Modern state law excludes populations, peoples, and social groups by making them invisible, irrelevant, or dangerous. In this book, Boaventura de Sousa Santos offers a radical critique of the law and develops an innovative paradigm of socio-legal studies which is based on the historical experience of the Global South. He traces the history of modern law as an abyssal law, or a kind of law that is theoretically invisible yet implements profound exclusions in practice. This abyssal line has been the key procedure used by modern modes of domination ¿ capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy ¿ to divide people into two groups, the metropolitan and the colonial, or the fully human and the sub-human. Crucially, de Sousa Santos rejects the decadent pessimism that claims that we are living through 'the end of history'. Instead, this book offers practical, hopeful alternatives to social exclusion and modern legal domination, aiming to make post-abyssal legal utopias a reality.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra, Portugal, and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. He has written and published widely in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French, German, Chinese, Danish, Romanian, Arabic and Polish. His current research interests are epistemology, sociology of law, post-colonial theory, democracy, interculturality, globalization, social movements and human rights. One of his most recent publications is The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (2018).

Part I. The Tragic Optimism of the Law: The End of a Story: 1. Unsettling times; 2. The end of legal reformism? Lineages of legal reformism; 3. The early demise of legal reformism: my journey through the Law and Modernization Program at Yale University; 4. Room for manoeuvre: Paradox, programme, or Pandora's Box?; Part II. Epistemologies of the South and the Law: 5. Introducing the epistemologies of the South; 6. The epistemologies of the South and law: towards a post-abyssal law; 7. Is post-abyssal law possible? Part III. The Abyssal Law under the Mode of Abyssal Exclusion: 8. Lawfare: a long history; 9. Colonial law and imperial law; 10. Colonial legal duality: the creation of legal codes for indigenous populations; Part IV. Real Legal Utopias: Interrupting the State: 11. The heterogeneous state, legal plurality and traditional authorities in Africa: the case of Mozambique; 12. The rise of a micro dual state: a case of highly politicised legal pluralism; 13. The refoundation of the state in Bolivia and Ecuador?; Part V. Real Legal Utopias: Interrupting the Law: 14. Law and revolution in Portugal: experiences of popular justice after the carnation revolution of 1974; 15. Popular justice in cape verde; 16. The landless rural workers' movement in Brazil and its struggles for access to law and justice; 17. The law of the excluded: indigenous justice and plurinationality in Bolivia and Ecuador; 18. Decolonising justice and democratic peace in Colombia; Part VI. Real Legal Utopias: Interrupting Hegemonic Human Rights: 19. Human rights in a post-secular age: counter-hegemony and progressive theologies; 20. Towards an insurgent, intercultural and cosmopolitan declaration of human rights and duties; 21. Rights of nature.