Rights, Resistance and Critique

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.