GilbertLeung
critical legal theory · law · philosophy
I research and write on critical legal theory and legal philosophy, and am a founding editor of Critical Legal Thinking and a director of Counterpress, a publisher of critical scholarship in law and the wider humanities. I completed my PhD in law at Birkbeck, University of London, and my LLM and DEA in legal theory at the European Academy of Legal Theory in Brussels
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Filmed on Location · 22 September 2024
What is the Critical Legal Conference?
Latest publication
What Does Justice Sound Like?
Critical Legal Thinking, September 18, 2026.
Publications and other outputs
All works are by Gilbert Leung unless otherwise indicated. Items are arranged in reverse chronological order within each section.
Books and edited collections
Law and Diversity: Current Perspectives and Future Challenges
Co-edited with Anne Röthel. Forthcoming 2027.
Jean-Luc Nancy: The First Question of Law
Counterpress, forthcoming 2027.
Book chapters
Just Listening
In Rights, Resistance and Critique: The Legal Theory of Costas Douzinas, edited by Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa and Illan rua Wall, 50–55. Abingdon: Routledge, 2026.
Breach of the Peace or Violence and/of Silence
In Disobedience: Concept and Practice, edited by Elena Loizidou, 37–47. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013.
Illegal Fictions
In Jean-Luc Nancy: Justice, Legality and World, edited by Benjamin Hutchens, 82–95. London: Continuum, 2012.
Towards a Radical Cosmopolitanism
In New Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political, edited by Matthew Stone, Illan rua Wall, and Costas Douzinas, 229–40. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012.
Repensando a liberdade no ius cosmopoliticum de Kant
Translated by Eduardo Costa Barbosa. In Estudos de direito público e filosofia do direito: Um diálogo entre Brasil e Alemanha, edited by Ricardo Lobo Torres and Ana Paula Barbosa-Fohrmann, 131–42. Rio de Janeiro: Renovar, 2011.
Journal articles
Cosmopolitan Ethics from Below
Ethical Perspectives 20, no. 1 (2013): 43–60.
The Efflorescent Nihilism of Laughter: An Existential Supplement to Satirical Legal Studies
Law and Humanities 4, no. 2 (2010): 275–89.
Otherwise Than Hospitality: A Disputation on the Relation of Ethics to Law and Politics
With Matthew Stone. Law and Critique 20, no. 2 (2009): 193–206.
A Critical History of Cosmopolitanism
Law, Culture and the Humanities 5, no. 3 (2009): 370–90.
Human Rights, World Citizenship and the Cosmopolitan Question
Human Rights Law Review Student Supplement 2003–2004 (August 2004): 3–6.
Key concepts and reference entries
Law
In The Nancy Dictionary, edited by Peter Gratton and Marie-Eve Morin, 139–40. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
Jurisfiction
In The Nancy Dictionary, edited by Peter Gratton and Marie-Eve Morin, 130–31. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
Abandonment
In The Nancy Dictionary, edited by Peter Gratton and Marie-Eve Morin, 15–16. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
Translations
On Human Rights: Two Simple Remarks
Jean-Luc Nancy. In The Meanings of Rights: The Philosophy and Social Theory of Human Rights, edited by Costas Douzinas and Conor Gearty, 15–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Translated by Gilbert Leung.
Short articles, commentaries and online writing
Introducing Counterpress: A New Open Access Publisher of Law and Critical Theory
With Stephen Connelly and Illan rua Wall. Critical Legal Thinking, August 26, 2013.
Rights, Politics and Paradise: Notes on Žižek’s ‘Silent Voice of a New Beginning’
Critical Legal Thinking, March 14, 2012.
The Occupy Protests, #GlobalDemocracy and … Cosmopolitanism?
Critical Legal Thinking, October 17, 2011.
Doctoral thesis
Radical Cosmopolitanism: Law, Freedom and World Creation
PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London, 2010.
Commissioned reports and educational materials
Comparative Constitutional Law: United Kingdom, Republic of Albania and European Union
Teaching and educational materials prepared for a World Bank-funded justice-reform programme covering comparative constitutional law and European Union law. London, 2004. 127 leaves.