Daniel Matthews is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong. Daniel has a broad interest in interdisciplinary and critical approaches to law, with a particular focus on critical legal theory, deconstruction, and law and literature.

Taking a somewhat circuitous route to the law, Daniel completed his BA(Hons) in Philosophy and English Literature and his MA in Critical Theory (both at The University of Sussex). He was awarded the Graduate Diploma in Law (University of East Anglia) before moving on to his doctoral studies at Birkbeck Law School, University of London.

Daniel teaches Law and Literature, Introduction to Law and Literary Studies, Law and Society, and Legal Theory. His current research develops an interdisciplinary and theoretically informed account of jurisdiction. Contributing to an emerging field of the jurisprudence of jurisdiction, his work understands jurisdiction as first and foremost a matter of “speaking the law” (juris-diction). Jurisdiction is read through a number of theoretical, historical and literary texts, with particular attention paid to the work of French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. With a focus on performativity and narrative theory as well as theories of community and political resistance, the project aims to resituate jurisdiction as a central concern for contemporary critical legal thought.

Daniel is also currently working – with Illan rua Wall (University of Warwick, UK) and Matt Stone (University of Essex, UK) – on a project that assesses the early stages of the Critical Legal Studies movement in Britain. The project aims to understand the early political, theoretical and institutional commitments and experiments that underpinned the distinctive and influential “BritCrit” scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s.

He is a member of the Editorial Committee of Law and Critique, having previously been the journal's Associate Editor, and is a regular contributor to the Critical Legal Thinking Blog.