Jurisprudence

The Illegality of Power

By
0
17 February 2012
Police Power

Law and jur­idical dis­course play a cent­ral role in the con­fig­ur­a­tion of power rela­tions. In order to impose a pro­gramme of social cut­backs, a police action and even a protest mobil­isa­tion, force is needed. But so too is the abil­ity to appeal to the law as a source of jus­ti­fic­a­tion. The leg­al­ity or illeg­al­ity of an act does not make it a just one, without fur­ther ado. How­ever, it is a ther­mo­meter that assists in cal­ib­rat­ing the legit­im­acy of power. And of the res­ist­ances that arise against its arbit­rary manifestations. This basic prin­ciple explains that law and its inter­pret­a­tion are a sphere of per­man­ent dis­pute. There is no power that does not attempt to cover its actions with the cloak of leg­al­ity. The legit­im­ate ones without doubt. ...
Read More »

Something is Missing in the Hrant Dink Murder Ruling

By
4
19 January 2012
Protest outside the court, placards proclaim "For Hrant, For Justice"

Hrant Dink’s murder was the cul­min­at­ing point of a per­se­cu­tion cam­paign that can be traced back to Feb­ru­ary 2004, when he pub­lished claims to the effect that Sabiha Gökçen, the adop­ted daugh­ter of Ata­türk and the first woman war pilot of the Turk­ish Repub­lic, was of Armenian des­cent. Dink’s claim pro­voked a pub­lic state­ment from the Chief of Staff, the highest ech­elon of the Turk­ish army. A few days later he was summoned to the Istan­bul Governor’s Office and “warned” by two people who were intro­duced to him as “friends” of the then Deputy Gov­ernor. Three and a half years after the assas­sin­a­tion, the Intel­li­gence Ser­vice admit­ted that these two people were its operatives. Soon after the cov­ert threats in the Deputy Governor’s ...
Read More »

A Dictionary of Policing Protest

By
1
11 November 2011
Student demo

This is the second install­ment of the dic­tion­ary. I felt we needed new terms to help us describe the increas­ing intim­id­a­tion of pro­test­ers in the UK. Kettle of First Resort: The use of ‘containment’ – holding people against their will and without inten­tion to charge them – as a stand­ard tac­tic rather than (as claimed) as a last resort. Open Kettle: A vari­ant of the above, but with por­ous police lines. The inten­tion is to take con­trol of the space from the protest while allow­ing indi­vidu­als to move through the lines. An Open Kettle can become a stand­ard kettle at any moment. Pres­sure Cooker: An Open Kettle in which the police pro­gress­ively move inwards, dimin­ish­ing the space in which the pro­test­ers can move. Those who main­tain this is not meant ...
Read More »

From the nano to the macro-​political: Reflections on Biodiversity & Food Supply

By
0
6 October 2011
Critical Environment

This is the latest edit­or­ial from the Journal of Human Rights & the Envir­on­ment (Vol. 2, No. 2 (2010)). The full edi­tion is avail­able here. TW Lukes once observed that ‘he dis­curs­ive script of envir­on­ment­al­ity embed­ded in terms such as eco­logy or envir­on­ment is rarely artic­u­lated by sci­ent­ists or tech­nical ana­lysts. Yet there are polit­ics here’. While many read­ers of this edi­tion of the Journal of Human Rights and the Envir­on­ment would not neces­sar­ily find them­selves in agree­ment with a com­mit­ted Fou­caul­dian read­ing of the com­plex rela­tion­ships char­ac­ter­ising the domain of ‘biod­iversity and food sup­ply’, it is non­ethe­less essen­tial not to over­look the very real pres­ence, sig­nalled by the vari­ous con­tri­bu­tions to this edi­tion, of the ‘polit­ics here’. Prima facie, most ...
Read More »

Towards an Acoustic Jurisprudence

By
0
27 September 2011
Anechoic Chamber

In the same build­ing in which Bob Dylan recor­ded much of his sem­inal album Blood on the Tracks, there is a room within a room within a room. The out­er­most of these is lined with foot-​thick con­crete, the inner two have double walls of insu­lated steel. The cent­ral cav­ity floats on I-​beams and springs and is lined with fibre­glass acous­tic wedges more than three foot thick. This is the anechoic cham­ber at Orfield Labor­at­or­ies in south­ern Min­nesota. With back­ground noise levels at –9.4dBA (nine point four decibels below the nor­mal range of human audi­tion), it is offi­cially the quietest place on earth. If you were to spend any time in it, how­ever, you would prob­ably be sur­prised by what you heard. ‘The ...
Read More »

Constitutionalism & the Time of the Political

By
2
19 September 2011
Al-gorithm

In his book The Idea of Pub­lic Law Mar­tin Lough­lin out­lines three ‘orders of the polit­ical’ that under­pin and ori­ent pub­lic law. The first order begins with Carl Schmitt’s fam­ous for­mu­la­tion of the dis­tinc­tion between friend and enemy. Lough­lin con­tends that it is this decision or ‘deed’ that forms the found­a­tions of the polit­ical, upon which the second and third orders rest. As such, this dis­tinc­tion comes before the cre­ation of the state and before the cre­ation of law. The second order goes bey­ond this stage to include a state-​based pro­gram of gov­ernance. Here polit­ics takes its place as the sys­tem that oper­ates between the gov­ernors and the gov­erned in order to achieve a com­mon goal of secur­ity and sta­bil­ity. The ...
Read More »

Common Rights: Humans as Nature, Nature as Human

By
1
21 July 2011
Chevron Trial

Humans as Nature: geo­lo­gical forces In an art­icle pub­lished in Nature in 2002, Nobel win­ner chem­ist Paul J. Crutzen had argued that, given the unpre­ced­en­ted effects of human activ­it­ies on the global envir­on­ment, the planet has entered into a new geo­lo­gical era, which he pro­poses to call Anthropocene. Accord­ing to him, since indus­tri­al­iz­a­tion gained steam power in late 18th cen­tury, the Holo­cene epoch, a twelve-​thousand year period of rel­at­ive stable cli­mate that allowed agri­cul­ture and urban civil­iz­a­tions to flour­ish, was about to give space to a new age in plan­et­ary evol­u­tion that is dis­tin­guished by the his­tor­ical fact that human­ity have turned out to be the equi­val­ent of a nat­ural force which is now determ­in­ant to global eco­lo­gical pro­cesses. In other words, in ...
Read More »

Constitutional Politics & Capital

By
1
18 July 2011
Colombia

Colombia’s 1991 con­sti­tu­tion is seen by many as the threshold of an intense polit­ical pro­cess that has arrived at a set of revolu­tions in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and now, maybe, Peru. Fur­ther­more, in the midst of a hor­rible con­flict, Mex­ico is look­ing to a Colombian-​style con­sti­tu­tional assembly to over­come the blood­shed its people have suffered. I believe such atti­tudes are mis­guided, and that it is in the interest of ortho­dox neo­co­lo­nial powers to enforce the con­sti­tu­tional fable. In the United States, soci­ety, state and con­sti­tu­tion were born in a sin­gu­lar and indi­vis­ible event and as such, they’re stuck to each other like flesh to the bone; the his­tory of the US is the his­tory of its con­sti­tu­tion. Dis­courses on eman­cip­a­tion or recog­ni­tion, such as ...
Read More »

The Fetus Fetish & the Erosion of Reproductive Rights in the USA

By
1
4 July 2011
Don't Drink Your Baby's Future Away

Ren­nie Gibbs, a 15 year old girl from Mis­s­i­sippi, has been charged with murder for the fol­low­ing reas­ons: her baby was born dead, and she appar­ently took cocaine dur­ing preg­nancy. A dir­ect causal link between the drug use and the still­birth was not estab­lished. In sim­ilar vein, the state of Utah recently pro­posed legis­la­tion to crim­in­al­ise mis­car­riage, if the mother can be proven to have caused the fetal death. What does this harden­ing of the concept of maternal-​fetal com­pet­i­tion in pre­dom­in­antly (but not exclus­ively) Christian-​right, con­ser­vat­ive ideo­lo­gies mean in legal and cul­tural terms? What types of mater­nal and fetal bod­ies are cre­ated and envis­aged by such pun­it­ive risk-​focused laws? It will be my argu­ment here that the mother accused of ‘pre-​birth ...
Read More »

Strike for the Present, Perhaps This Is All There Is

By
0
29 June 2011
Skull

José Saramago’s Death at Inter­vals (2008) tells the story of Death going on Strike. In Saramago’s ima­gined coun­try ‘since the begin­ning of the new year, or more pre­cisely since zero hours of the first day of Janu­ary’ that there is ‘no record of any­one dying’ (2008:3). This new state of affairs leads the coun­try not as we may ima­gine to a per­petual cel­eb­ra­tion (though there was at first a ‘col­lect­ive joy’ (p.3)) but rather to a kind of state of emer­gency. ‘What emer­gency’ you may ask ‘can the sus­pen­sion of death pos­sible arouse?’ The author crafts for us a series of eco­nom­ical, polit­ical, reli­gious, cul­tural and philo­soph­ical crises that the Death Strike over­casts for example we read of hos­pital cor­ridors being filled ...
Read More »

Home & Apart: Spatial Justice in ‘Women of Cyprus’

By
2
22 June 2011
Abandoned airport – stark symbol of Cyprus division

On the 16th of June 2011, the West­min­ster Inter­na­tional Law & The­ory Centre hos­ted the Lon­don première of Women of Cyprus, a doc­u­ment­ary dir­ec­ted by Vassi­liki Kat­rivanou and Bushra Azzouz, fol­lowed by a dis­cus­sion with the first dir­ector. The film tries to cap­ture the voices and feel­ings of women both sides of the 1974 Cyp­riot par­ti­tion, namely the North (Turk­ish) side and the South (Greek) side. The main focus of this mov­ing film turned out to be the home and its con­cep­tu­al­isa­tions both as a nation­al­ist strategy and a per­sonal feel­ing, namely as a geo­pol­it­ical line and a cor­por­eal affect. The film and the ensu­ing dis­cus­sion amply show that the two con­cep­tu­al­isa­tions of home can­not eas­ily be told apart. We wit­ness for example how, in ...
Read More »

Class and Gender in Super-​Injunctions

By
0
23 May 2011
Tweet

For the past three weeks, the media has been swamped with tales of super­in­junc­tions. The press claim super­in­junc­tions cur­tail free­dom of speech, while celebrit­ies and their law­yers argue that they are neces­sary to pro­tect indi­vidual pri­vacy. In my view, the claim to pri­vacy is incon­sist­ent. If it applied to all indi­vidu­als equally, there might be an argu­ment; how­ever, in its cur­rent form the super­in­juc­tion has been used almost exclus­ively by rich men. And it is for that reason, that we are now see­ing a fight­back against it. Two weeks ago, it was revealed that the BBC’s senior polit­ical journ­al­ist, Andrew Marr, had an affair and took out a super­in­junc­tion to cover it up or pre­vent journ­al­ists from men­tion­ing the story at ...
Read More »

The Fallibility of the Immune: Metchnikoff’s lie

By
1
5 May 2011
Metchnikoff in his Laboratory

On May 1st 2011 news was broad­cast that the leader of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, had been killed fol­low­ing a ‘tar­geted oper­a­tion’ executed by United States forces, in a north­ern town of Pakistan. Shortly after­wards, it was con­firmed by US offi­cials that bin Laden’s body had been bur­ied at sea, accord­ing to Muslim cus­tom. The details of this occur­rence were delivered to the world by the US Pres­id­ent, Barack Obama, in a speech where he described that the ‘achieve­ment’ was to be seen as a ‘test­a­ment to the great­ness of our coun­try.’ He also stated that in Bin Laden’s death it could be said to ‘…those fam­il­ies who have lost loved ones to al Qaeda’s ter­ror: Justice had been ...
Read More »

What Kind of Law is This?

By
0
21 April 2011
Libyan Rebel Tank

Many aspects of the Libyan situ­ation remain unclear: the scope of the man­date given to UN mem­ber states by Secur­ity Coun­cil Res­ol­u­tion 1973, the broader aims of the inter­ven­tion, how many civil­ians have been killed and by whom, and who the rebels rep­res­ent. One thing, how­ever, seems clear: the inter­na­tional inter­ven­tion is con­sidered to be legal. Inter­na­tional law­yers have agreed with the UK government’s advice that Secur­ity Coun­cil Res­ol­u­tion 1973 ‘provides a clear and unequi­vocal legal basis for the deploy­ment of UK forces and mil­it­ary assets to achieve the resolution’s object­ives’. Legal experts have been quick to sug­gest that Res­ol­u­tion 1973 gives author­ity for any action thought neces­sary not only to pro­tect civil­ians, but to pro­tect areas inhab­ited by civilians. ...
Read More »

Exception, Precariousness, Power & Authority: irregular migrants in Australian law (Pt. 2)

By
0
6 April 2011
boat people

State of excep­tion, resur­gent sovereignty? The Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment has attemp­ted to assert that the entire RSA pro­cess is an exer­cise of non-​statutory exec­ut­ive power and as such, status assessors and inde­pend­ent review­ers are under no oblig­a­tion to afford an applic­ant pro­ced­ural fair­ness or to decide applic­a­tions accord­ing to exist­ing law. How­ever late last year the High Court upheld a chal­lenge made by two asylum seekers rul­ing that the RSA pro­cess and Inde­pend­ent Mer­its Review were con­duc­ted for the pur­poses of the Migra­tion Act and hence, like the rest of that or any other Act, were sub­ject to law and pro­ced­ural fair­ness require­ments. The asylum seekers also argued that the arbit­rary and unen­force­able nature of the off­shore pro­cessing régime made it ...
Read More »