A growing body of work over the past two decades has been explicitly concerned with the interdisciplinary connections between law and questions of space. Traversing topics such as the regulation of the city, control of public space and the symbolic dimensions of spatial conflicts, this literature constitutes an important contribution to critical legal scholarship. However, there is still much work to be done on the development of the theoretical foundations of this field. This article will present the writings of the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre as revealing a sophisticated theory of space with potentially profound implications for the research program of critical legal studies. Lefebvrean ideas are directly relevant to the renewal of critical approaches to the structure and form of planning law and regimes of urban governance. His work also contains fertile resources for research into the transformation of traditional forms of political citizenship into the broader concept of urban citizenship. Both these examples highlight the importance of the politics of space for critical legal thought and the role Lefebvre’s social theory may play in its future development.

Given that one of the defining elements of capitalist society is the ubiquity of forms of abstraction through which social relations are mediated, it is not surprising that a generalised 'reproach of abstraction' has taken on a critical orthodoxy within social theory and the humanities. Many of these attacks against a pervasive culture of abstraction have an obvious resonance with longstanding critiques of the abstractions inherent in law. This article explores the critique of the power of abstraction that is a central theme in Henri Lefebvre's depiction of the 'abstract space' of contemporary capitalism. In doing so, it will be emphasised that Lefebvre's work is not primarily concerned with the rejection of abstraction per se, but with understanding the relationships between dominant forms of abstraction and concrete social practices. Of particular interest here is Lefebvre's reformulation of the concept of concrete abstraction which extends his work beyond a polemical dismissal of the violence of abstraction into broader theoretical debates about the role of the abstract in the reproduction of social relations. Building on this aspect of Lefebvre's work, I will argue that the concept of concrete abstraction can provide a means of understanding the relationships between the concrete and the abstract in existing juridico-political relations.

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Critical legal scholarship has recently turned to consider the form, mode and role of law in neoliberal governance. A central theme guiding much of this literature is the importance of understanding neoliberalism as not only a political or economic phenomenon, but also an inherently juridical one. This article builds on these conceptualisations of neoliberalism in turning to explore the wider historical, cultural and sociological contexts which inform the production of neoliberal authority. The papers in this collection were first presented at the symposium 'Forms of authority beyond the neoliberal state', held at the Griffith Law School in December 2017. They consider the role of the corporation, the site of the university, the politics of debt, the genre of prestige television, and the archic sources of state violence, in order to imagine forms of authority which lie beyond neoliberalism as an ideology and a set of practices, and the neoliberal state as an ensemble of institutions. The contributions draw on social theory, philosophy, cultural studies, legal geography and political theology in exploring new possibilities for cultivating judgement through and beyond the sovereign, political and aesthetic terrains of neoliberal governance.