Lecturer

LLB (Hons) ( Dundee); LLM (with Distinction) (Glasgow); PhD (Glasgow)

Email: jason.beckett@leicester.ac.uk
Telephone: 0116 252 2338

Before joining Leicester, Jason lectured at the University of Newcastle. Before that, he was a student at the universities of Glasgow and Dundee. His only foray into the non-academic world (as a researcher at the Scottish Law Commission) was brief and unhappy.

Jason’s research concerns the nature of law, and is largely focussed on Public International Law; but he also has interests in philosophy, critical theory, and the interplay between ontology (the study of what exists) and epistemology (the question of how we know what we know). His recent projects have included an analysis of mercy, a review of anti-liberal theory, and an analysis of the limitations of the Oxford empirical legal theory associated with H.L.A. Hart; and particularly its unsuitablity to the study of International Law. He is now beginning to write about the relationship between law and violence, and the self-justificatory Eurocentricity of International Human Rights discourse.

At Leicester, Jason teaches Analysing Law, Critical Approaches to Law, International Law, Jurisprudence, and Law and Political Theory.

Research Interests

Legal Theory; International Law; Critical, Race, and Feminist Theory.

Selected Publications

• The End of Customary International Law? A Purposive Analysis of Structural Indeterminacy (VDM Publishers 2008)
• “Fragmentation, Openness, and Hegemony: Adjudication and the WTO” in M. K. Lewis and S. Frankel, ed.s, International Economic Law and National Autonomy (Cambridge University Press 2009)
• “The Hartian Tradition in International Law” 2008 The Journal Jurisprudence 53-85
• “Conflicting Orders: How Peace is Waged” Leiden Journal of International Law. 2007 (1), pp 281 - 319.
• “Mercy, Particularity, and the Map from the Void” Archiv fur Rechts und Sozialphilosophie (Forthcoming 2006/7)
• “Rebel Without a Cause? Martti Koskenniemi and the Critical LegalProject”
• “Countering Uncertainty and Ending Up/Down Arguments: Prolegomena to a Response to NAIL.” 2005 European Journal of International Law 213-238.
• “Interim Legality: A Mistaken Assumption? An Analysis of Depleted Uranium Munitions Under Contemporary International Humanitarian Law” 2004 Chinese Journal of International Law 43-86
  http://chinesejil.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/3/1/43
• “Behind Relative Normativity: Rules and Process as Prerequisites of Law” 2001 European Journal of International Law 627-650.
  http://www.ejil.org/issue.php?issue=37
• “Parliamentary Intention in Judicial Review: A Question of Centrality?” 2000 Juridical Review 191-211.