Reading Modern Law addresses the identification and elaboration of a critical methodology for reading and writing about law in modernity.

Introduction; 1. Incitement to justice: Fitzpatrick's citations as counter-imperialism, Marianne Constable; 2. Reading Thomas Hobbes: Peter Fitzpatrick's gentle deconstructionist style, James Martel; 3. Unconditional laws and ungovernable sovereigns, George Pavlich; 4.Democracy's ruins, democracy's archive, Paul A. Passavant; 5. Living in international law, Fleur Johns; 6. The World Trade Organization and Fitzpatrick's 'new constitutionalism', Fiona Macmillan; 6. The World Trade Organization and Fitzpatrick's 'new constitutionalism', Fiona Macmillan; 7. Derrida's territorial knowledge of justice, William E. Conklin; 8. Reading Luther: Law, modernity and psychoanalysis, Judith Grbich; 9. Totemic immimanence: Peter Fitzpatrick's liminal contemplation of law, Johan van der Walt; 10. 'The obliging etymology of nomos': Peter Fitzpatrick and the aesthetics of law, Carrol Clarkson; 11.Writing by firelight: Constructing an enduring consciousness of postcoloniality, Abdul Paliwala; 12. Reading slowly: The law of literature and the literature of law; Peter Fitzpatrick.

Ruth Buchanan is Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. She teaches and researches in the areas of globalization, international economic law, law and development, and political and social theory. She has published widely in international journals.

Stewart Motha is Reader in Law at Birkbeck, University of London, and Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, South Africa. He has published widely on questions of postcolonial sovereignty, indigenous land rights, and political theology and democracy.

Sundhya Pahujais Professor of Law at the Melbourne Law School and Director of the Law and Development Research programme at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, University of Melbourne .Sundhya's research is widely published, and focuses on the political economy of international law and institutions, jurisprudence and postcolonial theory.