Prof. Alan Norrie
Honorary Professor
Alan Norrie is a legal theorist and criminal lawyer with interests in socio-legal and dialectical theory and critical realism. He held the Edmund-Davies Chair of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at King’s College London (1997-2009) and the Drapers’ Chair in Law at Queen Mary and Westfield College (1994-7). He is Professor of Law at Warwick Law School, where he was Head of School from 2011-2015. He is Fellow of the British Academy, past President of the International Association for Critical Realism, and was a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (2015-18).
Alan Norrie has published three editions of Crime, Reason and History (2014) and Justice and the Slaughter Bench: Essays on Law’s Broken Dialectic (2017). He recently completed a three year project on ‘Criminal Justice: the Blaming Relation’, exploring issues of guilt and forgiveness in and beyond law. Other books include Law, Ideology and Punishment (1991), Punishment, Responsibility and Justice (2000), Law and the Beautiful Soul (2005), Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice (2010). Law and the Beautiful Soul won the Hart/SLSA Book Prize and was described as ‘an important book which crosses a breathtakingly diverse terrain … a beautifully written book, which … demonstrates the author’s own journey’. Dialectic and Difference won the Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize.
