Dr Michael Murphy - orcid.org/0000-0001-5732-7256
Postdoctoral Fellow, April - July 2022
Home institution: Max Planck Institute of Comparative and International Private Law
Michael Murphy obtained his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was a guest research scholar at the Max Planck Institute from September 2021 to March 2022. Dr Murphy’s first book, A Post-Western Account of Critical Cosmopolitan Social Theory: Being and Acting in a Democratic World, sets itself the extraordinarily ambitious task of rethinking the critical cosmopolitan social theory as developed by Gerard Delanty and Walter Mignolo by pollinating this dialogue with the work of the Japanese thinker Watsuji Tetsurō. His current research engages with the growing fragility, vulnerability, and the perception of a lack of legitimacy of democracies, through the development of a decolonial philosophy of law.
Project Title: A Decolonial Philosophy of Law: Toward Radical Imaginations of Democracy
The decolonial critique of law, developed from the experiences of colonialism in Latin America, represents a significant challenge to social, political, and legal theories. However, it also offers us a way to think about how our economic, social, political, and legal institutions could be different, and in which all people’s lives and voices matter. The law was an instrument of imperialism, but it has also been used as an instrument of social, economic, cultural, and political repression, at home. So, rather than begin with notions of an ideal of law or law as an autonomous sphere of legal rules and procedures, my research aims to provide a legal imagination that connects jurisprudence, a theory of law, legal practice, with pluralistic communities for an alternative vision of the results of democratic participation.