Interdisciplinary Legal Studies: Philippine Constitutional Law, International Law and the Humanities

Copyright 2025

Author: Jose Duke Bagulaya

📚 About the book:

This book is exactly what Philippine public discourse desperately needs. In a country where the most divisive social and political issues often end up in the courts, public debate is heavily shaped by laws and lawyers, whose purely legalistic arguments rarely bring useful insights and can be terribly mind-deadening. Duke Bagulaya is best prepared to pioneer interdisciplinary approaches to law. Trained in both the humanities and the law…he achieves what his book calls a ‘standard of analysis that is intellectually acceptable to both disciplines’, thereby breaking ‘disciplinary walls without necessarily dissolving the disciplines.’ I hope that Duke’s work will start a wave of interdisciplinary legal writing among Filipino legal scholars.
—Judge Raul Pangalangan
International CriminalCourt

This is a must-read book for legal scholars and practitioners in Asia and globally. Interdisciplinary perspectives give us good insights into law and its relevance to society.
—Dean Tony La Viña
Chair, Jurisprudence and Legal Philosophy Department Philippine Judicial Academy

INTERDISCIPLINARY LEGAL STUDIES gathers scholarship at the intersections of Philippine constitutional law, international law, and the humanities. It presents the ways in which interdisciplinarity has broadened legal scholarship, reshaping styles of argumentation and transforming images of thought into new and unpredictable forms.

Part I Law &… examines texts ranging from Lino Brocka’s Orapronobis to Philippine Supreme Court decisions. Thematically, it covers law and film, law and literature, law and temporal studies, and law and philosophy. Part II History, Theory and Poetics of International Law retells the story of the Law of Nations from a Global South perspective, explicating legal doctrines and images of thought in the works of Vitoria, Grotius, Wolff, Lorimer, and Oppenheim. This book may serve as reference work for interdisciplinary scholars, legal professionals, and students of law and humanities.