Critical Legal Education

Occupy Wall Street and the Left

By
4
24 January 2012
Occupy Oakland - Rich Black

Occupy Wall Street, for all its talk of hori­zont­al­ity, autonomy, and decent­ral­ized pro­cess, is recen­ter­ing the eco­nomy, enga­ging in class war­fare without nam­ing the work­ing class as one of two great hos­tile forces but instead by present­ing cap­it­al­ism as a wrong against the people. It’s put­ting cap­it­al­ism back at cen­ter of left polit­ics — no won­der, then, that it has opened up a new sense of pos­sib­il­ity for so many of us: it has reignited polit­ical will. In a way, it’s return­ing to the left its miss­ing core or soul, what has been dis­placed or denied since we turned our back on the com­mun­ist hori­zon. It’s react­iv­at­ing the Marx­ist insight that class struggle is a polit­ical struggle. As I men­tioned before, a new Pew poll finds a nine­teen ...
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Dissensus, the Right to Education & A New Latin American Student Movement

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0
14 December 2011
Chile, Police & Protestors Clash

Recently, there have been the rum­blings of an emer­gent pan-​Latin Amer­ican stu­dent move­ment. Cru­cially, this poten­tial move­ment coheres around the demand for a right to edu­ca­tion. In Colom­bia and Chile a new front is being fought against the cre­ation and main­ten­ance of private edu­ca­tion and the impli­cit com­modi­fic­a­tion of learn­ing. How­ever, this emer­gent trans-​continental rights-​demand is not simply another tra­di­tional usage of rights. Very often, when we hear ‘human rights’ we think about them in the most leg­al­istic of senses. They are fet­ish­ized as that which the state may guar­an­tee for the sub­ject. As noted by all sorts of crit­ical the­or­ists, such an iden­ti­fic­a­tion leads to a thor­ough lim­it­a­tion of polit­ical agency. The polit­ical sub­ject is figured simply as the indi­vidual in ...
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Disrupting Links: Gender, Identity and Security

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0
3 October 2011
X-ray art by Nick Veasey

This paper is about, as the title indic­ates, dis­rupt­ing cer­tain per­vas­ive and seem­ingly obvi­ous links. First, the link between gender and iden­tity, wherein gender is assumed to be a stable, reli­able determ­in­ant of an iden­tity that also assumed to be fixed. Fol­low­ing from the assumed fix­ity of iden­tity comes a link to secur­ity, wherein the more pre­cise we can be in determ­in­ing iden­tity, the bet­ter secur­ity appar­at­uses, in this case those found in U.S. air­ports, can func­tion (as more and bet­ter inform­a­tion leads to more per­fect secur­ity). The exper­i­ence of trans­gender people exposes the tenu­ous nature of these links, as non-​normative bod­ies and appear­ances con­found their basic assumptions. In an art­icle describ­ing his exper­i­ence of hav­ing a heart trans­plant, L’Intrus, Jean-​Luc Nancy ...
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Use of Private Law to Control Student Occupations

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2
28 March 2011
Les Beaux Arts

I have been won­der­ing about teach­ing one of the secret lives of private law; the use of the law of tort, con­tract and equity to reg­u­late on-​campus stu­dent protest. There is a grow­ing online archive — of blogs, media reports and uni­ver­sity press releases — which details how these private tools for the defence of “uni­ver­sity prop­erty” have been used to bring occu­pa­tions and sit-​ins viol­ently to halt. Many of our stu­dents now have first-​hand exper­i­ence of these mat­ters and many of us, on the cam­puses where we teach and visit, have seen cre­at­ive stu­dent attempts to sus­tain the uni­ver­sity as a polit­ical space shut down by the invoc­a­tion of law. The first task in this teach­ing, I think, is to remem­ber that there is a private law ...
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Zizek on Equity & Trusts… well almost…

By
1
23 February 2011
Zizek toilet training

Equity is some­thing of a prob­lem. Aside from the blatant pat­ri­archy of the Pre­sump­tion of Advance­ment or Com­mon Inten­tion Con­struct­ive Trusts, it is often a little dif­fi­cult to smuggle crit­ical (legal) the­ory into an Equity and Trusts course. A long time ago now, Cot­ter­rell wrote: Legal doc­trine is ideo­lo­gic­ally import­ant not only for what it expresses but also for its ‘silences’; for the appar­ent fact that it avoids expli­cit recog­ni­tion of cer­tain fea­tures of social life which are famil­iar from exper­i­ence. Through the use of the concept of prop­erty, elab­or­ated in legal doc­trine, it becomes pos­sible to ban­ish almost entirely from the dis­course of private law recog­ni­tion of one of the most dom­in­ant fea­tures of life in a soci­ety of mater­ial inequal­it­ies — that of private power.… Today, ...
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