Critical Legal Theory

Lincoln Unchained: Is Obama the Global Uncle Tom?

By
1
8 March 2013
Samuel Jackon as Stephen in Django Unchained

Beware. This art­icle con­tains spoilers. Let’s start with a self-​evident affirm­a­tion. Movies, or more pre­cisely Hol­ly­wood, is the ulti­mate con­trap­tion of hege­monic ideo­lo­gical dif­fu­sion. The proph­etic dysto­pias in which secret police would place the mech­an­isms of con­trol inside the private realm of people, fall way short of the intrus­ive viol­ence of today’s real­ity. Now we pay for movie tick­ets and plasma TVs to get the pre­scribed indoc­trin­a­tion. Through cre­at­ing the very seed of pop­u­lar cul­ture, the United States has pro­duced a colossal appar­atus of his­tor­ical cleans­ing, a form of re-​writing of their long dark shadow over the world. John Ford’s The Man who Shot Liberty Val­ance is a beau­ti­fully craf­ted example of estab­lish­ing myth­ical ori­gins that func­tion as the basis of real­ity. Today’s ...
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Hugo Chavez: The Revolution Will Not be Televised

By
3
6 March 2013
roy-lichtenstein-drowning-girl-1

We were saddened to see the death of Hugo Chavez today — and the barely con­tained joy from parts of the global elite. The focus on the ‘restric­tions to the media’ in par­tic­u­lar forms the cent­ral plank of the vari­ous lib­eral, neo-​liberal and neo-​con responses to his gov­ern­ment. We thought it would be good to post a reminder of the reason why par­tic­u­lar media out­lets in Venezuela were restric­ted over the last dec­ade. The Revolu­tion will not be Tele­vised is a fly-​on-​the-​wall doc­u­ment­ary from an Irish film crew who happened to be in Venezuela when the coup against Chavez began. It is com­pel­ling watch­ing, although its cir­cu­la­tion has been sur­pris­ingly cur­tailed by its distributers.
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Right & Rights: Notes on the Thought of Jean-​Luc Nancy

By
0
5 March 2013
pittorecaravaggesco-lamortedigiacinto

Nancy repeatedly rejects the banal politico-​legal insist­ence on human rights as the solu­tion to every answer, sug­gest­ing that such a move is intim­ately bound to the ‘with­drawal of the polit­ical’ (See Politics/​The Polit­ical). How­ever, he does not reject rights out of hand. In a recent text entitled ‘From the Imper­at­ive to Law’, he explains that: The force of the form called ‘right’ resides in an act that is in the pro­cess of enact­ing a free­dom of all and of each as a uni­ver­sal shar­ing, which is at work in such a shar­ing — and not just occu­pied with delim­it­ing the spheres of free wills to pro­tect one from the oth­ers. In other words, rights enact an act­ive free­dom, cre­at­ive not only of com­munity but also, more ...
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An Ungovernable Italy: Interview with Bifo

By
4
1 March 2013
Bifo

Amador Fernández-​Savater: What is the con­text in which the Italian elec­tions have taken place? Bifo: The polit­ical dis­in­teg­ra­tion of Europe. Europe was born as a pro­ject of peace and social solid­ar­ity, tak­ing up the leg­acy of the social­ist and inter­na­tion­al­ist cul­ture that opposed fas­cism. In the 90s, fin­ance capital’s major centres of power decided to des­troy the European model and the sign­ing of the Maastricht Treaty unleashed the neo-​liberal assault. In the last three years, the anti-​Europe of the ECB and Deutsche Bank seized the oppor­tun­ity of the 2008 fin­an­cial crisis in the US to trans­form the cul­tural diversity of the European con­tin­ent (its Prot­est­ant cul­ture, gothic and com­munit­arian, its Cath­olic cul­ture, baroque and indi­vidu­al­ist, its spir­itu­al­ist and icon­o­clastic ortho­doxy) into a factor ...
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Dehumanisation and the Systemic Perpetuation of Rape

By
0
26 February 2013
Ben Walker - Gang Rape [Cropped]

Are we wit­ness­ing a global epi­demic of sexual viol­ence against women, or are we simply wit­ness­ing a tem­por­ary surge in pub­lic and media interest in a ubi­quit­ous, endemic prob­lem? I sus­pect the lat­ter — much as a spec­tac­u­lar fam­ine, or a good earth­quake, tem­por­ar­ily piques ‘inter­na­tional’ (i.e. West­ern or Euro-​American) interest in the endemic real­ity of global poverty; before ‘dis­aster fatigue’ kicks in, and the issue is once more releg­ated to the back-​burner, to the shad­ows. Too big to tackle, too far away to con­cern ‘us’. Although, of course, viol­ence against women is not phys­ic­ally far away from us, we still some­how suc­ceed in deny­ing its scale and ubi­quity; and in dis­tan­cing ourselves from its causes. It has been on my mind to lay out my very pre­lim­in­ary ...
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Politics and the Political: Notes On the Thought of Jean-​Luc Nancy

By
1
20 February 2013
siren

In 2003 Nancy gave a brief, basic philo­soph­ical radio talk in which he dis­cussed the ques­tion of polit­ics and the polit­ical. Repris­ing his early work with Phil­ippe Lacoue-​Labarthe at the Centre de Recherches Philo­sophiques sur la Poli­tique (the Centre for Philo­soph­ical Research on the Polit­ical), he explained that excess­ive use is often made of the term ‘polit­ical’. When we claim that everything is polit­ical, polit­ics loses its spe­cificity. It becomes ‘total­it­arian’ in the sense that ‘the hori­zon of thought is that of a ‘polit­ical’ absorp­tion of every sphere of exist­ence’ (Nancy 2008, 25). In the face of such a sub­sump­tion, Nancy sug­gests the ana­lyt­ical move of dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing le poli­tique (the polit­ical) from la poli­tique (polit­ics). Where polit­ics sig­ni­fies the every­day to– ...
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Flag Protests, Politics and Transition in Northern Ireland

By
1
4 February 2013
N04067613590264794_1153899t

The right to protest is cur­rently at the fore­front of crit­ical debates about demo­cracy and the nature of the state. Mass protests have been seen across the European Union in response to aus­ter­ity meas­ures and the poli­cing of protests, dir­ect action and demon­stra­tions in the UK was recently the sub­ject of the com­ment by the UN rap­por­teur on Free­dom of Assembly and Asso­ci­ation. In gen­eral terms, the right to protest, to use polit­ical action to express oppos­i­tion to unpop­u­lar laws, is regarded as a fun­da­mental part of any demo­cratic state. It is an import­ant mech­an­ism whereby the ongo­ing con­test­a­tion of law can be expressed and con­flict­ing views articulated. This appears to be true, how­ever, only to the extent that the ...
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Asylum Seekers, Migrants and Indefinite Detention

By
0
28 January 2013
Detainee

Lib­eral demo­cra­cies, ostens­ibly such as the United King­dom, should respect the neg­at­ive liberty of free­dom from unlaw­ful and arbit­rary arrest and impris­on­ment. In addi­tion, the UK is a sig­nat­ory of the European Con­ven­tion of Human Rights, as fur­ther incor­por­ated into domestic law through the Human Rights Act 1998. With regards to asylum seekers, migrants and ex-​foreign national pris­on­ers (ex-​FNPs) in hold­ing facil­it­ies inclus­ive of Immig­ra­tion Removal Centres (or pris­ons) in the UK, this liberty seems to be ambigu­ous and pre­cari­ous. Indeed, by stat­ute, immig­ra­tion deten­tion is per­mit­ted “in a num­ber of situ­ations includ­ing pending a person’s exam­in­a­tion and a decision on his or her admis­sion to the U.K., and pending a decision whether or not to give removal dir­ec­tions, and pending removal in pur­su­ance ...
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Democracy, Distrust and the Right to Resist, Today

By
2
21 January 2013
15-M Puerta del Sol at Midnight 14 May 2012

According to classical theory, the roots of democracy are in consensus. The truth, however, is quite the opposite. Experience has shown us that the key to democracy lays elsewhere; in the capacity to accept and even guarantee dissent and criticism of the established powers, with resistance to these powers playing an even more important role. Although trust is a vital component of democracy, distrust and maintaining a permanently critical attitude towards the execution of power are even more essential. The way in which this power is exercised must be controlled if we hope to preserve any essence of the notion of power to the people. A serious look at the critical evidence leaves us in no doubt that this ...
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Coughing out the Law: Perversity and Sociality around an Eating Table

By
0
18 January 2013
Ham Sandwich

It was lunch­time at Sydney’s David Jones, Australia’s up-​market depart­ment store chain. So I headed down to the ‘food floor’. Whenever I have to shop at DJs I try to make sure I go there around mid­day, pre­cisely so I can go down to the food floor and order the excep­tion­ally suc­cu­lent off the bone ham sand­wich at the roast carvery sec­tion. You can buy it and sit and eat it at a large ‘com­munal’ table nearby. So here I was enjoy­ing my super sand­wich with a bottle of min­eral water and read­ing the approach­ing Sydney Film Fest­ival pro­gram when oppos­ite me across the roughly 1.5 meter wide table came and sat an older woman. She seemed in her sev­en­ties, well, but con­ser­vat­ively, dressed, and not a single ...
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The People Returns: A footnote to protests in Slovenia

By
5
16 January 2013
cv_mors

His­tory repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, Marx wrote in his Eight­eenth Bru­maire. This fam­ous remark fits well to the cur­rent situ­ation in Slov­e­nia, when the coun­try exper­i­ences the largest protests since 1989. The per­son stand­ing in the centre of these protests is the same, Janez Janša. In 1989 he was a journ­al­ist of the left­ist weekly Mlad­ina, who revealed mil­it­ary secrets of the Yugoslav army. Today he is Slov­e­nian prime min­is­ter, who has become a syn­onym for both polit­ical cor­rup­tion and the cor­rup­tion of polit­ics. The 1989 mass demos took the legal pro­cess against Janša and three other prot­ag­on­ists of the affair as a case of what was wrong with the former social­ist régime. Today the protests demon­strate ...
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Compliance: The Uncomfortable Reality of Docile Bodies

By
14 January 2013
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806), Coup d’oeil du Théâtre de Besançon, 1804

The movie 'Compliance' is disturbing on many different levels, and left me with a feeling of extreme discomfort, and even disorientation, long after the credits rolled, no less because it is based on true events, referred to by the American media as the “strip search prank call scam’. As the story unfolds in the movie in the same sequence as it did in reality, Sandra, the manager of an Ohio "Chickwich" fast-food outlet, receives a call from a man falsely claiming to be a police detective. Referring to himself as “Officer Daniels” or “Sir”, he accuses a young female cashier, Becky, of stealing money from a customer. He then enlists Sandra's assistance in physically detaining Becky in the store ...
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The People’s Law Tribunals in Pakistan

By
4
10 January 2013
Okara 09/01

QM: A set of move­ments you have been involved with in Pun­jab is the sath, a form of people’s law. What is a sath and how does it trans­late? What areas are gov­erned by sath? What is your involve­ment? Finally, can you explain how the exper­i­ence of law and justice dif­fers between state law and the people’s sath? AF: The exper­i­ence of sath began in South­ern Pun­jab. Before we begin to explain the sath, it is import­ant to under­stand the pos­i­tion of South­ern Pun­jab within Pun­jab and Pakistan. The com­munit­ies settled in the South are heav­ily impov­er­ished, mar­gin­al­ised and sub­ject to a pecu­liar form of dis­place­ment within their own ter­rit­ory. This form of extrac­tion involves the set­tle­ment of Cent­ral Pun­j­abis and the estab­lish­ment ...
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Law: Jean-​Luc Nancy

By
3
19 December 2012
Lex Dictionary Entry

Law The concept of law is tor­tured by an internal com­plex­ity that renders it par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult to define (Hart 1983, 89 – 98). When con­sid­er­ing how Jean-​Luc Nancy thinks about law, we have the added prob­lem of a semantic slip­page that is the bane of trans­lat­ors between com­mon and civil law jur­is­dic­tions. The dif­fer­ent use of legal sig­ni­fi­ers between lan­guages is there­fore significant. The com­mon law ori­gin­ates from a cus­tom­ary and case-​based sys­tem that is prag­mat­ic­ally evol­u­tion­ary. Civil law hails from a Roman-​law inspired sys­tem of codes that are writ­ten down in order to be read. In Roman law this is known as lex, which comes from legere, mean­ing to read. Yet if lex is read, from an early Roman point of view, lex ...
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The ‘Politics’ in Ethiopia’s Political Trials

By
0
10 December 2012
Fed Court

The Ethiopian régime is using the legal sys­tem to elim­in­ate dis­sid­ent voices and drag pro­test­ers to court under ter­ror­ism charges. Far from guar­an­tee­ing equal­ity and justice, the country’s courts serve as an instru­ment in the Government’s hands to legit­im­ize per­se­cu­tion of polit­ical adversar­ies while jus­ti­fy­ing its prac­tices to the west. The deploy­ment of laws and the devices of justice for oppress­ive polit­ical pro­jects are as old as antiquity. From Socrates to Jesus of Naz­areth, from Joan of Arc to Susanne Anthony, from Nel­son Man­dela to Ethiopia’s own Bur­tukan Midaksa and Eskindir Nega, the site of the courtroom has been used to intim­id­ate, har­ass, silence, exile, and elim­in­ate polit­ical foes per­ceived to be a threat to the author­it­ies of the day. The ...
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