Law Unlimited by Davies, Margaret;

Short description:

This book engages with the traditional questions of legal theory but its analysis rests on the contention that ‘law’ is not confined to the state. Against the backdrop of analytical jurisprudence, the book draws theoretical connections and continuities between different experiences, spheres, and modalities of law – and in particular legal pluralism. Reading, crystallising, and extending themes that have emerged in legal thought over the past century, this book is the culmination of the author’s twenty-five years of engagement with legal theory. Its bold attempt to forge a thoroughly contemporary approach to law will be of enormous value to those with interests in legal and socio-legal theory.

Long description:

This book engages with a traditional yet persistent question of legal theory – what is law? However, instead of attempting to define and limit law, the aim of the book is to unlimit law, to take the idea of law beyond its conventionally accepted boundaries into the material and plural domains of an interconnected human and nonhuman world. Against the backdrop of analytical jurisprudence, the book draws theoretical connections and continuities between different experiences, spheres, and modalities of law. Taking up the many forms of critical and socio-legal thought, it presents a broad challenge to legal essentialism and abstraction, as well as an important contribution to more general normative theory. Reading, crystallising, and extending themes that have emerged in legal thought over the past century, this book is the culmination of the author’s 25 years of engagement with legal theory. Its bold attempt to forge a thoroughly contemporary approach to law will be of enormous value to those with interests in legal and socio-legal theory.

This is a must-read new book offering a strikingly original account of the materialities, modalities, imaginaries and politics of law. Rethinking distinctions that have shaped traditions of theorising about law – mind and matter, culture and nature, and subject and object – Davies offers new resources for a multi-perspectival, post-binary understanding of law. Dr Maksymilian del Mar. Reader in Legal Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context (CLSGC) at Queen Mary University of London, and Academic Fellow of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple.

Law Unlimited is a tour de force that presents a wide-ranging theoretical conversation of enormous importance to understanding the legal complexities of our postnational era. Pushing the reader to transcend the normative equivalence of law and nation-state, the book unleashes a spectrum of spatialities, materialities, imaginaries and subjectivities through which to reconceptualize law and its dynamic engagements. The book is written in a highly accessible way making it appropriate for students and seasoned scholars. It is without question a "must read" for anyone thinking about law and its constitutive force in all social and political relations.  Eve Darian-Smith, PhD LLB BA(Hons).

Table of Contents:

1. Theoretical Variables – An Overview






2. Limited and Unlimited Law








3. Legal Materialism and Social Existence








4. A New Legal Materialism








5. Inner and Outer Space








6. Scales of Law








7. Subjects and Perspective








8. Imagining Law








9. Pathfinding








10. Conclusion