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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 at the intersection of legal theory and legal humanities. In general, he seeks to understand how the arts of language, and their complex histories, matter for theorising law. He has a special interest in the theory and history of imagination. His first 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. He also has an interest in the history and historiography of philosophy, with a particular focus on Scotland. His second book – Neil MacCormick: A Life in Politics, Philosophy, and Law (2025) – offers a reading of the entire corpus of MacCormick’s work, particularly in its Scottish context. Current research interests focus on exploring relations between the history of the language arts, imagination, and the practice and pedagogy of law and philosophy, with a focus on the long early modern or ‘long humanism’ (1300-1800).

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 two current research projects. The first concerns the relations between character sketching and law making and involves tracing the long history of the character arts (e.g., Theophrastus’s Characters and their legacy) on legal reasoning. The second examines how David Hume and Adam Smith read Lucian of Samosata (2nd century CE).

Collaborative work in progress is focused on the relations between comedy and law in the medieval and early modern (1000-1600), and on the theoretical and historical relations between law and poetics in the long early modern (1300-1800).

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 423KB]

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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