Maks Del Mar
Biographic Data
| ID | 1317724 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maks Del Mar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maks |
| FAMILY NAME | Del Mar |
| SIGNATURE | DEL MAR M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen Mary University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8242-5867 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Reading Plato Otherwise
This article, a contribution to a symposium in honour of Christopher Tomlins, seeks to embrace his ‘speculative history’ and apply it to the history of philosophy, and especially Plato. The article attempts to read Plato otherwise, offering an alternative account of his picture of philosophy, not as the mastery of the body by reason, and the domination of the ignorant many by the enlightened few, but instead as a therapeutic response to pain, esp…
The Confluence of Rhetoric and Emotion
This essay argues that the history of rhetoric is a crucial resource for illuminating the theoretical importance of emotion in, for instance, reasoning, reading, knowing, acting, and judging. Taking its cue from two recent histories of rhetoric – Rita Copeland’s Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (2021), and Benedict Robinson’s Passion’s Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson (2021), which together trace thirteen centuries of…
Cognitive Legal Humanities
Whereas cognitive legal studies has attracted a considerable amount of attention from law professors over the past few decades, cognitive legal humanities (CLH) is only starting to gain traction. CLH brings together work in the cognitive sciences, the humanities, and law, focusing not so much on the prescriptive concerns that often animate research in cognitive legal studies, but on ways of enriching that vein of work—and legal scholarship more g…
El jinete de la capa roja
Born in 1973 in Bogotá, where she lives and works. After studying mechanical engineering, she graduated in fine arts from the National University of Colombia. Recognized for multiple residencies, exhibitions, and national and international collections, her work stands out for a continuous interest in themes related to nature, particularly trees as complex worlds. She spends part of her time at her home on Lake Tota, a place that inspires the seri…
Contextual legal pedagogy
This is an introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Contextual Legal Pedagogy’. It introduces the themes of the Special Issue and offers summaries of the papers in the collection. The introduction considers whether, and how, contextual legal pedagogy can still be radical, and how addressing pedagogical issues also necessarily involves addressing vital theoretical issues
The Poetics and Politics of Custom
What role does the poetics of custom play in Renaissance literature? Stephanie Elsky's wonderful new book offers an extended meditation on this question. Recovering a sense of custom that requires pulling aside the curtain of modernity, Elsky shows just how fecund, how fertile, and how enabling of rhetorical invention and literary play is this older sense of custom. In large part, this fecundity lies in the particular temporality of that premoder…
Introduction to Symposium on Fleur Johns, “Data, Detection, and the Redistribution of the Sensible in International Law”
This symposium situates a recent AJIL article by Fleur Johns, and develops ideas through and from it. 1 Johns' article centers on new or newish sensory technologies rather than distant history; yet much can be gleaned about its significance for legal scholarship by comparing it with the work of contemporary historians such as Lauren Benton. 2 Benton has looked for law in some unlikely places: chronicles of imperial voyages, manuals of colonial ad…
Imagining by feeling
This paper argues that feeling compassion (and other relational emotions) makes an important, beneficial difference in adjudication, as it improves the exercise of the perspectival imagination – that is, it helps a judge to better understand, and to better describe, a situation as another person experienced it. Even where a judge has a highly developed capacity for empathy and sympathy (these being cognitive and evaluative processes that are dist…
John Harrington, Towards a Rhetoric of Medical Law, Abingdon and New York
Common virtue and the perspectival imagination
This paper considers the similarities between Adam Smith's device of the impartial spectator and the use of perspectival devices in common law reasoning. The paper adopts a reading of Smith's device as one involving the exercise of imaginative sympathy by an ordinarily virtuous, and culturally and historically situated, spectator who does not have a stake in the outcome of the scene being evaluated. The point here is to show that the impartial sp…
Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice
Must We Play to Win? A Reply to Morgan
This paper offers a brief reply to William Morgan’s critique of my review of Andrei Marmor’s Social Conventions (2009). Morgan’s principal critique is that I am wrong to think that the constitutive rules of games do not determine their aims and values. In particular, with regards to chess, Morgan argues that the rules of chess determine that the aim of playing chess is to win the game. I defend my position that one can play the game of chess with…
Recovering legal fictions
Aside from some occasional exceptions, the topic of legal fictions has largely disappeared from the agenda of the legal academy.It was not always so: arguably, the topic used to be a hot jurisprudential potato. 2 Further, the topic of fictions and fictionalism generally continues to be debated amongst philosophers.Why, one might ask, is the topic so neglected in contemporary legal scholarship?This is not the moment for a thorough investigation in…
Legal fictions and legal change
This paper offers a definition of legal fictions and an evaluation of the role of legal fictions in legal practice, especially insofar as they enable legal change. The first part of the paper defines legal fictions as any suspension of one or more of the required operative facts leading to the imposition of an associated normative consequence, whether this suspension is introduced because of (1) the absence of proof of some previously required fa…
Exemplarity and Narrativity in the Common Law Tradition
This paper argues that for the purposes of analyzing legal reasoning, exemplarity is profitably understood as a complex concept with the following dimensions: first, typicality; second, atypicality; and third, modelling for the future. These dimensions can also be usefully thought of in temporal terms: typicality is backward-looking, atypicality is present-regarding, and modelling is future-oriented. Any instance of exemplarity delicately balance…
What Does History Matter to Legal Epistemology
This paper argues that not only does history matter to legal epistemology, but also that understanding legal epistemology can yield a certain understanding of the past. The paper focuses on the common law practice of precedent and argues that there is no set of rules, principles, reasons or material facts that constitute the fixed or foundational content of past decisions (a ‘timeless what’ that determines its own relevance), but rather that what…
Marmor’s Social Conventions
This essay argues that the practical reason approach to the study of social conventions (and social normativity more generally) fails to adequately account for the fluency of social action in environments that we experience as familiar. The practical reason approach, articulated most recently in Andrei Marmor’s Social Conventions: From Language to Law (2009) does help us, though not wholly adequately, to understand how we tend to react to, and ex…
The moral quality of work in international economic institutions
This paper offers a theory through which, we argue, we can more appropriately evaluate and potentially improve the moral quality of work. There are three components to such a theory. The first two components, which we argue need to be integrated, are normative resources that appeal to two different behavioural capacities: first, the articulation of rules, appealing to the capacity of agents to deliberate about what they ought to do; second, the i…
Jurisprudence on the Frontline
In an article preceding his latest book, Law and Irresponsibility: On the Legitimation of Human Suffering , Scott Veitch posed the following challenge to contemporary jurisprudence: ‘ [i]t says a great deal ... about the state of “ jurisprudence ” in Britain that, while vast amounts of time and intellectual energy are spent debating the values of legal positivism versus natural law theorising, the British government had been involved in a legal e…
System Values and Understanding Legal Language
This paper argues that the concerns and methodology of the recently completed Report of the International Law Commission (ILC) over the fragmentation of international law presuppose a particular way of understanding legal language which tends to separate the understanding of rules from their factual adaptability to certain recurring social problems faced within specific institutional contexts. The paper argues that separating rules from their fac…
Legal fictions and legal change
This paper offers a definition of legal fictions and an evaluation of the role of legal fictions in legal practice, especially insofar as they enable legal change. The first part of the paper defines legal fictions as any suspension of one or more of the required operative facts leading to the imposition of an associated normative consequence, whether this suspension is introduced because of (1) the absence of proof of some previously required fa…
Imagining by feeling
This paper argues that feeling compassion (and other relational emotions) makes an important, beneficial difference in adjudication, as it improves the exercise of the perspectival imagination – that is, it helps a judge to better understand, and to better describe, a situation as another person experienced it. Even where a judge has a highly developed capacity for empathy and sympathy (these being cognitive and evaluative processes that are dist…
Exemplarity and Narrativity in the Common Law Tradition
This paper argues that for the purposes of analyzing legal reasoning, exemplarity is profitably understood as a complex concept with the following dimensions: first, typicality; second, atypicality; and third, modelling for the future. These dimensions can also be usefully thought of in temporal terms: typicality is backward-looking, atypicality is present-regarding, and modelling is future-oriented. Any instance of exemplarity delicately balance…
Common virtue and the perspectival imagination
This paper considers the similarities between Adam Smith's device of the impartial spectator and the use of perspectival devices in common law reasoning. The paper adopts a reading of Smith's device as one involving the exercise of imaginative sympathy by an ordinarily virtuous, and culturally and historically situated, spectator who does not have a stake in the outcome of the scene being evaluated. The point here is to show that the impartial sp…
Marmor’s Social Conventions
This essay argues that the practical reason approach to the study of social conventions (and social normativity more generally) fails to adequately account for the fluency of social action in environments that we experience as familiar. The practical reason approach, articulated most recently in Andrei Marmor’s Social Conventions: From Language to Law (2009) does help us, though not wholly adequately, to understand how we tend to react to, and ex…
The moral quality of work in international economic institutions
This paper offers a theory through which, we argue, we can more appropriately evaluate and potentially improve the moral quality of work. There are three components to such a theory. The first two components, which we argue need to be integrated, are normative resources that appeal to two different behavioural capacities: first, the articulation of rules, appealing to the capacity of agents to deliberate about what they ought to do; second, the i…
Jurisprudence on the Frontline
In an article preceding his latest book, Law and Irresponsibility: On the Legitimation of Human Suffering , Scott Veitch posed the following challenge to contemporary jurisprudence: ‘ [i]t says a great deal ... about the state of “ jurisprudence ” in Britain that, while vast amounts of time and intellectual energy are spent debating the values of legal positivism versus natural law theorising, the British government had been involved in a legal e…
System Values and Understanding Legal Language
This paper argues that the concerns and methodology of the recently completed Report of the International Law Commission (ILC) over the fragmentation of international law presuppose a particular way of understanding legal language which tends to separate the understanding of rules from their factual adaptability to certain recurring social problems faced within specific institutional contexts. The paper argues that separating rules from their fac…
What Does History Matter to Legal Epistemology
This paper argues that not only does history matter to legal epistemology, but also that understanding legal epistemology can yield a certain understanding of the past. The paper focuses on the common law practice of precedent and argues that there is no set of rules, principles, reasons or material facts that constitute the fixed or foundational content of past decisions (a ‘timeless what’ that determines its own relevance), but rather that what…
Marmor’s Social Conventions
This essay argues that the practical reason approach to the study of social conventions (and social normativity more generally) fails to adequately account for the fluency of social action in environments that we experience as familiar. The practical reason approach, articulated most recently in Andrei Marmor’s Social Conventions: From Language to Law (2009) does help us, though not wholly adequately, to understand how we tend to react to, and ex…
Recovering legal fictions
Aside from some occasional exceptions, the topic of legal fictions has largely disappeared from the agenda of the legal academy.It was not always so: arguably, the topic used to be a hot jurisprudential potato. 2 Further, the topic of fictions and fictionalism generally continues to be debated amongst philosophers.Why, one might ask, is the topic so neglected in contemporary legal scholarship?This is not the moment for a thorough investigation in…
Legal fictions and legal change
This paper offers a definition of legal fictions and an evaluation of the role of legal fictions in legal practice, especially insofar as they enable legal change. The first part of the paper defines legal fictions as any suspension of one or more of the required operative facts leading to the imposition of an associated normative consequence, whether this suspension is introduced because of (1) the absence of proof of some previously required fa…
Exemplarity and Narrativity in the Common Law Tradition
This paper argues that for the purposes of analyzing legal reasoning, exemplarity is profitably understood as a complex concept with the following dimensions: first, typicality; second, atypicality; and third, modelling for the future. These dimensions can also be usefully thought of in temporal terms: typicality is backward-looking, atypicality is present-regarding, and modelling is future-oriented. Any instance of exemplarity delicately balance…
Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice
Must We Play to Win? A Reply to Morgan
This paper offers a brief reply to William Morgan’s critique of my review of Andrei Marmor’s Social Conventions (2009). Morgan’s principal critique is that I am wrong to think that the constitutive rules of games do not determine their aims and values. In particular, with regards to chess, Morgan argues that the rules of chess determine that the aim of playing chess is to win the game. I defend my position that one can play the game of chess with…
Introduction to Symposium on Fleur Johns, “Data, Detection, and the Redistribution of the Sensible in International Law”
This symposium situates a recent AJIL article by Fleur Johns, and develops ideas through and from it. 1 Johns' article centers on new or newish sensory technologies rather than distant history; yet much can be gleaned about its significance for legal scholarship by comparing it with the work of contemporary historians such as Lauren Benton. 2 Benton has looked for law in some unlikely places: chronicles of imperial voyages, manuals of colonial ad…
Imagining by feeling
This paper argues that feeling compassion (and other relational emotions) makes an important, beneficial difference in adjudication, as it improves the exercise of the perspectival imagination – that is, it helps a judge to better understand, and to better describe, a situation as another person experienced it. Even where a judge has a highly developed capacity for empathy and sympathy (these being cognitive and evaluative processes that are dist…
John Harrington, Towards a Rhetoric of Medical Law, Abingdon and New York
Common virtue and the perspectival imagination
This paper considers the similarities between Adam Smith's device of the impartial spectator and the use of perspectival devices in common law reasoning. The paper adopts a reading of Smith's device as one involving the exercise of imaginative sympathy by an ordinarily virtuous, and culturally and historically situated, spectator who does not have a stake in the outcome of the scene being evaluated. The point here is to show that the impartial sp…
The Poetics and Politics of Custom
What role does the poetics of custom play in Renaissance literature? Stephanie Elsky's wonderful new book offers an extended meditation on this question. Recovering a sense of custom that requires pulling aside the curtain of modernity, Elsky shows just how fecund, how fertile, and how enabling of rhetorical invention and literary play is this older sense of custom. In large part, this fecundity lies in the particular temporality of that premoder…
El jinete de la capa roja
Born in 1973 in Bogotá, where she lives and works. After studying mechanical engineering, she graduated in fine arts from the National University of Colombia. Recognized for multiple residencies, exhibitions, and national and international collections, her work stands out for a continuous interest in themes related to nature, particularly trees as complex worlds. She spends part of her time at her home on Lake Tota, a place that inspires the seri…
Contextual legal pedagogy
This is an introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Contextual Legal Pedagogy’. It introduces the themes of the Special Issue and offers summaries of the papers in the collection. The introduction considers whether, and how, contextual legal pedagogy can still be radical, and how addressing pedagogical issues also necessarily involves addressing vital theoretical issues
Cognitive Legal Humanities
Whereas cognitive legal studies has attracted a considerable amount of attention from law professors over the past few decades, cognitive legal humanities (CLH) is only starting to gain traction. CLH brings together work in the cognitive sciences, the humanities, and law, focusing not so much on the prescriptive concerns that often animate research in cognitive legal studies, but on ways of enriching that vein of work—and legal scholarship more g…
The Confluence of Rhetoric and Emotion
This essay argues that the history of rhetoric is a crucial resource for illuminating the theoretical importance of emotion in, for instance, reasoning, reading, knowing, acting, and judging. Taking its cue from two recent histories of rhetoric – Rita Copeland’s Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (2021), and Benedict Robinson’s Passion’s Fictions from Shakespeare to Richardson (2021), which together trace thirteen centuries of…
Reading Plato Otherwise
This article, a contribution to a symposium in honour of Christopher Tomlins, seeks to embrace his ‘speculative history’ and apply it to the history of philosophy, and especially Plato. The article attempts to read Plato otherwise, offering an alternative account of his picture of philosophy, not as the mastery of the body by reason, and the domination of the ignorant many by the enlightened few, but instead as a therapeutic response to pain, esp…
Sociology (16 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Law in Society and Culture (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works)