James Murray

This collection of essays explores the different ways the insights from complexity theory can be applied to law. Complexity theory - a variant of systems theory - views law as an emergent, complex, self-organising system comprised of an interactive network of actors and systems that operate with no overall guiding hand, giving rise to complex, collective behaviour in law communications and actions. Addressing such issues as the unpredictability of legal systems, the ability of legal systems to adapt to changes in society, the importance of context, and the nature of law, the essays look to the implications of a complexity theory analysis for the study of public policy and administrative law, international law and human rights, regulatory practices in business and finance, and the practice of law and legal ethics. These are areas where law, which craves certainty, encounters unending, irresolvable complexity. This collection shows the many ways complexity theory thinking can reshape and clarify our understanding of the various problems relating to the theory and practice of law.

Deleuze & Guattari: Emergent Law is an exposition and development of Deleuze & Guattari's legal theory. Although there has been considerable interest in Deleuze & Guattari in critical legal studies, as well as considerable interest in legality in Deleuze & Guattari studies, this is the first book to focus exclusively on Deleuze & Guattari and law. Situating Deleuze & Guattari's engagement with social organisation and legality in the context of their theory of 'abstract machines' and 'intensive assemblages', Jamie Murray presents their theory of law as that of a two-fold conception of, first, a transcendent molar law and, second, an immanent molecular emergent law. Transcendent molar legality is the traditional object of legal theory. And, as explicated here, immanent molecular emergent law is the novel juridical object that Deleuze & Guattari identify. Developing this conception, Deleuze & Guattari: Emergent Law draws out its implications for current and for future legal theory; arguing that it provides the basis for a new jurisprudence capable of creating new concepts of legality.

The paper articulates Deleuze & Guattari’s semiotics towards a semiotic of law through a discussion of the intensive semiotics of the field of emergence and pragmatic semiotics of social power. Within the framework of the pragmatic semiotics, it is argued that the crucial tension is how social machines and their regimes of signs operate with the intensive semiotics of the field of emergence. The signifying regime of the State social machine constructs itself on the excluded foundation of the field of emergence, and what is lost are the real ontological and social conditions of emergence, intensity and affect. In contrast, the counter-signifying regime of the war social machine actively operates with the intensive semiotic of the field of emergence, and develops an image of legality and regime of signs that taps the field of emergence for social organisation and expression. Returning to the issue of emergence and legality, the concept of Emergent Law is developed as a war social machine, abstract machine, assemblage, and regime of signs, that operates a semiotic that is developed in terms of an intensive semiotics that is open to and taps the forces of the field of emergence.

In recent years, philosopher Jeff McMahan has solidified an influential view that moral desert is irrelevant to the ethics of self-defense. This work aims to criticize this view by demonstrating that there are cases in which moral desert has a niche position in determining whether it may be permissible to kill a person in self- (or other-)defense. This is done by criticizing McMahan’s Responsibility Account of liability as being overly punitive against minimally responsible threateners (MRTs), and by demonstrating, through reference to Saba Bazargan’s Hybrid Account of liability to defensive harm, that further justification than mere liability is necessary in the justification of killing these kinds of threateners. It is also argued that other kinds of justifications like lesser-evil justifications are not necessarily strong enough to justify killing MRTs, even on top of established liability. This paper puts forward the view that, where a strong enough moral difference between threatener and innocent victim cannot be established, a justification on the basis of the implications of prior moral acts might, on some occasions, give us reasons to kill or not kill MRTs in self-defense.