Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

18 July 1918 – 5 December 2013

A Longer Road to Freedom

Mandela will never, ever be your minstrel.

Farewell, Madiba. Farewell

Nelson Mandela: The Lawyer’s Ideal

Nelson Mandela: The Lawyer’s Ideal

Mandela’s image should replace the image of the scales or of lady justice as the iconic image of the legal profession, argues Justin Hansford.

Question Everything? Rape Law / Free Speech

by  • 

Save_Freedom_of_Speech

“Ques­tion everything” is an injunc­tion that reg­u­larly sur­faces in liber­tarian polit­ical circles. But aside from the fact it rarely becomes the focus of its own exhorta­tion, how does the com­mand to ques­tion and chal­lenge con­sensus and ortho­doxy deal with the con­sequences of such actions? When are speak­ers respons­ible for what their words do? And to what extent are social claims, includ­ing of less power­ful con­stitu­en­cies, vul­ner­able to becom­ing “orthodox-​ised” so as to form a legit­im­ate sub­ject of “free speech” advoc­ates’ inter­rog­a­tion? In the UK, these ques­tions have garnered atten­tion in recent weeks fol­low­ing a high-​profile pub­lic debate at the LSE: “Is rape dif­fer­ent?”, which in turn fol­lowed pub­lic­a­tion of “Rape Myths: Is Elite Opin­ion Right and Pop­u­lar Opin­ion Wrong?” a con­tro­ver­sial art­icle by…

Read more →

Transcription: Angela Davis ‘Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities’

by  • 

Angela Davis delivers the Birkbeck Annual Law lecture

They say that free­dom is a con­stant struggle. They say that free­dom is a con­stant struggle. They say that free­dom is a con­stant struggle, O Lord, we’ve struggled so long we must be free. I’d like to thank the school of law at Birk­beck and Exec­ut­ive Dean Patri­cia Tuitt for hav­ing invited me to speak to you this even­ing (I’ll do some other things as well). Pro­fessor Patrick Hanafin for the won­der­ful intro­duc­tion. He ended with a song. I began with a song. And I’d like to thank Yvette Van­son for hav­ing ini­tially asked me to speak here in con­nec­tion with her hon­or­ary research fel­low­ship and artist in res­id­ence pro­ject, which is called ‘Bar­ri­ers to Free­dom’. And then of course I’d like to thank Michael Mans­field for agreeing…

Read more →

Black and Red Baiting: A Reply to Eric Heinze, ‘Angela Davis’s Racism’

by  • 

King Communist Training

It is to be hoped that most read­ers of Crit­ical Legal Think­ing who enjoy a passing acquaint­ance with twentieth-​century his­tory or the writ­ing and act­iv­ism of Angela Davis, will recog­nise Eric Heinze’s art­icle ‘Angela Davis’s Racism’ for what it is: a pom­pous and pur­blind character-​assassination, whose ignor­ance of his­tory and polit­ical bad faith make old school anti-​communist polem­ics seem like par­agons of fair­ness and schol­ar­ship by com­par­ison. Heinze’s ‘argu­ment’ is eas­ily sum­mar­ised: Angela Davis cam­paigns against racism, Angela Davis sup­por­ted com­mun­ist regimes, com­mun­ist regimes were racist, ergo Angela Davis is a racist and a hypo­crite. Impli­cit corol­lary: Angela Davis has no legit­im­acy as a critic of racism and should thus not be given a prom­in­ent plat­form from which to voice her pos­i­tion. Now, Heinze presents his…

Read more →

Angela Davis’s Racism: A Glance at Morality and History

by  • 

Erich Honecker and Angela Davis

What might we have thought about high-​profile per­son­al­it­ies fly­ing into Alabama or Mis­sis­sippi in the 1950s — white fig­ures meet­ing with white gov­ernors, white may­ors, white police chiefs, to openly cheer those states’ ‘equit­able solu­tions’ to social prob­lems? Such vis­its cer­tainly took place. Surely we would have to call those vis­it­ors overtly racist, or else wil­fully ignor­ant, hence full-​blown racists by default. In the 1970s, Angela Davis trav­elled in — seem­ingly — the oppos­ite dir­ec­tion. Her crit­ics have harped on the point ever since. They con­demn Davis’s chummy delight for East block dic­tat­or­ships. ‘What does Angela Davis know about free­dom?’, runs the title of Alan Johnson’s Tele­graph piece, pub­lished the day of Davis’s cel­eb­rated Octo­ber 2013 speech at Birk­beck Col­lege in Lon­don. Echo­ing cri­ti­cisms already made in Davis’s heyday,…

Read more →

Blockupy plan to disrupt ECB opening

by  • 

aktionskonferenz-624x200

The open­ing of the new European Cent­ral Bank headquar­ters should not take place without protests across the board in 2014. The Blockupy Alli­ance has called for dis­rup­tion of the open­ing, planned for some­time in Decem­ber 2014, with a fore­taste com­ing with a week of action in May 2014. Around 450 Blockupy sup­port­ers met at the week­end in Frank­furt to plan their actions for the com­ing year . The focus of the protests will be the open­ing of the European Cent­ral Bank (ECB) in Frank­furt, the Blockupy Alli­ance announced at the con­clu­sion of the plan­ning con­fer­ence on Sunday. “An undis­turbed open­ing cere­mony will not occur,” said Blockupy spokes­man Chris­tian Linden . “We invite all those who oppose aus­ter­ity polit­ics in Europe and bey­ond to Frankfurt…

Read more →

Sovereignty Regained? Ireland Exits the EU-​IMF Bailout

by  • 

Ireland

The bail­out will soon be over. No longer will Ire­land have to be sub­jec­ted to the inter­fer­ence of external powers in its affairs. No more humi­li­at­ing con­di­tion­al­it­ies imposed by mild-​mannered Troika func­tion­ar­ies with a stern eco­nomic vision. Instead, thanks to the credit facil­it­ies sup­plied by KfW Entwicklungs­bank, which is mostly owned by the Ger­man fed­eral gov­ern­ment, Ire­land will become an espe­cially crappy part of Ger­many. One thing that the formal exit to the bail­out means is that all those offi­cial man­tras honed at PR firms, about the recov­ery of eco­nomic sov­er­eignty, will have to be dis­carded. “Get­ting sov­er­eignty back” was a highly effect­ive alibi for all kind of social out­rages, per­pet­rated by a gov­ern­ment that had to main­tain its claim to rep­res­ent the Irish people while…

Read more →

Socialism and rights: A reply to David Renton’s ‘Do socialists still have an alternative concept of rights?’

by  • 

Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People

David Renton’s thought­ful and trenchant art­icle in SL64 [Ed: repub­lished 18 Nov 2013 on CLT] has done us all a great ser­vice, open­ing up ques­tions of cru­cial import­ance to the Haldane Soci­ety. That is because we are social­ists, com­mit­ted to solid­ar­ity in res­ist­ance to the depred­a­tions of cap­ital, and to fight­ing for its abol­i­tion. We are not simply human rights defend­ers, though many of us are act­ive in a host of human rights organ­isa­tions, for example the Bar Human Rights Com­mit­tee and the Soli­cit­ors Inter­na­tional Human Rights Group. What then should be our under­stand­ing of the dis­course of human rights, which has become some­thing like a sec­u­lar reli­gion or sub­sti­tute for reli­gion? And the prac­tice of human rights pro­tec­tion often looks wor­ry­ingly like Euro­centrism; European…

Read more →

Do socialists still have an alternative concept of rights?

by  • 

Artist RJ Hamerton (Punch 1843)

An obvi­ous start­ing point is Karl Marx’s pos­i­tion on human rights. We can begin with his response in 1844 to Bruno Bauer’s pamph­let The Jew­ish Ques­tion, in which Bauer opposed Jew­ish demands for polit­ical lib­er­a­tion on the grounds that no one in Ger­many was eman­cip­ated and that Jews should fight not for their lib­er­a­tion but for uni­ver­sal lib­er­a­tion. This sparked some caustic remarks from Marx on the lim­ited notion of lib­er­a­tion espoused by Bauer. Polit­ical eman­cip­a­tion, Marx observed, took the form of neg­at­ive liber­ties such as the right not to be imprisoned or the right not to be pro­hib­ited from hav­ing a pro­fes­sion. Marx wrote: Liberty … is the right to do everything that harms no one else … [T]he right of…

Read more →

Rape is Different: Academic Impact Sinks to New Lows

by  • 

Rape is rape

Two weeks ago the LSE Depart­ment of Law hos­ted its inaug­ural ‘Debat­ing Law’ pub­lic event, draw­ing an audi­ence that filled all 400 seats of its largest lec­ture theatre and work­ing with the LSE’s events team to ensure the debate attrac­ted max­imum media atten­tion. The ques­tion being put up for debate was ‘Is Rape Dif­fer­ent?’, and if the inten­tion of the event was to cre­ate a stir then it has cer­tainly suc­ceeded, with a wide range of shocked news media cov­er­age, a Twit­ter debate that is still raging, and today an edit­or­ial from aca­demic journal feminists@law deplor­ing LSE Law ‘for giv­ing a plat­form to… dan­ger­ous and unsup­por­ted views and for fail­ing to engage respons­ibly with the pub­lic on such an import­ant and sens­it­ive issue as rape’.…

Read more →

A Leaderless Resistance: Balochistan

by  • 

baloch-sarmachar

In April 2010, Baloch guer­illa com­mander Dr Allah Nazar gave a cere­mo­ni­ous recep­tion to Jagoo at a Balochistan Lib­er­a­tion Front’s (BLF) camp in Balochistan’s Awaran dis­trict. Those BLF fight­ers, who hadn’t seen Jagoo before, gos­siped in hushed tones about his identity. “He fixed a machine gun. A bul­let had been stuck inside the gun and it’d been out of order for months. But he fixed it right then and there,” said Imran*, who was present at the camp. “It’s a fuck­ing bril­liant weapon. If I had one, I could fight a whole mil­it­ary bat­talion on my own,” Jagoo remarked in a hoarse voice, observing the machine gun with lust­ful eyes. Accord­ing to BLF’s secur­ity pro­tocol, names of guests at its guer­illa camps are not revealed. How­ever, Jagoo hap­pily revealed his iden­tity after…

Read more →

Critical Finance Law

by  • 

Finance is Enlightenment's reenchantment of the world - within its labyrinthine corridors lie such becomings-animal that would devour our future imperfect.

Fin­ance and tele­ology Crit­ical fin­ance law is the study of one of the most sig­ni­fic­ant teloi of the mod­ern era: the set­tle­ment of debt. Why is the set­tle­ment of debt a telos? Well it is per­haps no sur­prise that just as the Schol­astic concept of the causa finalis, or final cause, was being ques­tioned and would be ulti­mately dis­carded by the C17th, the ‘fin’ or ‘end’ of final cause would be appro­pri­ated as the French verb finer which meant to settle one’s debts. Eng­lish adop­ted this ‘fin’ within the new credit based eco­nomy, and in so doing the theo­lo­gians were forced to cede the telos to the high priests of fin­ance. This ety­mo­lo­gical explan­a­tion is no mere curio; one can see…

Read more →

Letters on Legal Architecture

by  • 

Luke_Casey

FIRST LETTER (New York on July 12th 2012) /​/​/​Dear Lucy, I read your essay Archiv­ing Bur­roughs: Interzone, Law, Self-​Medication with atten­tion and appre­ci­ated, as usual, the way you man­age to link nar­rat­ive, law and space all together. I do think how­ever that we should keep this text for a little bit later in our con­ver­sa­tion as its spe­cificity might make us miss the bases of the dis­cus­sion that we would like to have about law and archi­tec­ture. In this regard, I would like to ingenu­ously start by stat­ing some obvi­ous facts which are always good to remem­ber for such a dis­cus­sion. Law, under­stood as a human arti­fact, con­sti­tutes an ensemble of reg­u­la­tions which have been expli­citly stated in order to cat­egor­ize beha­vi­ors in two categories:…

Read more →

Robert Webb is a Prick

by  • 

Robert Webb

Last week when I was writ­ing about Rus­sell Brand’s art­icle in the New States­man, I didn’t want to sub­ject it to too close a read­ing because there are some things that are writ­ten with inten­tional pre­ci­sion and deserve to be read with pre­ci­sion, and there are other things that are more dis­or­gan­ised and impres­sion­istic, and you can come across as a bit of a prick by turn­ing a grim laser-​like focus onto some­thing that was never writ­ten to with­stand that kind of focus. Russell Brand’s writ­ing is scat­ter­gun and impre­cise and is never going to be the kind of thing that people who want detailed plans for revolu­tion­ary action want to see. Would you go look­ing for orange juice inside a bottle of Domes­tos? Maybe there are very…

Read more →

The Law of the Commons: Climate Change Protest in Buckfastleigh

by  • 

Buckfastleigh

On Thursday 17 Octo­ber the com­munity of Buck­fastleigh, South Devon, heard the fate of their town, their live­li­hoods, the pro­tec­tion of their imme­di­ate envir­on­ment and sur­round­ing eco­sys­tems, presen­ted to them in the much awaited decision of a plan­ning appeal inquiry that took place over the heat of the sum­mer, 25 June – 19 July 2013.1 The plan­ning inquiry was an appeal made under sec­tion 78 of the Town and Coun­try Plan­ning Act 1990, to a pre­vi­ous decision on behalf of the local Devon County Coun­cil (DCC) who refused plan­ning per­mis­sion for MVV Envir­on­ment Devon­port Ltd to use the local White­cleave Quarry for their indus­trial pur­poses.2 MVV wanted to use the quarry as a ‘facil­ity for inert con­struc­tion and demoli­tion waste’ and to build an ‘incin­er­ator bot­tom ash…

Read more →

White Feminist Fatigue Syndrome

by  • 

fist

In her recent piece in Com­ment is Free, “How fem­in­ism became capitalism’s hand­maiden — and how to reclaim it” Nancy Fraser draws on her own work in polit­ical the­ory to argue that fem­in­ism at best has been co-​opted by neo­lib­er­al­ism and at worst has been a cap­it­al­ist ven­ture of the neo-​liberal pro­ject. What appears at first glance to be a reasoned self-​reflection, one that takes stock and respons­ib­il­ity for past alli­ances and cel­eb­ra­tions of stra­tegic moves for the bet­ter­ment of women’s lives, at second glance reveals the innate and repet­it­ive myopia of White fem­in­ism to take account, to con­verse and think along with Black and Third World Fem­in­ists. Writ­ing from the early 1970s onwards, these schol­ars and act­iv­ists have sys­tem­at­ic­ally engaged a fem­in­ist cri­tique of not only…

Read more →

Against Rebels

by  • 

che_guevara_coffee

Rebels are not just bor­ing, they are dan­ger­ous. We’ve had dec­ades of rebel-​worship now and if I see Che Guevara on one more t-​shirt I’m going to start shoot­ing the host­ages. Che Guevara was a dick. I know this because I have the Bolivian Diary in my toi­let and every time I pick it up I have the urge to use it when I’m done. He was emo­tion­ally as well as actu­ally com­mit­ted to author­it­ari­an­ism — and of a par­tic­u­lar pat­ri­archal stripe that didn’t shrink from pro­grams of exe­cu­tions for the greater good. His death was no great loss, except per­haps to his fam­ily. If the CIA had any sense they would have let him live in order to dis­credit him. As for the Cuban revolu­tion, it was mostly…

Read more →

Vulnerability and the Protestor Desired

by  • 

By Ricardo Alvaraz, from Global Voices (Creative COmmons Licence) http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/03/05/puerto-rico-why-so-much-fear-of-an-image/

I. In Septem­ber of last year, Char­lene González, a Uni­ver­sity of Puerto Rico under­gradu­ate stu­dent removed her top in the Uni­ver­sity plaza as part of a performance/​protest against insti­tu­tion­al­ized gender dis­crim­in­a­tion in the uni­ver­sity and in Puerto Rican soci­ety at large. In a mat­ter of minutes, cam­pus and state police were aler­ted and upon refus­ing to cover her­self, Char­lene was arres­ted on charges of offend­ing pub­lic mor­al­ity. In the days sub­sequent to her arrest, she appeared on a num­ber of local tele­vi­sion talk shows where she both detailed and expan­ded on the motiv­a­tions of her protest. Her com­ments took the form of emo­tion­ally charged, tear­ful rants that some­how man­aged to inter­twine gender dis­crim­in­a­tion with the treat­ment afforded to Puerto Rican stu­dents com­pared to exchange…

Read more →

The Alien Body in Contemporary Netherlands: Incarceration and Force-​feeding of Asylum Seekers

by  • 

Naman Hadi, Le Déraciné

On 22 May 2013, the Dutch State Sec­ret­ary of Secur­ity and Justice and Min­is­ter for Migra­tion offered the House of Rep­res­ent­at­ives a memor­andum issued by the Coun­cil of State con­cern­ing ‘the options to admin­is­ter food and drink to an alien in deten­tion who is on hun­ger and/​or thirst strike, against his will.’ This essay sets out to unpack the main premises of these recom­mend­a­tions in the frame­work of biopol­it­ics, its colo­nial her­it­age and con­tem­por­ary deploy­ment in the Neth­er­lands. Whilst under­stood in a his­tor­ical con­tinuum, this little doc­u­ment gains rel­ev­ance as it rep­res­ents a sig­ni­fic­ant step over the threshold of the human …

Read more →