This Research Handbook offers unparalleled insights into the large-scale resurgence of interest in Marx and Marxism in recent years, with contributions devoted specifically to Marxist critiques of law, rights, and the state.

This unique Research Handbook maps the historical, theoretical, and methodological concepts in sociology of law, exploring the rich and complex nature of this area of research. It argues that sociology of law flourishes due to its strong capacity for interdisciplinary engagement and links to other scientific concepts, methodologies and research fields.

Presenting diverse understandings of the origins and development of social welfare law, this globally informed Research Handbook embraces the inherent contradictions and complexities within the field. It emphasises the importance of ethical research and inclusivity and recognises the value of historical and contemporary methodologies. The Research Handbook on Social Welfare Law illustrates the breadth and depth of modern welfare research, examining approaches that challenge the traditional boundaries of social assistance in practice. Contributors, including those from the Global North and South, explore timely and fascinating case studies, including an analysis of social insurance in India, constitutionalism in South Africa and social care in the UK. They cut across varied legal and social contexts, informing future research on a global scale. This Research Handbook is crucial for academics and researchers focusing on social policy, particularly its patterns, histories and futures. It will provide rich rewards for students of law, social welfare and public policy.

This timely Research Handbook offers significant insights into an understudied subject, bringing together a broad range of socio-legal studies of medicine to help answer complex and interdisciplinary questions about global health – a major challenge of our time.

This comprehensive Research Handbook offers a comparative overview of the history, nature and current status of social rights at the universal and regional level. Tracing their evolution from rather modest beginnings, to becoming the category of rights responding most accurately to the 21st century’s policy objectives of poverty eradication and equitable resource allocation, this Research Handbook assesses the mechanisms used to enhance the implementation and enforcement of social rights.

Critical theory, characteristically linked with the politics of theoretical engagement, covers the manifold of the connections between theory and praxis. This thought-provoking Research Handbook captures the broad range of those connections as far as legal thought is concerned and retains an emphasis both on the politics of theory, and on the notion of theoretical engagement. The first part examines the question of definition and tracks the origins and development of critical legal theory along its European and North American trajectories. The second part looks at the thematic connections between the development of legal theory and other currents of critical thought such as; Feminism, Marxism, Critical Race Theory, varieties of post-modernism, as well as the various ‘turns’ (ethical, aesthetic, political) of critical legal theory. The third and final part explores particular fields of law, addressing the question how the field has been shaped by critical legal theory, or what critical approaches reveal about the field, with the clear focus on opportunities for social transformation.

Presenting diverse understandings of the origins and development of social welfare law, this globally informed Research Handbook embraces the inherent contradictions and complexities within the field. It emphasises the importance of ethical research and inclusivity and recognises the value of historical and contemporary methodologies.