Roberto Esposito: Law, Community and the Political provides a critical legal introduction to this increasingly influential Italian theorist's work, by focusing on Esposito's reconceptualisation of the relationship between law, community and the political. The analysis concentrates primarily on Esposito's Categories de l'Impolitique, Communitas, Immunitas and Bios, which, it is argued, are animated by an abiding concern with the position of critique in relation to the tradition of modern and contemporary legal and political philosophy.

The first extended study of Bruno Latour's legal theory, this book presents a critical reconstruction of the whole of Latour's oeuvre to date, from Laboratory Life to An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence. Based on the powerful insights into normative effects that actor-network theory makes possible, the book advances a new theory of legal normativity and the force of law, rethinking Latour's work on technology, the image,　and referential scientific inscriptions,　among others, and placing them within the ambit of legality.　The book also captures and...

Althusser & Law is the first book specifically dedicated to the place of law in Louis Althusser's philosophy. The growing importance of Althusser's philosophy in contemporary debates on the left has - for practical and political, as well theoretical reasons - made a sustained consideration of his conception of law more necessary than ever. As a form of what Althusser called 'Ideological State Apparatuses', law is at the forefront of political struggles: from the destruction of Labour Law to the exploitation of Patent Law; from the privatisation of Public Law to the ongoing hegemony of...

The very first book dedicated to Slavoj Zizek's theoretical treatment of law, this book gathers widely recognized Zizek scholars as well as legal theorists to offer a sustained analysis of the place of law in Zizek's work. Whether it is with reference to symbolic law, psychoanalytical law, religious law, positive law, human rights, to Lacan's, Hegel's, or Kant's philosophies of law, or even to Jewish or Buddhist law, Zizek returns again and again to law. And what his work offers, this volume demonstrates, is a radically new approach to law, and a rethinking of its role within the framework...

This book is the first to approach Jacques Ranciere's work from a legal perspective. A former student of Louis Althusser, Ranciere is one of the most important contemporary French philosophers of recent decades: offering an original and path-breaking way to think politics, democracy and aesthetics. Ranciere's work has received wide and increasing critical attention, but no study exists so far that reflects on the wider implications of Ranciere for law and for socio-legal studies. Although Ranciere does not pay much specific attention to law--and there is a strong temptation to identify law...

This book uses Hannah Arendt's controversial text Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil to examine major themes in contemporary jurisprudence, including the nature of law, legal authority, the duty of citizens, the nexus between morality and law and political action. Hannah Arendt has plausibly been characterised as one of the great outsiders of twentieth-century political philosophy: strikingly original and disturbingly unorthodox. After reporting on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt embarked on a series of...