Constitutional Politics, Law and Theory (Intensive) (LLM)

As the utopian idea of 'the end of history' falters, it has been replaced by a growing desire for law and constitution reforms to tackle the distinctive problems of the early twenty-first century, including concerns about security and risk, instability and crisis in the relationship between financial markets and sovereign states, perpetual war, and corruption in politics. These expectations, however, are often at odds with the way contemporary social and political theories, and a growing number of constitutional law specialists, conceptualise politics. Birkbeck’s LLM Constitutional Politics, Law and Theory (Intensive) considers the traditional neglect of constitutionalist approaches to politics in Britain - something that is now changing fast. This course focuses on two related, but distinct, processes: the crisis of law and the shift towards exceptional modes of state power; and the demand that law mitigates manifold crises. Questions are raised about law as solution, about its role in the violent imposition of liberal social and market relations, and whether or not we may be able to imagine a different sort of crisis, a different relation between law and the future.