CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Mandate 2.0
The word Mandate here refers to the arrangement by which the fate of the people in Palestine was handed to European colonial powers a century ago. A rereading of the Mandate at this time becomes a necessary act. Towards that, I distinguish between a Mandate 1.0 and a Mandate 2.0; a Mandate 1.0 in the 1920s by which European powers sought a foothold in Palestine, and a Mandate 2.0 in the 2020s with fundamentally different aims to preserve yet supersede Mandate 1.0. Periodisation of historical continuity is contentious, but the differentiation is to reinstate the Mandate in the present, as a subject of agency. For the conundrum of the Mandate always lay in how it could be fulfilled, the answer to which lay in a process of revisions towards fulfilment. What we see today in Gaza can be understood within that process; thus this is a rereading structured on a process of revisions. It offers a revisiting of the practices the Mandate instituted through the revisions, in particular to draw...
ARTICLES
Mandate 2.0
The word Mandate here refers to the arrangement by which the fate of the people in Palestine was handed to European colonial powers a century ago. A rereading of the Mandate at this time becomes a necessary act. Towards that, I distinguish between a Mandate 1.0 and a...
Shouting ‘what makes a real woman’ as the earth is on fire!*
Every border implies the violence of its maintenance. It’s just that the border guards differ. Borders come in many kinds. The borders this statement brings to mind could be geographical, international. Perhaps they are otherwise spatial, or temporal. This is a...
The Age of Lawiness
As the bold “TED” logo dissolves into a flurry of red dots, a slightly nasal voice asks us to examine a picture and consider the puzzle it presents.[1] ‘These African students are doing their homework under streetlights at the airport in the capital city because...
Swallowing the Snake’s Tail: Responding to Žižek’s Critique of my “Many Worlds Interpretation”
In his book Freedom a Disease Without Cure, (2023), Slavoj Žižek draws a lengthy critique of my article “Many Worlds Interpretation, Critical Theory and the (Immanent) Paradox of Power.” The critique stands on a tripod (we will develop below). 1. Difference...
German Staatsräson means deportation?
Germany has joined other nation-states – such as the US and Greece – in the repression via deportation of political action against their respective governments’ ongoing material and ideological facilitation of Israel’s genocide in Palestine. The specificity of the...
Forming the Legal Humanities Association
In late 2021, a small group of legal scholars began a discussion about possibly setting up a new academic association for law and humanities research which would be registered in the UK, but open to people around Europe and the world. This led to a small, reflective...
“Man is the only real enemy we have”: Feminist reflections on staging Animal Farm in the fall of 2024
In February of this year, a new feminist blog called The Morrigan launched in Ireland as part of the Doing Feminist Legal Work Network. It features a mixture of Irish and international feminist legal thinking. This piece is a cross-posting from The Morrigan. No set of...
To Reclaim or Resist: Can Digital Sovereignty Ever Be Feminist?
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven / AMVK; Bloem van Smarten (1990-1991) On 30 and 31 January 2025, a group of researchers participated in a workshop examining digital sovereignty through a feminist lens (see below for full list of contributors).[1] Digital or technological...
Ontology and Politics of Liberation: Two Paths to Decrypt Power
This analysis introduces two solid critical arguments—one ontological, the other historical—that illuminate the unique features of the theory of encryption of power, what sets it apart from other theoretical endeavors. The results are deeply intertwined, highlighting...
Tyranny at Europe’s Borders….
On Wednesday 10th April 2024, the bodies of three girls were recovered off the Greek island of Chios.[1] They drowned after a boat carrying migrants from Turkey to the EU ran into rocks. Another, fourteen people, including eight more children, were...
Transnational Disruption: On the meaning of J.D. Vance’s Munich Speech
In the speech he gave to the 2025 Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance apparently missed the point (video, transcript). According to immediate criticism, the format should be a platform for security policy exchange in...
Sleeping While Poor: The Use and Abuse of Criminal Law
On June 28, 2024, the United States Supreme Court upheld state and city-level bans on sleeping in public spaces—effectively, laws against homelessness. In his majority opinion for Grants Pass v. Johnson, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the local ordinance in Grants...
This could have been a Tweet, or: On the politics of signing things
In the wake of the Iraq war, a group of international lawyers published an open letter in the Guardian, framing their opposition to the invasion in legal terms. Months later, in a piece that has reached somewhat of a cult-status in the discipline, some of the...
Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights From Colombia to Palestine:
A Response to the Symposium on Struggles for the Human On the anniversary of publication of Struggles for the Human: Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights (Duke University Press, 2024), it is a pleasure to respond to the contributors to...
Arendt, Gaza and Personal Responsibility Under Genocide
In an essay crafted in 1964, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” Hannah Arendt reflects on a set of moral issues concerning our capacity to judge.[1] The difficult questions she raises in this essay remain pertinent in our own genocidal times unfolding...
Bridging the Infinite Distance Between Us
While Kantian’s are concerned with duties, Aristotelians with human flourishing and consequentialists with aggregating value, Simone Weil’s central concern is the distance that separates us. Naturally, she has much to say about duties and human flourishing, but these...
The Miracle of Friendship
"Yes, and here’s to the few Who forgive what you do And the fewer who don’t even care" Leonard Cohen, Night Comes On When a human being is attached to another by a bond of affection which contains any degree of necessity, it is impossible that he should wish autonomy...
The Labour of Reading
Two mothers read a letter. One knows how to read and the other doesn’t. The mother who knows how to read reads and then faints. ‘Until the day she dies her eyes, her mouth, and her movements will never again be the same.’[1] The words ‘strik[e] her mind,...
Attention to the Silence
Heaps of ruining textiles lie in a clothing graveyard (Figure 1). The items, made through significant effort and environmental cost and then abandoned, imply a decadence to c21 consumer capitalism. Codes, diligence plans and disclosures by the...
What Matters?
Yet always there is another life, A life beyond this present knowing, A life lighter than this present splendor - Wallace Stevens, ‘The Sail of Ulysses’ It is the condition of the critical theorist to be constantly attuned to unnecessary suffering and injustice...
Between Alienation and Ecstasy: Simone Weil’s degrees of attention
L’attention humaine exerce seule légitimement la fonction judiciaire Simone Weil. Among the many inventions that the learned world owes to ancient Greece, the philosophical banquet is not the least valuable. The Greek word symposion has been retained to...
