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Professor Maksymilian Del Mar, BA LLB (Qld), PhD (Edinburgh), DSS (Lausanne), Solicitor (Qld)

Maksymilian

Professor of Legal Theory and Legal Humanities

Email: m.delmar@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: Mile End

Profile

Maksymilian Del Mar is Professor of Legal Theory and Legal Humanities in the Department of Law, Queen Mary University of London.

He studied philosophy, literature, and law at the University of Queensland, Australia (BA Hons / LLB Hons), with an Honours dissertation on Italo Calvino. He completed a Doctorate in Philosophy (PhD) at the School of Law, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and a Doctorate in the Social Sciences (DSS) at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Prior to academia, he qualified as a lawyer in Brisbane, Australia, and worked as a Judge’s Associate in the Supreme Court of Queensland. He arrived at Queen Mary in 2011.

Professor Del Mar teaches and researches at the intersection of sociologically- and historically-oriented legal theory and the legal humanities. He has long-standing interests in the relations between social theory and law, including in the importance of second-person approaches to social ethics (as falling in between individualism and collectivism), as well as in transnational and global legal contexts. He also has long-standing interests in the importance of history and historiography for theorising law. He has a special interest in Scottish thought, from the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century to twentieth century jurisprudence. He has also worked on common law reasoning, especially in connection to imagination, emotion, embodiment, and related forms of language (e.g., fictions, metaphors, personifications, hypotheticals), and retains a strong interest in the importance of the theory and history of rhetoric, narrative, and character for legal reasoning and legal education.

He is the author of Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (2020). He has edited or co-edited: ‘Cognitive Legal Humanities’ (2023); ‘Contextual Legal Pedagogy’ (2022); The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities (2020); Virtue, Emotion, and Imagination in Law and Legal Reasoning (2020); Law in Theory and History (2016); Authority in Transnational Legal Theory (2016); Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice (2015); Beyond Text in Legal Education (2013); New Waves in Legal Philosophy (2011); and Law as Institutional Normative Order (2009). He has recently completed Neil MacCormick: A Life in Politics, Philosophy, and Law (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2025).

He edits the Law in Context series at Cambridge University Press; the Encounters series for the International Journal of Law in Context; and Cambridge Elements in Legal Humanities. He serves on the Editorial Boards of Public Humanities and Law & Literature .

At Queen Mary, he convenes the Cotterrell Lectures in Sociological Jurisprudence and the interdisciplinary research network on ‘Imagination’ at the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Undergraduate Teaching

  • Jurisprudence and Legal Theory
  • Legal Reasoning in a Global Context
  • Law, Knowledge, Power: Past and Present

Postgraduate Teaching

Research

Current Research:

Professor Del Mar has three main current research projects:

  • The first is interested in the relations between the history of rhetoric and the history of jurisprudence. The particular focus is on the writing of moral philosophy in eighteenth century Scotland, especially in the works of David Hume and Adam Smith, and how informed this writing is by Hume and Smith’s deep reading in the arts of rhetoric.
  • The second examines the relations between common law reasoning and the inventive and oral arts of memory, especially with respect to practices of collective re-narration of memorable tales.
  • The third is designed to probe the long history of legal ingenuity and its links to the arts of discourse (grammar, rhetoric, logic). This includes close attention to the relations between law, reasoning, and comedy, and with a special interest in the history of pleading and its pedagogy.

Past research

Particular threads of past research include:

  • The role and value of imagination in twentieth century common law reasoning. Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (484pp, Hart, 2020) draws on a range of theoretical traditions, including rhetoric, the cognitive humanities, literary theory, and the philosophy of mind, to argue for why imagination and related forms of language matter to common law reasoning.
  • The life and work of Neil MacCormick, alongside a broader interest in the historiography of philosophy and politics. This long-standing project, which includes a website, containing a timeline, full bibliography, and audio and video resources, has resulted in a monograph entitled Neil MacCormick: A Life in Politics, Philosophy, and Law (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2025).
  • Normativity and social theory: with a specific interest in second-personal, dialogical, and interactionist accounts of normativity and social life.
  • The role and value of the arts in legal education, e.g., in the Beyond Text in Legal Education project.
    Global and transnational legal theory: with a special interest in legal reasoning in a global context, transnational authority, and the theory and history of international law.

Publications

View Professor Maks Del Mar's full CV [PDF 450KB]

Select publications

Supervision

Professor Del Mar welcomes proposals for supervision in legal theory and legal humanities. He is willing to consider any proposal in these fields, but is likely to be most helpful as a supervisor if the proposal falls within his main areas of research. Proposals in the following broad areas would be especially welcome:

  1. The theory and history of common law reasoning, especially its links to aesthetics, rhetoric, and poetics.
  2. Relations between law and cultural theory and history (including literature and the visual arts).
  3. The history and historiography of legal philosophy, and the importance of, and prospects for, historical jurisprudence.
  4. The theory and history of law in a global context.
  5. The tradition of Scottish jurisprudence, especially in and since the 18th century. 

Professor Del Mar is currently supervising:

  • Luiza Tavares da Motta, Tense and Tensions between Law, Literature and Temporality, with Dr Tanzil Chowdhury, Law, 2021-
  • Gabrielle Schwarzmann, Trauma, Pain and Shame: Recovering the Experiences of Non-Elite Women in Late Medieval English Legal Culture, with Professor Miri Rubin, 2021-

Recently completed students:

  • Ms Adela Halo, Ending the French Revolution: Germaine de Staël and the Birth of Liberalism in France, with Gareth Stedman-Jones, Schools of Law and History, 2015-2020

Public Engagement

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