Product Description: Strange Gods provides a genealogy of modern law as a secular theology, calling into question the received ideas that modern law is radically different from its religious antecedents, and that modernity involved a repudiation of theological concepts...read more

They shared a name and their physical resemblance was startling. And, both Frank Thrings were huge figures in the landscape of 20th-century Australian theatre and film. But, in many ways, they could hardly have been more different. Frank Thring the father (1882-1936) began his career as a sideshow conjuror, and he wheeled, dealed, and occasionally married his way into becoming the legendary "F.T." - an impresario, speculator, and owner of Efftee Films, Australia's first 'talkies' studio. He built for himself an image of grand patriarchal respectability, a sizeable fortune, and all the makings of a dynasty. Frank Thring the son (1926-1994) squandered the fortune and derailed the dynasty in the course of creating his own persona - a unique presence that could make most stages and foyers seem small. He won fame playing tyrants in togas in Hollywood blockbusters (perhaps his most famous role was that of Pontius Pilate in Ben-Hur [1959]), then, suddenly, he came home to Melbourne to play perhaps his finest role - that of Frank Thring, actor and personality extraordinaire. Central to this role was that Frank the son was unapologetically and outrageously gay. In this compelling dual biography, author Peter Fitzpatrick tells the story of two remarkable characters. It's a kind of detective story, following the lives of two men who did all they could to cover their tracks, and to conceal 'the self:' Frank the father used secrecy and sleight-of-hand as strategies for self-protection; Frank the son masked a thoroughly reclusive personality with flamboyant self-parody. It's also the tale of a lost relationship - and of the power a father may have had, even over a son who hardly knew him. "This is a superbly constructed biography, finding a shape in the lives it explores after impeccable research". The Sydney Morning Herald, October 27, 2012 In August 2013, this book won the National Biography Award, Australia's pre-eminent prize for biographical writing and memoir.

Product Description: Few thinkers can have had a more diverse or a more contested impact on theorizing law than Michel Foucault. This diversity is reflected in the wide range of Foucault's work and of the intellectual fields it has so conspicuously influenced...read more

Addresses Foucault's position on law. Considering Foucault's relationship to other continental thinkers, this book examines the claim that the law was expelled from Foucault's analysis of modernity. It focuses on the texts by Foucault: 'Truth and Juridical Forms'; 'Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside'; and, 'A Preface to Transgression'.

Product Description: The scandal of this collection lies not just in its equating law and resistance but also in its consequent revision of those critical, realist, social, and even positivist theories that would constitute law in its dependence on sovereign or society, on some surpassing power, or on the state of the judge's digestion...read more

Product Description: The role of such people as the refugee, the immigrant and the subjugated minority is explored in this book, together with their attendant legal regimes, in the persistent but ever unsettled processes of national/global formation. Challenging accounts that would ascribe to them a transitory or incidental place in the establishment of the modern juridical order, the collection argues that these excluded or marginalized people are coming to form a new entity - the global legal subject - comparable in ways to other non-state actors operating in the international legal system...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

"The Mythology of Modern Law" is a radical reappraisal of the role of myth in modern society. Fitzpatrick uses the example of law, an integral category of modern social thought, to challenge the claims of modernity which deny the relevance of myth to the practice of law in modern society. Peter Fitzpatrick argues that law is mythic both in its origin and as a continuing social force, and depends for its identity on other mythic categories, such as the nation, the individual and the "sciences of man and society". He traces the development of the hold of mythology on Western society to the Enlightenment, despite the supposedly secular rationality of that period, and shows how it was strengthened by the experience of imperialism, when European identity was created in opposition to racially defined "others". Challenging and controversial, "The Mythology of Modern Law" questions current conceptions of legal and social theory. It revises the very foundations of jurisprudence and the sociology of law and undermines the exclusive stands taken within these disciplines.

Approaches to the relation of law and society have for a long time seen law as either autonomous or self-grounded in society. This book is a radically new approach that sees law as both derived from and constitutive of its surrounding social and cultural context. Drawing on the work of major theorists, this book examines the nature of law as it has descended from the Enlightenment, through to colonialism and now globalization. It is a significant contribution to legal philosophy, jurisprudence and socio-legal studies. (view table of contents)

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Product Description: European law is usually taken to embody an unstoppable dynamic of integration and progress. Such assumptions, claim the authors, are rooted firmly in modernist assumptions which avoid the impact of current critical, poststructural and postmodern thought...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This is a dual biography, the story of Louis Esson, the distinguished playwright who has been called 'the father of Australian drama', and his wife Hilda, who did her own pioneering in the theatre and in public health. The plays they wrote and performed reflected the drama of their lives: creative angst, intellectual conflict, untimely death, romantic entanglement, jealousy and despair...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This work, part of the series Socio-Legal Studies, explores the connections between nationalism, racism and the rule of law. The ways in which nation informs law, the New Europe, and first or imperial nations are three dimensions of this concern.

In Dangerous Supplements expert legal scholars employing a variety of theoretical perspectives—feminism, poststructuralism, semiotics, and Marxism—challenge predominating views in jurisprudence. Prevailing notions of the nature of the law, they argue, have failed to recognize the law’s dependence on social constructs and the indeterminance of language. The contributors further claim that proponents of traditional notions have borrowed knowledge from other fields, only to reject that knowledge as ultimately subversive and dangerous in its ramifications.Taking as a point of departure H. L. A. Hart’s The Concept of the Law, Peter Fitzgerald shows how Hart adopted Wittgenstein’s linguistic theory to overthrow J. L. Austin’s “simple” conception of rules and habits in law, only to jettison this theory in order to locate the essence of law in its evolution from a “primal scene.” Other chapters examine the way in which the setting of English law above social relations has masked an imperial mission; how the philosophies of Hayek and Marx, as well as the discourses of liberalism, feminism, semiotics, and poststructuralism, have been assiduously marginalized and rendered inessential to jurisprudence.

Product Description: Critical legal studies is one of the most challenging developments in the contemporary study of law. It engages with the theory and politics of law and shows how both the profession and the academic discipline are deeply influenced by the realities of power in society...read more