fruit of the contributors’ collaboration during the celebration of the Year of St. Paul. They share a common appreciation of the natural law as a basis for civil law and contemporary legal theory, and each chapter examines the foundations of the natural law – particularly in the writings of St. Paul – giving special recognition to the Catholic contributions to natural law and contemporary legal theory.