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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 (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 teaches and researches at the intersection of legal theory and the legal humanities. He has long-standing interests in the relations between social theory and legal theory, as well as 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 extensively on common law reasoning, especially in connection to imagination, emotion, embodiment, and related forms of language (e.g., fictions, metaphors, figures / personifications, and hypothetical scenarios). He has an interest in the history of common law reasoning and pedagogy, especially in the long early modern, with a focus on the connections of the common law to the arts of language, character, and narrative.  

He is the author of Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (2020) and Neil MacCormick: A Life in Politics, Philosophy, and Law (2025). 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 edits the Law in Context series at Cambridge University Press; 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 is currently researching within the following broad areas:

First, the theory and history of common law reasoning, including its pedagogy, and its connections with the history of rhetoric, grammar, logic, and a variety of literary genres, especially comedy. Specific work in progress includes a short book on ‘Character Making and Law Making’, as well as papers on dialogue, pleading, and laughter in the medieval and early modern common law.

Second, the history of jurisprudence, with particular attention to the writing and reading of jurisprudence, and thus its connections to the history of the arts of discourse, especially rhetoric. The specific interest is in the influence of Greek-language rhetoricians and orators on eighteenth century Scottish writing about justice and morality.

Third, the history of imagination and its relations to knowledge, including historicising the image in the mind’s eye, and comparing the role and value of imagination across epistemic activities and cultures. Current interests include thought experiments and their functions in epistemic communities.

And fourth, developing a relational social and legal theory, drawing on work on second-person ethics and related approaches that prioritise relational dynamics when theorising law and society. This builds on previous work on compassion and vulnerability, and on Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil’s ethics of encounter and attention.

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, 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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