Book awards! It’s that time of the year again. If I had to choose the Legal Studies book of the year it would be Laurent De Sutter’s edited collection of essays on Zizek and Law. Ground breaking and mind boggling all at once. Essays by well known Zizek scholars including Adrian Johnston, Fabio Vighi and Frank Ruda take legal philosophy or jurisprudence to a new level in one volume. Slavoj Zizek himself even has a Postscript to the book, explicitly writing about law and legal theory for the first time, through the oblique lens of Alfred Hitchcock and the Catholic church. The book was published in Routledge’s Nomikoi Critical Legal Thinkers series, a major publishing innovation in law and legal theory over the past few years. Laurent de Sutter, a Professor teaching currently in Belgium, had an earlier volume in the series, again an edited collection, this time on Louis Althusser. There is a new, tantalising volume of essays planned for a book on Alain Badiou and Law in the near future, again to be edited by de Sutter, or so the book series editor Peter Goodrich tells me. Much of the series’ energy and creativity is down to Professor Peter Goodrich, an international icon in law and legal theory, who through the Cardozo Law School in New York organised a conference on Alain Badiou and Law in 2008 which had a special journal issue devoted to it. In 2011 Peter and I talked about doing a book on Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio and Law. I was moving back to Australia from Canada at the time but it is still on the back burner.
The watershed for these disciplinary changes in law and other subject areas, in many ways, was the the global financial crisis of 2007/8. The GFC was followed by a brief global Keynesianism in countries like Australia before a return to business as usual and an even more brutal neo-liberalism and seemingly endless global war. Discipline after discipline in the academic world has agonised over whether the tenets of yesteryear still hold good after these earth shattering events. In its turn, Legal Studies has renewed its call for a ‘new interdisciplinary legal studies’, incorporating new critical legal theory and the rediscovery of critical legal thinkers and for law and critique and critical legal studies as never before. Nomikoi has played its part in this shift of perspective. The Nomikoi series has volumes on Judith Butler and Law, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and Law, Evgeny Pashukanis and Law, Bruno Latour and Law, Jacques Derrida and Law, Giorgio Agamben and Law, and so on. All are high quality texts and a must for teaching on the contemporary international legal curriculum. The series proclaims a ‘new interdisciplinary legal studies’ on the horizon. Almost single handedly the series has in fact created such a development in international legal studies. The theorists Nomikoi chose to feature have contributed significantly over the years to the emergence of the new interdisciplinary legal studies. Partly because most of them come from outside law itself – mainly from the humanities and social sciences – the whole field of law and legal theory has been radically altered. The series is a magnificent resource for teaching and learning in legal studies. When I was Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) in Ontario in Canada I once taught a whole undergraduate course called Cultural Studies of Law using only the texts from the Nomikoi Critical Legal Thinkers series. It was a semester to remember!
