Dr Cosmin Cercel's book published - Towards a Jurisprudence of State Communism

Dr Cosmin Cercel recently published his book entitled: Towards a Jurisprudence of State Communism (Routledge, 2018).

The book addresses two central theoretical lacunae fostered by the historiography of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe: the status of law, and its relationship to the broader ideological framework legitimising authoritarian regimes. Cercel develops a theoretical framework that is able to uncover law's complicity with the extreme ideologies that dominated Central and Eastern Europe. For it is, he argues, in its recourse to legal concepts that the communist experience raises important jurisprudential questions for our contemporary understanding of law, the limits of state sovereignty and law's relationship to historical violence.