CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
On the non-violent generosity of Violent Modernities
It is a quiet Saturday morning in Victoria BC, and I find myself sitting at the kitchen table, Oishik Sircar’s book Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India open in front of me. It is a beautiful book, one whose insights continue to linger with me. It is unconventional in some ways, a collection of essays which document a series of scholarly and activist journeys, written over a decade. At the heart of the book is a conversation about the complex and paradoxical relationships of law and violence, of nation-states and justice, of culture as the terrain for the production of legal knowledge, of legal and cultural mechanisms of citizenship, belonging and exclusion. If it makes an argument, it is not one that gestures in the direction of universal, atemporal or portable claims (xxvii); Sircar invites the reader to approach the question of ‘violent modernities’ with a grounding in an ethic of time and place. We are asked to spend time with him in...
ARTICLES
New Directions for Critical Legal Studies in India: Oishik Sircar’s Violent Modernities
In reading Oishik Sircar’s Violent Modernities I found something akin to a fortune cookie: wrapped in the wafer is a gift in the form of an implicit message. The medium of this message is Oishik’s style, citational practice, acknowledgments, footnotes of gratitude;...
Law and the Inhuman: Concluding remarks
Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014) Every moment in Relation to another. Every Earth a broken ground. Kathryn Yusoff, ‘a geologic dirge’, in Geologic Life The Law and the Inhuman roundtable discussions compiled in this CLT forum opened on the morning...
The Inhuman as Refusal
Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014) The fourth roundtable of the Law and the Inhuman workshop was entitled ‘The Inhuman as Refusal’, and was curated and chaired by Marie Petersmann. The two speakers were Juliana M. Streva and Sarah Riley Case.[1]...
The Inhuman as the Human
Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014) The second roundtable of the Law and the Inhuman workshop was entitled ‘The Inhuman as the Human’, and was curated and chaired by Afshin Akhtar-Khavari. The two speakers were Matilda Arvidsson and Connal Parsley....
The Inhuman in the Human
Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014) The first roundtable of the Law and the Inhuman workshop was entitled ‘The Inhuman in the Human’, and was curated and chaired by Kathleen Birrell. The two speakers were Daniel Matthews and Scott Veitch. Kathleen...
Law and the Inhuman: Introductory remarks
On 8 April 2024, the workshop ‘Law and the Inhuman’ took place at Tilburg Law School (TLS), in the Netherlands, convened by Marie Petersmann, Julia Dehm, Kathleen Birrell and Afshin Akhtar-Khavari. The workshop gathered ten speakers from different disciplines, who...
Kerstin Anér, Pioneering Thinker of Data Power – Towards A Critical Reimagining the History of Data Law and Policy
Questions of data, law, feminism and the environment are not new, and contrary to popular perceptions, were not discovered as a field of critical thought by contemporary scholars. These debates were already taking place in national and international fora in the 1960s...
Live and let live: the mythological projection of police in the killing of Chris Kaba
Continuing our responses to A Philosophical History of Police Killing, today we bring you Carson Arthur's response to the book. In the UK, we are seeing the attempted rewriting of ‘police accountability.’ This in response to the prosecution and in preparation for the...
Are the Police Anarchic?
Following the publication of Melayna Lamb's superb book A Philosophical History of Police Power, we have asked James Martel and Carson Arthur to respond to the book. Today we bring you James' response. Melayna Lamb’s A Philosophical History of Police Power makes the...
The Colonial Breach and the Colonial Bind
Reposted from Interregnum. Whatever the contentions on the term we use to express the scale and method of killing we are witnessing in Gaza, the description at the International Court of Justice as a 'live-streamed genocide' is both apt and particular to our age. For...
Robert Michels’ Lessons for the Left
Tim Christiaens In the early 2010s, many people on the left proclaimed the death of state-based socialism, the political party, and any kind of organizational authority. From Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring, the 2011 revolts put their faith in horizontalist...
Gaza Genocide: An Introductory Critical Legal Reading List
https://twitter.com/UNRWA/status/1758156390684557777 We asked Jessica Whyte, Goldie Osuri and Marina Velickovic to put together a resource pack of the most important critical (legal) work on the on-going Gaza Genocide. We hope this will be of use in teaching,...
Questioning our Need for Punishment
Henrique Carvalho & Anastasia Chamberlen "Cage Head" by SanguineSeas The philosophy of punishment finds itself at a crossroads. On the one hand, it remains a very prolific and popular field of study, with countless works being regularly produced and revisited. On...
Collective Well-Being as Resistance: Garment Workers against Racial Capitalism
https://open.spotify.com/track/4cXkuDcAPqZ9WJD6GAM2tJ?si=e4e28c7bfabc47a4 Nanak naam, chardi kala, tere bane sarbat da bhala. I say these words by way of normalising a Sikh consciousness and vocabulary. The words appear at the end the Ardas, one of...
Yiddish songs of struggle and resistance: resources for our times?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCBELp1ZG7E These times are horrific beyond words. In January the International Court of Justice found it to be plausible that the State of Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. At the time of writing over thirty-three...
Palestinian Workers’ Resistance in the Age of Neoliberal Settler Colonialism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RePChC4XpU The Israeli settler government, conducting a genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since October 2023, has taken steps to prevent Palestinian workers in Israel and settlements from the West Bank and...
Workers Against Imperialism: Resistance in Palestine, Britain and Beyond
Close up of watemelon's red ripe slice and black stones isolated over blue On 25 March 2024, Francesca Albanese presented ‘An Anatomy of Genocide’, her report to the UN Human Rights Council as the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the...
Clickbait Capitalism – Or, The Return To Libidinal Political Economy
Republished from Progressive Political Economy: Last year I published an edited volume called Clickbait Capitalism. The title came as a surprise, even to me. The book was meant to be called Libidinal Economies of Contemporary Capitalism. No one was interested in the...
International law and failure in the context of Gaza
A few days ago a discussion developed on Twitter (as these things do) about whether Gaza (and specifically the failure to prevent or halt the ongoing genocide) signals a failure of international law. Many of the responses seemed to be saying a similar thing, mainly,...
What was the Anthropocene?
Apparently, we might no longer live in the Anthropocene. Such was the result of a formal vote by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (SQS), issued on the 5th of March 2024, who oversee and administer 4.5 billion...
The uses of Marxist theory of law during a genocide
This was originally a talk, prepared for the Pashukanis @100 conference, with an afterword post-ICJ interim order of 26 January 2024. In some ways it is ironic and in other ways entirely appropriate that the Pashukanis @100 event falls on the very days...
