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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 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 in legal theory and legal humanities. He has tried, in his research, to enrich and extend the practice of theorising law to include a generative dialogue with the history of law, society, language, and cognition. He has worked, for instance, on the role and value of imagination and related forms of language (which he calls ‘artefacts’) for common law reasoning, and on the history of Scottish jurisprudence (with a focus on the twentieth century jurist Neil MacCormick, but looking back also to eighteenth century Scotland). He remains very interested in seeing how legal theory can be informed by a historically conscious account of society and sociability, of emotion and imagination, and of aesthetics, poetics, narratology, and the arts of communication. Two current research interests are: first, the theory and history of legal reasoning, with a particular focus on the theoretical and historical relations between legal reasoning and the language arts, especially rhetoric, grammar, and logic, but also extending to specific devices and genres, such as ethopoeia or character-making, and the comic forms of anecdote, absurdity, hyperbole, and nonsense; and second, the history and historiography of philosophy and its connections to imagination and comedy, with a particular focus on the reception of classical models and practices of imagination and comedy in the long early modern, 1300-1800 (e.g., the reception of Lucian in sixteenth century England and eighteenth century Scotland; and the Aesopic tradition).

Professor Del Mar’s publications include two monographs: Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (2020); and Neil MacCormick: A Life in Politics, Philosophy, and Law (2025); and a number of edited volumes: ‘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; 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

Postgraduate Teaching

Research

Current research:

Professor Del Mar has four main active areas of research interest:

  • 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;
  • 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; and
  • The theory and history of comedy, from Ancient Greek and Roman comedy, through to medieval and early modern comic texts, with an interest in the relationship between comedy, knowledge, and reasoning.

He is currently writing:

Making Character, Making Law (for the Elements in Legal Humanities series): this relates the rich art of making character to the practice of legal reasoning. The first part explores the rich history of the character making arts in ancient Greek and Roman rhetorical, dramatic, and philosophical pedagogy and creative practice. Its focus is on Theophrastus’s Characters on the Greek side and Seneca the Elder’s Declamations on the Roman. The second part turns to the characterisation of the urban underworld, and especially rogues, in medieval and early modern literature, with a focus on the sixteenth century rogue pamphlets, and, in contemporary twentieth century common law reasoning, on the mistaken identity cases in English contract law. The Element, as a whole, seeks to illuminate the complex poetics of making character and how vital this is to a range of practices, including legal reasoning.

Lucian’s Enlightenment (for the Elements in Eighteenth Century Connections series): this Element explores the significance of Lucian of Samosata (2nd century CE) for conceptions of imagination and its relation to philosophy in eighteenth century Scotland. The focus is on how David Hume and Adam Smith read Lucian and how their reading of him influenced their view of the aims and limits of philosophy, especially in terms of the relations between moral philosophy and the pleasures of imagination.

Collaborative projects in progress include:

  • A special issue of Law & Literature, co-edited with Greg Walker, on Comic Pleading: Law, Comedy, Dialogue (1000-1600), with a workshop on 28-29 April; 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 (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 454KB]

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:

  • 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:

  • 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, 2021-2025.
  • 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
  • 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

Current:

Past:

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