The European Academy of Legal Theory mourns the loss of Emilios Christodoulidis, who passed away at the age of 62 on the 3rd of February 2026.
Emilios, holder of the Chair of Jurisprudence at the School of Law, University of Glasgow since 2006, was one of the leading legal theorists of his generation; a sui generis thinker who moved seamlessly across the idioms of such diverse discourses as systems theory, political constitutionalism, phenomenology, Marxism, and moral philosophy. His work constituted an amalgam of rare qualities, combining analytical sharpness with conceptual imagination, critical vigilance with a deeply-rooted attention to human vulnerability, passion for social justice with the courage to confront its intellectual stakes head-on, and all of this framed in an elegant, at times poetic, language.
His outstanding contribution to scholarship was acknowledged with a number of distinctions: his book Law and Reflexive Politics received the European Award for Legal Theory in 1996 and the Society of Legal Scholars’ Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship in 1998. In 2023 he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy, while his latest monograph The Redress of Law (2021), translated into several languages, is already perceived as a milestone for critical legal thinking.
The generosity of his work – a work overflowing with ideas, intellectual passages, striking references, and capturing images – was nothing but a crystallization of his own personal generosity. Anybody who had the opportunity to meet Emilios can affirm his charming and gentle way of addressing his interlocutors. His students are no exception to this rule: even when his illness made it considerably harder, Emilios was there for them with his astonishing mental clarity, encouraging them to explore and exposing through his critical questions all that which still remains to be thought and written.
If we could have made this enough of a farewell, we would have managed to put into words some of Emilios’ personal and scholarly generosity. We could not. The debt is passed on to all those generations of academics Emilios inspired: to rethink law and politics with the gravity of his rigorous philosophical argumentation and the grace of his emancipatory spirit.
