Law and the Epistemologies of the South

Modern state law excludes populations peoples and social groups by making them invisible irrelevant or dangerous. In this book Boaventura de Sousa Santos offers a radical critique of the law and develops an innovative paradigm of socio-legal studies which is based on the historical experience of the Global South. He traces the history of modern law as an abyssal law or a kind of law that is theoretically invisible yet implements profound exclusions in practice. This abyssal line has been the key procedure used by modern modes of domination - capitalism colonialism and patriarchy - to divide people into two groups the metropolitan and the colonial or the fully human and the sub-human. Crucially de Sousa Santos rejects the decadent pessimism that claims that we are living through 'the end of history'. Instead this book offers practical hopeful alternatives to social exclusion and modern legal domination aiming to make post-abyssal legal utopias a reality.