This series of short-form books intends to define a new direction in the interdisciplinary study of law and legal processes. The conventional issues and categories must be reframed in our challenging times, especially in regard to the ‘racial reckoning’ of 2020, the climate crisis, and the persistence of systemic inequalities within and across nations and cities. New Trajectories in Law is a series of short, punchy texts borrowing from the academic publishing tradition of a ‘key ideas/concepts’ series, but subverting and extending it to push the study of law and the delineation of legal concepts in a new, progressive and thoroughly interdisciplinary direction. The books in the series will not respect the conventional divisions of legal teaching and practice, but will focus attention on ideas and ways of governing that cut across conventional institutional as well as intellectual divides. Making use of various theoretical traditions, but kept rigorously accessible, each title will shed light on a contemporary issue of interest to readers concerned not only with law but with social justice.
By Mariana Valverde
January 29, 2024
This book provides an overview and assessment of infrastructure’s legal and governance underpinnings. Infrastructure is often thought of as a term referring only to the physical entities – pipes, cables, utility poles, highways, airports – that facilitate the transmission of water, gas, ...
By Francine Rochford
January 18, 2024
This book examines the increasingly widespread movement to recognise the environment as a legal person. Several countries have now recognized that nature, or parts of nature, have juristic personhood. In this book, the concept of legal personhood and its incidents are interrogated with a view to ...
By Thomas Giddens
September 25, 2023
Judgment is simple, right? This book begs to differ. Written for all students of the law—from undergraduate to supreme court justice—it opens the reader to a broad landscape of ideas surrounding common law judgment. Short and accessible, it touches upon the many pathways that lead out from the ...
By Marc Trabsky
July 20, 2023
This book examines how legal institutions reify the value of death in the twenty-first century. Its starting point is that bio-technological innovations have extended life to such an extent that death has become an epistemological problem for legal institutions. It explores how legal definitions ...
By Riaz Tejani
June 28, 2023
This book examines the contemporary significance of the Law and Economics movement. Drawing on anthropology, sociology, political economy, and ethics, the book traces the influence of lawyer-economists in developing and operationalizing key ideas—for instance human capital and structural ...
By Sarah Murray
May 31, 2023
This book examines the phenomenon of Community Justice Centres and their potential to transform the justice landscape by tackling the underlying causes of crime. Marred by recidivism, addiction, family violence, overflowing courtrooms, crippling prison spending and extreme rates of incarceration, ...
By Peter D. Burdon
May 24, 2023
This book introduces the concept of the Anthropocene and examines its importance for environmental legal thinking, research and practice. Two main arguments are explored. The first is that much of the scholarship in environmental law that addresses the Anthropocene does not respond to Earth ...
By Elaine A. O. Freer
January 09, 2023
This book examines the process and purpose of sentencing in the criminal justice system, beyond the confines of its legalistic aspects. Sentencing is the process that concludes any criminal trial that ends with the defendant being convicted, and any hearing in which a defendant pleads guilty. Those...
By Penny Crofts, Honni van Rijswijk
January 09, 2023
Placing contemporary technological developments in their historical context, this book argues for the importance of law in their regulation. Technological developments are focused upon overcoming physical and human constraints. There are no normative constraints inherent in the quest for ongoing ...
By Conor Heaney
October 25, 2022
This book analyses the conceptual and concrete relationships between rhythm and law. Rhythm is the unfolding of ordered and regulated movement. Law operates through the ordering and regulation of movement. Adopting a ‘rhythmanalytical’ perspective – which treats natural and social phenomena in ...
By Robert Herian
September 26, 2022
This book explores the phenomenon of data – big and small – in the contemporary digital, informatic and legal-bureaucratic context. Challenging the way in which legal interest in data has focused on rights and privacy concerns, this book examines the contestable, multivocal and multifaceted figure...
By Jaume Castan Pinos, Mark Friis Hau
September 19, 2022
This book develops a new conceptualisation of lawfare that recognises the polysemantic nature of the term. Drawing on theoretical developments from legal anthropology, international relations, and social theory, the book scrutinises the multiple dimensions of this phenomenon. It illustrates the ...