Research interests

Over the last decade, I have completed a trilogy of books which contributed to the creation of a distinct school of British critical legal thought and the turning of legal scholarship towards ethical concerns and aesthetic considerations.

1. Postmodern Jurisprudence: The Law of Text in the Texts of Law (Routledge, 1991,1993) was the first treatment in jurisprudential literature of the end of the certainties of modernism and its grand narratives. The book examined from a post-metaphysical perspective questions of rhetoric and semiotics, of deconstruction and hermeneutics and opened the discussion on Law and Literature in Britain. Standard jurisprudential schools such as legal positivism, rights theory and natural law were approached through an examination of the organisation of their texts and were shown to perform very differently from what their surface claimed. It remains to this day the definitive discussion of postmodernism in the field of legal theory.
2. Justice Miscarried: Ethics and Aesthetics in Law (Harvester 1994, Edinburgh 1996) is a sustained examination of the systematic elimination of ethical concerns from modern law and jurisprudence. Looking at alternative sources of ethical action in Greek tragedy (and in particular Antigone, the myth of the origin of justice/law in the Western tradition), in the Aristotelian tradition of phronesis, in pagan and Christian casuistry and in the Jewish tradition of alterity, expressed in the work of the phenomenologist philosopher Levinas, Justice Miscarried criticised the morality of neutrality proposed by liberal theorists like Rawls and Dworkin. No alternative theory of justice emerged because ethics and justice cannot be fully theorised ever, but a number of court cases, literary texts and aesthetic approaches were used to re-activate in Law the concern with the other who is persecuted and suffering. This book initiated the jurisprudential interest in ethics which characterised advanced legal theory in the late 90s.
3. The End of Human Rights (Hart, 2000) concludes the trilogy but was written without the inspiration and contribution of Ronnie Warrington and it is dedicated to his memory. It is an attempt to examine the history and philosophy of human rights from non-liberal perspectives. It is premised on the assumption that this most liberal of institutions has not been well-understood by liberal political and legal philosophy because of its cognitively limited and ethically impoverished view of the individual subject and of the social bond. Liberal philosophy is introduced through the work of classical jurists and the great philosophers Hobbes, Locke and Kant rather than through their pale jurisprudential imitations. The classical critics Burke, Marx, Hegel and Heidegger are then used to explore the limitations of liberal philosophy. Turning to the work of Arendt and Strauss, Sartre and Lacan, Derrida and Levinas, The End of Human Rights tries to reactivate the tradition of dissent and rebellion which characterised the history of right and to sketch a new utopia from within historical immanence and use it to critique the legal institution. The book argues that once this end of recovering transcendence in immanence is lost the end of human rights becomes imminent.

The aesthetic aspects of law and legal education are a central preoccupation in this exploration of the texts of law. The ethical importance of textual arrangement and the ethics of reading characterise the early work.

In the last few years, I have been involved in an exploration of the legality of visual images. In 1996, I co-organised an international conference at the Tate Gallery, entitled 'Images of Justice'. In 1999, I co-edited with Lynn Nead of the History of Art, Film and Visual Media School at Birkbeck Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law (Chicago University Press, 1999). This collection which includes essays by my colleagues Peter Goodrich and Piyel Haldar and contributions from some of the most prominent theorists and art historians like Martin Jay, Hal Foster, Lynn Nead, Georges Didi-Huberman and Catherine Fischer-Taylor has been hailed as opening a totally new inter-disciplinary area of research on law and visuality.

My own contribution 'Prolegomena to a Legal Iconology' is an introduction to the study of the relationship between legal and political power and images. Looking into classical Greek philosophy, Christian theology, Byzantine and Reformation iconoclastic debates, psychoanalytical theory and finally a 19th-century libel case between the painter James McNeil Whistler and John Ruskin, the essay argues that the law has always had a visual policy which banned certain images and validated others and that this 'administration of aesthetics' has political and anthropological significance. In this linkage between power, image and the individual, the subject is born and becomes attached to the needs and expectations of social reproduction. I am currently writing Legal Iconology a full examination of the historical, theoretical and legal dimensions of this intricate link between law, images and art.

My current work has two directions:

1. First, I have just completed an advanced alternative textbook in legal theory with Adam Gearey entitled Critical Jurisprudence. This book is an attempt at re-writing the jurisprudence syllabus. It presents critical readings on the traditional topics such as natural law, justice, rights and positivism and introduces a number of new topics such as critical race theory, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, law and literature, deconstruction, Hegel and western Marxism.
2. My other major project is a book on Postmodern Just Wars. It discusses the recent turn of domestic and international politics towards human rights and humanitarianism. The book examined the history of just war, its position in international law and politics and its transformation in the recent wars on terrorism and humanitarian interventions. It re-assesses the theory of sovereignty and the role of morality in politics by discussing the work of writers such as Schmitt, Agamben, Rawls, Habermas and Negri. It proposes a postmodern theory of justice and analyses the metaphysics of humanity and jurisdiction and the role of refugees and war prisoners as exemplifications of the bare life confronted by the condensed and bare sovereignty of empire.

I am one of the managing editors of Law & Critique (Springerlink), the international journal of critical legal thought which is published from the Birkbeck School of Law.