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	<title>Critical Legal Thinking</title>
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	<link>http://criticallegalthinking.com</link>
	<description>– Law &#38; the Political –</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Mon, 20 May 2013 08:20:42 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>The Reactionary ‘Freeman-on-the-land’ and a Political Fracture</title>
		<link>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/20/the-reactionary-freemen-on-the-land-and-a-political-fracture/</link>
		<comments>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/20/the-reactionary-freemen-on-the-land-and-a-political-fracture/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 May 2013 05:57:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Richard McAleavey</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Capital]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Critical Legal Theory]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Finance & the Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Geographies & Spacialities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jurisprudence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Political Philosophy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Political]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://criticallegalthinking.com/?p=14604</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Irish Times reports over 100 ‘Freeman’-style arguments used in the Irish courts this year, citing the Law Society Gazette [for the traditional legal response see here and here]. Last Tuesday, Francis Cullen (36) was sentenced to another three months in Mountjoy Prison for refusing to recognise the court’s jurisdiction. He claimed, according to the Irish Times report, that he was ‘a private, sovereign person’. The Law Society of Ireland ‘advises anyone in financial difficulty to get advice from someone who is trained in and knowledgeable about the law as set down in the Constitution and by the Oireachtas and the courts’, according to the Irish Times, which also cites a barrister pointing out the harmful and abusive dimension to providing vulnerable people with legal advice that is false. 100 court cases over the last 12 months seems like a big number to me. It would also be interesting to know how many people planning on using such arguments eventually thought better of doing so, before their case came before the courts. I don’t think it’s too hard to imagine the appeal of a freeman-style argument. Someone living in a situation of paralysing indebtedness can feel their life is falling apart. [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Seven Theses on Human Rights: (1) The Idea of Humanity</title>
		<link>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/16/seven-theses-on-human-rights-1-the-idea-of-humanity/</link>
		<comments>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/16/seven-theses-on-human-rights-1-the-idea-of-humanity/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 May 2013 09:27:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Costas Douzinas</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Critical Legal Theory]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Human Rights]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://criticallegalthinking.com/?p=14550</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Thesis 1: The idea of ‘humanity’ has no fixed meaning and cannot act as the source of moral or legal rules. Historically, the idea has been used to classify people into the fully human, the lesser human, and the inhuman. 

 Let me have a brief look at its history.

Pre-modern societies did not develop a comprehensive idea of the human species. Free men were Athenians or Spartans, Romans or Carthaginians, but not members of humanity; they were Greeks or barbarians, but not humans. According to classical philosophy, a teleologically determined human nature distributes people across social hierarchies and roles and endows them with differentiated characteristics. The word humanitas appeared for the first time in the Roman Republic as a translation of the Greek word paideia. It was defined as eruditio et institutio in bonas artes (the closest modern equivalent is the German Bildung). The Romans inherited the concept from Stoicism and used it to distinguish between the homo humanus, the educated Roman who was conversant with Greek culture and philosophy and was subjected to the jus civile, and the homines barbari, who included the majority of the uneducated non-Roman inhabitants of the Empire. Humanity enters the western lexicon as an attribute and predicate of homo, as a term of separation and distinction.
]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>13</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics</title>
		<link>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/</link>
		<comments>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2013 15:28:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Capital]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Geographies & Spacialities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Political Philosophy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Radical Politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Revolution]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://criticallegalthinking.com/?p=14509</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[At the begin­ning of the second dec­ade of the Twenty-​First Cen­tury, global civil­iz­a­tion faces a new breed of cata­clysm. These com­ing apo­ca­lypses ridicule the norms and organ­isa­tional struc­tures of the polit­ics which were forged in the birth of the nation-​state, the rise of cap­it­al­ism, and a Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury of unpre­ced­en­ted wars.

Most sig­ni­fic­ant is the break­down of the plan­et­ary cli­matic sys­tem. In time, this threatens the con­tin­ued exist­ence of the present global human pop­u­la­tion. Though this is the most crit­ical of the threats which face human­ity, a series of lesser but poten­tially equally destabil­ising prob­lems exist along­side and inter­sect with it. Ter­minal resource deple­tion, espe­cially in water and energy reserves, offers the pro­spect of mass star­va­tion, col­lapsing eco­nomic paradigms, and new hot and cold wars. Con­tin­ued fin­an­cial crisis has led gov­ern­ments to embrace the para­lyz­ing death spiral policies of aus­ter­ity, privat­isa­tion of social wel­fare ser­vices, mass unem­ploy­ment, and stag­nat­ing wages. Increas­ing auto­ma­tion in pro­duc­tion pro­cesses includ­ing ‘intel­lec­tual labour’ is evid­ence of the sec­u­lar crisis of cap­it­al­ism, soon to render it incap­able of main­tain­ing cur­rent stand­ards of liv­ing for even the former middle classes of the global north.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Homegrown Terror: The Boston Marathon’s Media Coverage</title>
		<link>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/08/homegrown-terror-the-boston-marathons-media-coverage/</link>
		<comments>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/08/homegrown-terror-the-boston-marathons-media-coverage/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2013 09:47:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Laurie Rodrigues </dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Human Rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://criticallegalthinking.com/?p=14473</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In the wake of the Boston Marathon explosions (15 April 2013), the Obama Department of Justice’s treatment of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—American citizen and primary terror suspect—gained significant attention from liberal media. Dzhokhar will be charged as a civilian for using weapons of mass destruction; he was provided legal representation and Mirandized at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital. Reportedly, he refuses to cooperate with questioning. He has been moved from Beth Israel in Boston to Devens Federal Medical Center (operated by the DOJ’s Federal Bureau of Prisons), which specializes in treating inmates who require long-term medical and/ or psychiatric care. Since his move to Devens, there have been suggestions that negotiations are currently taking place, potentially eliminating the death penalty as one of Dzhokhar’s potential sentences (if he is found or pleads guilty). However, it is unclear whether this offer was made by investigators, in hopes of gaining intelligence from Dzhokhar, or if the bargain was offered by Dzhokhar’s lawyers. Indeed, there have been some astute questions posed in the press, particularly by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian, concerning whether or not the above story is entirely true. Greenwald’s concern refers to whether federal officials, who questioned Dzhokhar prior to his being [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>CfP: Precariat — Abstracts 20 May, Full Articles 18 Aug 2013</title>
		<link>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/07/cfp-precariat/</link>
		<comments>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/07/cfp-precariat/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 07 May 2013 15:10:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Sidebar Announcement]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://criticallegalthinking.com/?p=14463</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In his recent work, Guy Standing has identified a new class which has emerged from neo-liberal restructuring with, he argues, the revolutionary potential to change the world: the precariat. This is ‘a class-in-the-making, internally divided into angry and bitter factions’ consisting of ‘a multitude of insecure people, living bits-and-pieces lives, in and out of short-term jobs, without a narrative of occupational development, including millions of frustrated educated youth who do not like what they see before them, millions of women abused in oppressive labour, growing numbers of criminalised tagged for life, millions being categorised as “disabled” and migrants in their hundreds of millions around the world. They are denizens; they have a more restricted range of social, cultural, political and economic rights than citizens around them’. In this issue, we wish to explore the nature, shape and context of precariat, evaluating the internal consistency and applications of the concept. Among others, we welcome submissions examining the following topics in relation to precariat: — changes in the sociology of social classes — the relationship between precariat and multitude — means by which precariat might become a ‘class for itself’ — cultural diversity and conflict (including through engagement with Samuel Huntington and Dieter Senghaas) [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>CfP: Understanding Neoliberal Legality, Oxford University, 21 June 2013</title>
		<link>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/07/cfp-understanding-neoliberal-legality/</link>
		<comments>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/07/cfp-understanding-neoliberal-legality/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 07 May 2013 07:28:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Honor Brabazon</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Sidebar Announcement]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://criticallegalthinking.com/?p=14447</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Whilst neoliberal institutional and economic reforms have attracted substantial scholarly attention in recent decades, the role of law in the neoliberal story has been relatively neglected.  Yet law, broadly understood, features in various prominent aspects of the content, form, and mode of the neoliberal project and of efforts to resist it. This day-long workshop at the University of Oxford will draw together established and emerging scholars researching various aspects of the role of law in the construction and contestation of neoliberalism.The questions and dilemmas to be interrogated in the workshop’s discussions include the following: •  In what ways has neoliberal restructuring shaped and been shaped by established legislative, judicial, and penal processes? •  How is law engaged by the neoliberal state in its relations with dissent? •  To what extent have the sites at which social change can be pursued been altered by neoliberal policy and ideology, or remained the same? •  What are the possibilities and challenges facing political groups or movements that choose to engage the law in neoliberal times?  What about those that choose to break the law? •  How has the neoliberal period clarified or complicated our understanding of the nature of law and of liberal legality? The range of scholarship addressing aspects of these important questions at the nexus of neoliberalism [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Lacanian Trials</title>
		<link>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/06/the-lacanian-trials/</link>
		<comments>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/06/the-lacanian-trials/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 06 May 2013 05:30:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>HW</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Critical Legal Theory]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Psychoanalysis]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://criticallegalthinking.com/?p=14408</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The 30th anniversary of Lacan’s death in September 2011 was marked by an “intellectual dispute,” one which was not settled in the sphere of ideas or public academic debate, but in a defamation trial in the French criminal courts. While a still on-going war of petitions and lawsuits is partly informed by individual rivalries, the juridical scope of the Lacanians’ feuds provides interesting reading with Lacan’s life, his teaching and his thought. In the initial trial of January 11th 2012, the “plaintiffs” were Judith Miller, Lacan’s daughter from his second marriage with Sylvia Bataille, and Jacques-Alain Miller, also known as JAM, Lacan’s son-in-law and legal “executor” of his (intellectual) property. The defendants: Elisabeth Roudinesco, also known as Lacan’s biographer, and Seuil, publisher of Lacan’s work since 1966. Both the biographer and the publisher were found guilty. JAM reproached the Seuil’s senior editor Olivier Bétourné with intentionally excluding him from publicity events on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Lacan’s death.
]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>Suárez and Rouse: Masculinity, Sport and Rape Apologies</title>
		<link>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/04/25/suarez-and-rouse-masculinity-sport-and-rape-apologies/</link>
		<comments>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/04/25/suarez-and-rouse-masculinity-sport-and-rape-apologies/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Apr 2013 09:04:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Yvette Russell</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Critical Legal Theory]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Feminism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gender]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jurisprudence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rape]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://criticallegalthinking.com/?p=14264</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As Luis Suárez joined Johan le Roux and Mike Tyson in the annals of sports-biting history this week, across the water in Northern Ireland Alvin Rouse continues to play in goal for Ballinamallard United Football Club, despite facing three counts of rape, two of sexual assault, one of causing a person to engage in a sexual act and one of false imprisonment. The difference in the narratives of the two cases is striking, as is the institutional response. Suárez was immediately fined by Liverpool for biting Ivanovic and yesterday received a 10-match ban from the FA for ‘violent conduct’. For similar offences Le Roux was banned for 19-months, and Tyson for one year with a $3 million fine. In the media Suárez was denounced as a ‘serial offender’, an ‘idiot’ and as bringing the game into disrepute.  Conversely, the reporting of Rouse’s court appearance noted his tears in the witness stand and his strenuous denials of guilt. Such treatment of sportsmen charged or convicted of rape by the media seems common place with the recent conviction of two high school football stars for rape in Steubenville, Ohio receiving a much derided compassionate hearing on CNN and other media outlets. Over [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>Thatcher: The Wound Festers</title>
		<link>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/04/24/thatcher-the-wound-festers-2/</link>
		<comments>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/04/24/thatcher-the-wound-festers-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Apr 2013 06:48:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dewi Williams</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Radical Politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Political]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://criticallegalthinking.com/?p=14237</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The passing of Margaret Thatcher was announced to this author via a simple text message, it contained only two words, ‘rejoice rejoice’. Its tone appeared to encapsulate one side of a debate which has exercised British political life for over three decades, the person and policies of Margaret Thatcher. The jubilant crowds who congregated in numerous towns and cities on hearing of Thatcher’s death bears witness to the continued animosity directed towards her by those on the political left. Whilst the hagiography of the ‘Iron Lady’ by her supporters on the right exemplifies an almost North Korean level of enforced conformity in mourning the passing of their own ‘Great Leader’. In seeking to examine further the legacy of Thatcher, beyond the banal notion of a ‘divided legacy’, this author suggests that questions concerning the direction of the plural left in post-Thatcherite Britain necessitate addressing, and that her passing exercises the ghosts of the left’s own conflicts in the 1970s and 1980s and highlights their failure to adopt radical policies and advocate an alternative course. Why Thatcher? To better understand Thatcher’s ‘appeal’ one must not only examine her attractions, but also the alternatives as offered by the mainstream left, in particular [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>All Rise: What Does Justice Sound Like?</title>
		<link>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/04/23/all-rise-what-does-justice-sound-like/</link>
		<comments>http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/04/23/all-rise-what-does-justice-sound-like/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Apr 2013 09:34:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Sarah Keenan</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Aesthetics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Radical Politics]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://criticallegalthinking.com/?p=14205</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Three years ago last Saturday, an oil rig around 50 kilometres off the coast of Louisiana exploded.  The explosion killed eleven workers instantaneously, and marked the beginning of an 87-day period of uncontrollable crude oil spillage into the Gulf of Mexico, the sea-floor well spewing out around 4.9 million barrels of oil before it was finally capped on 15 July 2010.  The spill blackened over 1000 miles of shoreline in Louisiana and neighbouring states, put hundreds of marine species and eight national parks at risk, threatened the livelihoods of local fishing and tourist industries, and had other environmental consequences that are ongoing and arguably immeasurable.  A study last year suggested, for example, that the ‘dispersant’ used to make the oil sink faster as part of the clean-up effort may now be affecting the groundwater supply in Florida. The now infamous Deepwater Horizon rig was being leased and operated at the time by London-based energy giant BP, with the assistance of Halliburton and a number of other smaller companies seeking to profit from the off-shore extraction.  Over 130 lawsuits have been filed in relation to the disaster, including criminal charges of manslaughter against BP (to which they are expected to plead guilty), as well as thousands of [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
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