I undertake research across interdisciplinary studies in law and the humanities.  I have been instrumental in developing a more sophisticated and ambitious conversation about law and culture, with a particular focus on questions of authority and legitimacy; justice, law and ethics; rules, interpretations, and judgment. And I have been in the forefront of expanding the field’s objects of study to encompass music, art, and popular culture. These interdisciplinary connections offer new imagination and insights into our thinking about law and justice.

Through this framework I have researched in a very wide variety of areas, including drug policy, music history, children’s literature, popular culture, animals, the ‘war on terror,’ tort law, refugees, and Indigenous peoples; and my theoretical work including articles on Derrida, Bourdieu, Butler, Foucault, Levinas, and Bakhtin has contributed to legal and social theory, legal education, aesthetics, ethical philosophy and legal history.  My research uses detailed interdisciplinary case studies that often bring together surprising elements—a story, a legal problem, and a theoretical perspective, for example—in order to show how each facet illuminates the others. This scholarship has been pioneering both in its influence and in its restlessness. Yet beneath its diversity my work has consistently built new bridges and opened new dialogues in three dimensions: across disciplines; between critical theory and law; and with the wider community.

My current research interests include Bakhtin and Bourdieu, legal history and modernism in the early twentieth century (particularly through the work of DH Lawrence and Carl Schmitt), the rule of law, and the relationship between art and concepts of law and justice.  My principal research project is The Sight of Justice: Art and the Rule of Law (see below). 

Professor Desmond Manderson is an international leader in interdisciplinary scholarship in law and the humanities. He is the author of several books including From Mr Sin to Mr Big (1993); Songs Without Music: Aesthetic dimensions of law and justice (2000); Proximity, Levinas, and the Soul of Law (2006); and Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law—The legacy of modernism (2012). His work has led to essays, books, and lectures around the world in the fields of English literature, philosophy, ethics, history, cultural studies, music, human geography, and anthropology, as well as in law and legal theory. Throughout this work Manderson has articulated a vision in which law's connection to these humanist disciplines is critical to its functioning, its justice, and its social relevance. After ten years at McGill University in Montreal, where he held the Canada Research Chair in Law and Discourse, and was founding Director of the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, he returned to Australia to take up a Future Fellowship in the colleges of law and the humanities at ANU.