New Police powers aimed at #ExtinctionRebellion?

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The Metropolitan Police force have requested greater powers to deal with the threat of #ExtinctionRebellion. The exact details of the request are unclear, but some of the proposals have begun to emerge. And they are couched in what may be politely be called ‘utter bullshit’. The police seem to be deliberately obscuring existing powers in order to gain new draconian ways of preventing people from expressing their views together. It is important to see the obfuscation, as well as the outline of these potential powers. This is the case, not least because the proposals have been apparently well received by the Home Secretary (Priti Patel), making it likely that they will form part of any future Tory party legislative agenda.…

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Why Context Matters in the Trans Prisoner Policy Debates

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‘Let women prisoners decide’ on trans policy sounds democratic but follows a concerning trend of anti-trans groups using women prisoners for their own political agendas In a recent blog post, the Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS) argues that non-trans women prisoners should decide whether trans women should be able to ‘share space’ with them in prison. To suggest that prisoners should determine trans prison policy sounds, on the surface, like a reasonable and laudable position. Certainly prisoners get very little say on the policies that impact their daily lives and should have greater opportunities to feed into decisions that affect their wellbeing. However, what the CCJS Director is actually arguing is that some women (i.e.…

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The Case Against Agamben’s Impotence

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Another appraisal of Aristotle´s configuration of potentiality and actuality and the latter as a division between Entelecheia and Energeia may open up a new consideration of being and power. Through it, we may dispel Agamben´s interpretation of power that shrouds political action in impotence. When we read Energeia as power without transcendent finality, contingency, as the order of the political, is released and with it the possibility of becoming-other is open anew. Contingency means that only when beings exist, not as a necessity, is the meaning of being necessary. In between potentia and actuality hinges not only the definition of power but the utter possibility of existence, of what is possible and impossible, logical, contingent, necessary and time. We have…

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Recognising the right to food does not mean handouts but radical transformations

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Four years after the Lombardia regional council in Italy approved the first law on the ‘Recognition, Protection and Fulfilment of the Right to Food’ in the European context, time seems to be ripe to put food at the centre of analogous political and legislative processes across the European Union. After the establishment of a Right to Food Observatory in Spain, the Good Food Nation consultations in Scotland and the announcement by the Liberal Democrat party of a Fairer Share for All, the last act of support was that of the United Kingdom Shadow Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary Sue Hayman, who announced few days ago that the UK Labour party – if elected – will formally recognise everyone’s right…

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A ‘Dred Scott Moment’ – but not only for the UK Supreme Court!

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When Aidan O’Neill QC, counsel for SNP MP Joanna Cherry and the other parliamentarians, asked the UK Supreme Court to save the “Mother of all Parliaments from being shut down by the father of all lies” it was justifiably a sensation. Finally the crux of the case about prorogation of Parliament was distilled and expressed free of the legal jargon about the justiciability of the prerogative, and the nature and limits of judicial review in the face of executive power. O’Neill also drew attention to the dark side of liberal institutions when he asked the Supreme Court not to make this their “Dred Scott moment”. The reference was to Dred Scott v Sandford (1857) – widely regarded as the worst decision…

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Law & Critique: Technology elsewhere, (yet) phantasmically present

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While in some corners it has been argued that “post-modernism” (in these tellings, usually a metonymy for any theory that questions authority, the stability of meaning and the normalization of various forms of sovereignty and their violence) bears a certain level of responsibility for the supposed rise of “post-truth” politics, for us the situation is directly the inverse. The problems that are being discovered today under the various monikers of crises of truth, institutions, ruleof law, etc. are in fact the generalised perception of the long-term impossibility of securing and regulating text that well predates the contemporary technological milieu. “New” contemporary technologies are not all that new.[1] The computer page for example “remains a screen” belonging to a “digital history”…

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Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus

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Key Concept In Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) Pierre Bourdieu provides a framework both for understanding the way that cultural settings (re)produce the means of their own production, and for analysing the effect of this (re)production on the particular subjects of a given ‘habitus‘. For Bourdieu, the term habitus refers to the collective entity by which and into which dominant social and cultural conditions are established and reproduced. In Bourdieu’s words, habitus refers to “a subjective but not individual system of internalised structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group or class” (p.86). These “internalised structures” and “schemes of perception” structure the subject’s (shared) world-view and their “apperception” of the world…

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What now, Brazil?

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The words that come to mind the most are astonishment and perplexity. The Brazilian government has slipped into the abyss of absurdity, into an absolute trivialization of abuse and aggression, into a gross violation of the most basic rules of democratic coexistence — not to mention the law and the Constitution —, while spewing hatred and negativity as its sole political weapon. Not a day goes by that we are not bombarded with bits of news and comments that seem to come out of some ideological sewer overflowing with years or centuries of rancid decay, exuding the most pestilential stench as if it were the very perfume of novelty and candor. All this is cause for astonishment among those who…

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The Politics of International lawyers: Whose Legacy Is at Stake? Reflections on Martti Koskenniemi’s series on ‘The Politics of International Law’

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The latest issue of the European Journal of International Law opens with the third instalment of Martti Koskenniemi’s The Politics of International Law series. This post offers some reflections on Koskenniemi’s article, although it is not intended as a full response to it. First, a disclaimer in the style of Liliana Obregón1 and many others before her is in order. I am a strong supporter of the structural understanding of international law that Koskenniemi has theorised in his work. Unsurprisingly, my approach to the field underwent significant and irreversible changes after reading From Apology to Utopia (FATU). The reason for this is, I believe, that FATU represents the perfect gateway to critical approaches to international law – in a loose…

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Hannah Arendt: The Right to Have Rights

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Key Concept Shortly after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, the English translation of Hannah Arendt’s essay was published under the title ‘The Rights of Man: What Are They?’1 This essay was later incorporated in Chapter 9 of The Origins of Totalitarianism and became known as one of the most influential critiques of the document. In her writing, Arendt claims the declaration itself embodies a contradiction: the declaration requires states to protect the ‘universal’ and ‘inalienable’ rights of all human beings, whereas the modern institution of the state is grounded on the principle of national and territorial sovereignty. This paradox, according to her, can only be resolved by the recognition of the ‘right to…

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Law & Critique: Property and the Interests of Things

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We take it for granted that the very wealthy use trusts to leave their wealth to their children. Have they not always done so? After all, the aristocracy has used one or another variant of the trust form for centuries to pass on rolling hills, country piles and precious heirlooms. So what has changed? A number of cases[i] have recently come before the courts that deal with one specific issue in the law that concerns what one may call donative or family trusts. In these cases, trustees and settlors that wish to vary an existing trust (usually for tax reasons) ask the court to hear their application in private. So what, one may think. After all, it is not surprising that…

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The Future of Sex Work: Labour unfreedom & Criminality at work

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The central and uniting demand of the sex worker rights movement around the world is the decriminalization of consensual adult sex work. This is based on the recognition that criminal law intervention makes sex workers less rather than more safe, and that sex workers are engaged in a legitimate form of work, not the commission of a crime. A core task of activists and academics has been amassing evidence that criminalization of the seller, buyer, and associated activities impacts negatively on the safety and well-being of sex workers. For 10 years I have conducted empirical work and have organized with sex worker rights and anti-capitalist feminist groups in London and Jamaica, as well as European based organizations that support decriminalization. As a result, I agree that criminalization makes sex work less safe for those selling sex and normalizes…

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Brasília: Constituent Power, Architecture, Urban Planning

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These notes belong to the same project on constitutional spaces that Panu Minkkinen has been working on for some time, and this piece was first published on his own blog. He says there that these notes represent a first attempt to look at the intersections of constituted power, architecture, and urban planning.  ‘Plano piloto’ Perhaps the most iconographic ‘new capital’, that is, a city that is specifically built to be a seat of power, is Brazil’s federal capital Brasília. The plan to move the capital from Rio de Janeiro on the coast to the inland plateaus closer to the country’s geographical center was already initiated in the early 19th century. But it was only President Juscelino Kubitschek who began to put the…

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Art, Law and the Elements: The Turn of the Venice Biennale

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58th Venice Art Biennale ‘May You Live in Interesting Times’ The 58th Venice Art Biennale is a sweeping turn towards the elemental. Aligned with many practices and disciplines (law and art amongst them), this turn to the elemental is everywhere in the Biennale: in the choice of materials, of forms, of artists by the main curator, even in the choice of the name: the ironic title of this year’s Biennale, ‘May you live in interesting times’, refers to life in a world that is collapsing but remains “interesting” (arguably, the second most meaningless word in the English language after “nice”). This is irony at its most elemental — nothing grand or evocative as was the going habit of most of the previous…

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The Far-Right in Austria; Or why ousting the current government won’t change an extreme consensus

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On Monday May 27th, a no-confidence vote against chancellor Sebastian Kurz’ (ÖVP) provisional minority government was successfully held in Austrian parliament.[i] This vote followed a political crisis provoked by a video recently circulated, which shows former Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache (FPÖ) and his close associate Johannes Gudenus (FPÖ) in a meeting with an alleged investor, discussing avenues for illicit party funding and campaign support. However, excessive jubilation over this outcome risks masking the long-standing problematic of Austria’s right-wing mode of business as usual. Better than the movies: A video displaying Austrian political leader’s art of government Social media channels fumed when a videorecently became known to public, showing FPÖ politicians Johannes Gudenus and Heinz-Christian Strache in summer 2017, prior to Austrian elections.…

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Rights as a Distraction from ‘Belonging’: A Response to the Shamima Begum Ruling

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I’m not an accomplished Tweeter. When I tried to Tweet about an event I spoke at recently and typed ‘Shamima’, the autocorrect changed it to ‘shaming’.[1]It’s funny how often that happens – some unintended link to a truth identified by autocorrect (my own surname autocorrects to Sikhism – which is part of who I am). It’s a truth of Shamima’s identity – there has been an active shaming of who she is, what she represents, to how she doesn’t belong and is not Britain’s problem/ question to deal with. My question, in the face of this shaming, was: dorights work? The Begum case is about many things; a lack of empathy or mercy, Islamophobia, misogyny and, crucially, everyday violence as…

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A Short History of Throwing Food at Fascists

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In the last month, milkshakes have been lobbed at several far right candidates in the Euro elections. First it was former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson, then UKIP’s misogynist YouTuber Carl Benjamin and now Nigel Farage as he was out campaigning in Newcastle for his new Brexit Party. When Farage visited Edinburgh, the local police advised McDonald’s not to sell milkshakes and there has been further news that Farage refused to step off his tour bus after being threatened with further milkshakings. This has followed on from the egging of right-wing politicians in Australia and of neo-Nazis in the United States. Some commentators have argued that these milkshakings and eggings are a form of political violence, while defenders of…

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The Cost of ‘Justice’: Sexual Offence Complainants and Access to Personal Data

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Monday last week saw the announcement of a new UK national policy requiring criminal complainants to sign consent forms authorising detectives to access data in their mobile phones. Conveyed in a joint briefing by Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Nick Ephgrave and director of public prosecutions (DPP) Max Hill QC, the new policy is designed to ‘ensure all relevant lines of enquiry are followed’ and that any material that undermines the case for the prosecution or assists the case for the accused is detected and disclosed to the defence.  While the forms are not to be used solely for sexual offence complainants the use of the forms in these cases was a major focus of Monday’s briefing.  While the CPS noted that…

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The Mytho-Poetics of Critical Legal (secret) Society

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By all accounts the secret society began before the Boston body was found. It started in many different places, small groups began to form who consumed the scraps and leftovers from other tables. Clusters of interested people had been gathering in smoky rooms for decades. And they would have been like all those other small groups in academia who persist for some time, sharing an interest before the connections break and the energy dissipates. Perhaps something similar would have happened to these ‘crits’, were it not for the discovery of the Boston body. The corpse was discovered on the front steps of an august American institution, some time in the late eighties. No one appears certain whether death came naturally…

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