BOOK DESCRIPTION:

Foucault’s Law is the first book in almost fifteen years to address the question of Foucault’s position on law. Readings of Foucault’s conception of law usually start from the proposition that he failed to consider the role of law in modernity, or indeed that he deliberately marginalized it. In canvassing a wealth of primary and secondary sources, the authors of Foucault’s Law rebut this argument. They argue that, far from marginalizing law, Foucault develops a much more radical, nuanced and coherent theory of law than his various critics have acknowledged. For Golder and Fitzpatrick, Foucault’s law is not the contained creature of conventional accounts but is, rather, uncontainable and illimitable. In their radical re-reading, they show how Foucault outlines a concept of law which is not tied to any given form or subordinated to a particular source of power, but is in fact critically oriented towards alterity, towards new possibilities and different ways of being.

Foucault’s Law is an important and original contribution to the debate on Foucault and law. The book engages not only with Foucault’s diverse writings on law and legal theory but also with the extensive interpretive literature on the topic. Developing as it does a revelatory argument about one of the most important social theorists and philosophers of the twentieth century, the book should be of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of law and social theory, legal theory, and law and philosophy of law, as well as to students of Foucault’s work generally.

Ben Golder is a lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Peter Fitzpatrick is Anniversary Professor of Law at Birkbeck, University of London.

PETER FITZPATRICK is currently Anniversary Professor of Law at Birkbeck, University of London and Honorary Professor of Law in the University of Kent. In 2007 he was given the James Boyd White Award by The Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities. He has taught at universities in Europe, North America and Papua New Guinea and published many books on legal philosophy, law and social theory, law and racism, and imperialism, the latest one being Law as Resistance: Modernism, Imperialism, Legalism (Ashgate, 2008). Outside the academy he has been in an international legal practice and was also in the Prime Minister’s Office in Papua New Guinea for several years.