PhD Seminar for Law PhD Students - The Marxist Theory of Law: What is it Good For?

Location:
Neil MacCormick Room,
Old College
Date/time
Thu 6 March 2025
11:00-13:00
About this event
It is often said that Marx never developed an integrated theory of law or the state, and that his observations on questions of rights are fragmentary and scattered across a large number of writings. Such assessments are not unjustified; Marx’s work, published and unpublished, offers no general theory of these topics on par with his critique of classical political economy. Yet Marx engaged closely with questions of law, rights, and the state, and he did so frequently, intensively, and with remarkable acuity. This seminar will explore some of these engagements, discussing Marx’s early critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law, his interventions in German debates about the customary rights of peasants to forage for wood, his lengthy and nuanced discussion of the Factory Acts in mid-nineteenth century Britain in the first volume of Capital, the central role of law in the account of ‘primitive accumulation’ and colonial capitalism he provides in the same book, and his trenchant critique of ‘fair distribution’ and social-democratic electoral strategy in ‘The Critique of the Gotha Programme’.
About the speaker Umut Özsu is Professor of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University. His research interests lie mainly in public international law, the history and theory of international law, and Marxist critiques of law, rights, and the state. He is the author of Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (OUP, 2015) and Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960–82 (CUP, 2023). He is also co-editor of the Research Handbook on Law and Marxism (Elgar, 2021) and The Extraterritoriality of Law: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge, 2019), as well as several journal symposia.