Nomos Studies in Law, Culture and Power
About the Book Series
Established by Nomos: Centre for International Research in Law, Culture and Power (based at the Institute of European Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków), this series seeks to encourage the development of critical legal scholarship, legal history, and law and the humanities, towards a radical rethinking of law and legal practice.
The series places at its core a sceptical view on the present status of legality while advocating for a study of the law in relation to its other, that is the practices of excess and violence that sustain the law’s operation. It endeavours to do so, first by offering a forum for critical analyses of current regimes of legality in relation to the law’s historical and cultural embeddedness. Second, it aims to provide a venue for exploring and integrating critical approaches to law, and forms of normativity that have been relegated to other disciplines, such as cultural anthropology, economy, political theory, and psychoanalysis (to name a few). Last, but not least, it will open a space for reflecting on emerging, potential future(s) of legality, while supporting jurisprudential inquiries within utopian and prefigurative thinking, with a view to overcoming both the quietism and the feigned apoliticism of established jurisprudential studies and reconnect with traditions of philosophical reflection on the law.
Proposals for monographs, edited collections and short books engaging with the outlined themes are welcome. For information get in contact with the series editors.
The End of Law: Political Theology and the Crisis of Sovereignty
1st Edition
By Mårten Björk, Tormod Johansen
December 01, 2025
This book examines how Gustav Radbruch, H.L.A. Hart, and Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde each addressed the question of the end of law, its function, and its normative foundation within the context of the modern legal and political order. Through a politico-theological reading, it highlights the tension...
Legal Imaginaries of Crisis and Fear: Dark Constitutionalism
1st Edition
Edited
By Martin Belov
November 18, 2025
This book explores the epistemological, semiotic, semantic, and heuristic dimensions of the dark emotions in constitutional and international law. We are living in times of crisis and emergency where negative emotions and dark feelings are abundant. As these have come to form the intellectual and ...
Law and the Exception: Towards a New Paradigm
1st Edition
By Gian-Giacomo Fusco, Przemysław Tacik
September 29, 2025
This book proposes a paradigm shift in the way that ‘the state of exception’–as it is usually named in legal and political theory–is to be understood. Building on the assumption that the exception is a heuristic idea that is still a relevant category for a critical deconstruction of law, this book ...
Covid, Biopolitics and the Suspension of the Nomos: Herd Immunities
1st Edition
By William Watkin
June 20, 2025
This book considers how, during the unprecedented global lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the normal order of everyday life, of the rule of law, of power itself was interrupted, and hence the nomos of this earth was suspended. Employing the term ‘herd immunity’ from vaccination science and ...
Law, Culture and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe: A Comparative Engagement
1st Edition
Edited
By Cosmin Cercel, Alexandra Mercescu, Mirosław Michał Sadowski
May 06, 2025
Combining insights from comparative legal theory, jurisprudence and legal history, this collection examines the legal and constitutional identity of Central and Eastern Europe. Although the various countries of Central and Eastern Europe have often compared themselves to the West, the failure of ...
Legal Form: Pashukanis and the Marxist Critique of Law
1st Edition
Edited
By Cosmin Cercel, Gian-Giacomo Fusco, Przemyslaw Tacik
October 14, 2024
A century after the publication of Evgeny Pashukanis’ pivotal book General Theory of Law and Marxism, this collection presents a comprehensive account and analysis of his key concept of legal form. Evgeny Pashukanis’ General Theory, born amidst the fervour of the first socialist revolution, remains...
Legal Form and the End of Law: Pashukanis's Legacy
1st Edition
Edited
By Cosmin Cercel, Gian-Giacomo Fusco, Przemyslaw Tacik
October 14, 2024
Following the 100th anniversary of Pashukanis’ General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924), this volume aims to breathe new life into the main category of Pashukanian legacy, the concept of legal form. This book offers new, deeper and more general, ways in which the concept of legal form can be used...