This is the first edited volume on the work of essential critical legal theorist Costas Douzinas. It brings together his collaborators, students and contemporaries in legal critique to reflect on different aspects of his oeuvre and to celebrate his significant contribution to legal scholarship over the last 40 years.
From the inauguration of a distinctly critical legal project in the UK in the mid-1980s, Costas Douzinas has been at the forefront of a number of its key theoretical, legal and political debates. With key interventions in deconstructive and postmodern legal theory, legal aesthetics, psychoanalysis and law, the radical critique of human rights and, most recently, in the critical legal theorisation of social movement, protest, sovereign power, the state of exception and non-human rights, Douzinas’s influence has been widely felt. This book provides a key overview of some key aspects of his oeuvre, uncovering fresh resources and new directions of analysis.
The book is aimed at students and researchers who share an interest in the politics and aesthetics of law. It refuses the easy critical equation of law and politics, and produces a more radical account of law, politics, resistance and social change.
Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa is a Senior Lecturer in Law and a Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. His research interests range from the globalisation of Western legal forms and the colonial history of international law to emerging developments in human rights and environmental law, including transitional justice in South America and the growing recognition of legal personhood and rights for non-human beings. His work draws on philosophy, critical theory, anthropology and jurisprudence to explore these themes from an interdisciplinary and critical perspective. He is the founding Co-Director of the Forum on Decentering the Human, Co-Director of the Queen Mary Centre for International Law (CeILa) and founding Co-Director of the Group of Critical Studies in Politics, Law, and Society (PoDeS).
Illan rua Wall is a Lecturer at the Irish Centre for Human Rights and the University of Galway, School of Law. Until 2023, he was Professor of Law at the University of Warwick, and Director of the Centre for Critical Legal Studies. He is an editor of the blog criticallegalthinking.com, the open-access publisher Counterpress and a managing editor of the journal Law & Critique. He works on questions of protest and disorder, using contemporary critical legal theory.
