Private Law Theory

INTRODUCTION
Mainstream contemporary legal theory often overlooks Marxist theories of law, for all of the obvious reasons. Yet there may sometimes be valuable insights contained in Marxist analyses that can provide guidance with respect not only to legal theory, but also to law reform efforts. The recent publication of Paul O’Connell and Umut Özsu’s Research Handbook on Law and Marxism in a softcover edition offers the opportunity to examine some of those lessons. This Research Handbook makes a profound contribution to the Marxist analysis of law; there is no doubt that Marx had much to say about law. But what he did say is often difficult to locate in one place, making a sustained critique of any one area of law difficult for those scholars seeking to do so. This Research Handbook draws together not only all that Marx had to say about law, but it also does so in a way that allows the scholar working in this field both to examine Marx’s thought on discrete categories of contemporary western liberal law – contracts, tort/delict, property, criminal law, and so on – and to use Marxist tools of analysis to critique law generally and the discrete doctrinal categories individually …

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PT Babie, Searching Marx for Property’s Obligations, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, volume 39, pages 417-424 (2026). Published: 11 November 2025.