This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module is intended to introduce students to the major debates, questions, concepts and theoretical approaches in the critique of law. It offers a grounding in several key aspects of legal theory, and some major ways of characterising law in Modernity. Students completing this module will develop a greater precision, articulacy and rigour in all of their considerations of law. The module is also intended as training in the making of well-considered and supported critical arguments.
After an introduction addressing the nature and practise of legal critique, the module has two main parts. In the first part, students will be introduced to key topics in critical legal theory, such as sovereignty and the legal subject, jurisdiction, legal interpretation, judgment, and justice. These topics will be considered with an eye to the overarching question of the relation between law and political authority. In the second part of the course, this conceptual vocabulary will be applied to a range of contemporary issues. Examples might include issues in biotechnology, facebook and social media, political protest, films and other popular cultural forms, social equality, terrorism and counter-terrorism, torture, the casualized workforce, and the plight of the refugee; and any other issues as relevant from time to time. In addition to the critical legal perspectives developed in the first part of the course, the module will draw on appropriate specialist theoretical material from other disciplines relevant to the contemporary issues selected for analysis.
Total study hours: 300
Contact hours: 40
Private study hours: 260
All undergraduate single and joint honours law programs. Available as a wild module to all Social Science and Humanities students.
Main assessment methods
The module will be assessed by 100% coursework as follows:
Class participation (10 %)
Essay, 1500-word (10%).
Research essay (project), 6000 words (80%).
Reassessment methods
The module will be reassessed by a reassessment instrument of a research essay (project).
Constable, M., 2005. Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dorsett, S. & McVeigh, S., 2012. Jurisdiction. Abingdon: Routledge.
Douzinas, C. & Geary, A. 2005. Critical Jurisprudence: The Political Philosophy of Justice. Oxford: Hart.
Esposito, R., 2012. Third Person: The Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal. Cambridge: Polity.
Goodrich, P., 1990. The Languages of Law. London: Weidenfeld.
Pottage, A. and Mundy, M. 2004. Law, Anthropology and the Constitution of the Social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
The intended subject specific learning outcomes.
On successfully completing the module, students will be able to:
1. Understand the special value of theoretical inquiry to critical approaches to law
2. Demonstrate familiarity with the central concepts, motivations, principles, traditions and debates of contemporary critical legal theory
3. Interrogate the relationship between normative and critical legal theories
4. Critically analyse legal concepts, practices, techniques, phenomena and events
5. Critically reflect on the nature of law in modernity, modern law's particular configuration of the relationship between law and life, and the
way modern law shapes contemporary legal, political and cultural relations
6. Understand the political and ethical relationship between critique and justice, and the distinctive role of critical legal theory in relation to
law, legal practices, and contemporary political and legal problems
7. Demonstrate the ability to critically reflect on the separation of law from other academic disciplines, practices and concepts
8. Appreciate the importance to the contemporary critique of law of perspectives developed in other disciplines, such as political theory,
aesthetic theory, visual culture, rhetoric, film studies, critical philosophy, theology, political theology, literature and literary studies,
linguistics, historical studies, psychoanalysis, sociology and economics
9. Critically reflect on the relationship between theory and practice in a legal context
The intended generic learning outcomes.
On successfully completing the module, students will be able to:
1. Demonstrate close reading of texts, including sophisticated theoretical material
2. Critically analyse texts, including legal texts, and of legal and juridical problems as they arise in texts from multiple disciplines
3. Demonstrate conceptual synthesis of a variety of sources, textual and non-textual, from multiple disciplines
4. Demonstrate a reflective, self-directed and independent approach to learning
5. Demonstrate a coherent and sustained written argument
6. Formulate critical legal research questions within a theoretical field, or drawing substantially on a theoretical field
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