This collection explores the existence and extent of the divide between analytic legal philosophy and critical legal theory.

Motivated by a shared desire to bridge these traditions, the editors and contributors establish meaningful dialogue between the two, identifying key points of overlap and divergence. Discussing the genesis of analytic and critical work within jurisprudence, remarking upon their distinctive perspectives, methods, and politics, and engaging in personal reflections along the way, the contributions to this collection each approach their subject matter in slightly different and complementary modes. With detailed argumentative chapters from leading scholars within both traditions, and edited by a team that sits across the two, this collection provides an essential point of reference and reflection for students, teachers, and researchers interested in jurisprudence and legal theory, very broadly construed. Topics covered include the nature of law and legal reasoning, the history of jurisprudence within legal education and scholarship, and the connections between law, politics, power, and morality.

The first sustained attempt by analytic legal philosophers and critical legal theorists to find some common ground and move forward together, Dialogues in Jurisprudence asks what the theory of law might look like if we go beyond the ridged but ultimately contingent categories of scholarship handed to us by history.

Alex Green (文浩航) is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Academic Associate of 23ES Chambers in the United Kingdom. He is a public international lawyer and legal, political, and moral philosopher best known for his work on the law governing State creation, continuity, and extinction, as well as his writing on the nature of law, statehood, legal reasoning, legal pluralism, and legal imagination. He was the winner of the 2026 IVR Prize for Best Book on the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, and his work has been cited with approval by several institutions, including the United Nations International Law Commission and the UK House of Commons International Development Committee.

Joshua Jowitt is Senior Lecturer at Newcastle Law School and Academic Fellow of the Middle Temple. He is a legal theorist working in the constitutivist natural law tradition. His current research interest is in ascriptions of legal personality, for which he has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and he has worked as a visiting researcher on this topic at the Library of Congress, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, and the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law.

Sahar Shah is Lecturer at the University of Bristol Law School. Her research focuses on legal theory as it relates to climate justice, with a special focus on anti-colonial and critical legal theory. With support from the Society of Legal Scholars, the Socio-Legal Scholars Association, and the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute, she has recently led a series of workshops on legal interpretations of climate reparations and the ways in which these might be translated into policy. She teaches across a range of climate and company law–related subjects at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She is the co-convenor of the Society of Legal Scholars’ Legal Theory Subject Section and co-organiser of a newly formed Law and Society Collaborative Research Network, ‘Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race and Empire’.