ABSTRACT

This book began with a contemporary legal moment in which monsters were disavowed. As the court in Re A commented, ‘[i]t hardly needs to be said that there is no longer any place in legal textbooks . . . for expressions (such as “Monster”) which are redolent of superstitious horror.’1 It was this legal representation of things that the book took as its point of departure. Instead of a legal world in which monsters are presumed to be a relic of a less rational legal past, the book has pointed to the importance of Foucault’s concept of the monster to thinking about legal outsiders and, in particular, the process of their constitution. In making this argument, the book has emphasised the monster over other available templates for the outsider generated within law and social theory. The selection of the monster over other templates was informed by a number of considerations.