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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). 

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