Emmanuel
Melissaris
Email:
e.melissaris@lse.ac.uk
Administrative support:
Amanda Tinnams
Room: New Academic Building 5.15
Tel.
020-7955-7257
University of Athens (Law); University of Edinburgh (MSc;
PhD).
Research interests
Social Justice and Criminal Law; Legal Pluralism.
External Activities
Member of the editorial board of
Jurisprudence
(with J.E.Penner) McCoubrey & White's Textbook on
Jurisprudence 5th edition (OUP 2012)
Fully
updated and revised by James Penner and Emmanuel Melissaris, McCoubrey &
White's Textbook on Jurisprudence clearly breaks down the complexities of
this often daunting yet fascinating subject. Sophisticated ideas are
explained concisely and with clarity, ensuring the reader is aware of the
subtleties of the subject yet not overwhelmed. With chapters dedicated
to both key concepts and leading theorists, this text takes a wide-ranging
look at jurisprudence and places central ideas in context. In particular
this text centres around one of the leading theorists, H.L.A Hart, and
considers the landscape of jurisprudence in relation to his seminal The
Concept of Law, looking at the key ideas which influenced him and
considering the response to his work. Coverage of post-modern and feminist
legal theory is also included, alongside discussion of key theorists such as
Hobbes, Kant, and Rawls.
click here for publisher's site
Ubiquitous Law : Legal Theory and the Space for Legal
Pluralism
(Ashgate, 2009)
Ubiquitous Law explores the possibility of understanding the
law in dissociation from the State while, at the same time, establishing the
conditions of meaningful communication between various legalities. This book
argues that the enquiry into the legal has been biased by the implicit or
explicit presupposition of the State's exclusivity to a claim to legality as
well as the tendency to make the enquiry into the law the task of experts, who
purport to be able to represent the legal community's commitments in an
authoritative manner. Very worryingly, the experts' point of view then becomes
constitutive of the law and parasitic to and distortive of people's commitments.
Ubiquitous Law counter-suggests a new methodology for legal theory, which will
not be based on rigid epistemological and normative assumptions but rather on
self-reflection and mutual understanding and critique, so as to establish
acceptable differences on the basis of a commonality.
click here
for publisher's site
'A Social and Legal Theory of Re-Enchantment: Interpretivism, Argumentation, and
Law' Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic
Theory, Volume 19, Issue 4, pp. 609–623, December 2012
'Property offences as crimes of injustice' Criminal Law and Philosophy 6
(2) (2012) pp.149-166
The article provides an outline of the basic principles
and conditions of criminalisation of interferences with others’ property
rights in the context of a specific context: a liberal, social
democratic state, the legitimacy of which depends primarily on its
impartiality between moral doctrines and the fair distribution of
liberties and resources. I begin by giving a brief outline of the
conditions of political legitimacy, the place of property and the
conditions of criminalisation in such a state. With that framework in
place, I argue that interferences with others’ property rights should be
viewed as violations of political duties stemming from institutions of
distribution. I then discuss three implications of this view: the
bearing of social injustice on the criminal law treatment of acts of
distributive injustice; the expansion of criminalisation over the
violation of distribution-related duties, which are considered
criminally irrelevant under moral conceptions of criminalisation; and,
finally, the normative significance of the modus operandi.
click here for full text via
Springer [ON
CAMPUS]
click here for full text via
Springer [OFF CAMPUS]
‘Toward a Political Theory of Criminal Law: A Critical Rawlsian Account’, New
Criminal Law Review 15/1 (2012) pp. 122-155.