CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
In response to the US Supreme Court draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade
Demonstrations have broken out throughout the United States supporting the right to abortion in response to the leak of the Supreme Court draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade – a rare event in US Supreme Court history. In response to this shocking news, we challenge the liberal discourse of “choice” around this issue. This is not at all for lack of support for the right to abortion, but because this right needs to be put in the context of a full program on reproductive freedom. The right to abortion goes far beyond the actual ability to have safe abortions, although that is crucial. Black revolutionary feminism has long pointed out that the abortion movement must take into account a full reproductive freedom agenda which would include the right to have a child, not have a child, and parent a child with dignity – including paid parental leave, universal healthcare, and safe conditions for birthing. For Black and Indigenous women, all too often the question is...
ARTICLES
In response to the US Supreme Court draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade
Demonstrations have broken out throughout the United States supporting the right to abortion in response to the leak of the Supreme Court draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade – a rare event in US Supreme Court history. In response to this shocking...
Academic Freedom Is Not Freedom of Speech
How to do things with academic speech The UK Government’s proposed Bill on Freedom of speech and academic freedom (Higher Education), now before the third reading in the House of Commons, aims to regulate the expression of unpopular or controversial views at...
The UK, Rwanda, and the Spectacle of Deterrence
On 14th April, it was reported that a deal has been made between the UK and Rwanda to establish a system of off-shore processing for asylum seekers who arrive irregularly to the UK. This means that people who arrive in the UK without a valid visa or permission to...
Feminism and Women’s Political Rights in Brazil
Gender inequality in representative institutions is still evident in contemporary democracies worldwide, and the path towards equity is not linear, involving disputes, conflicts, and resistances. In South America, more specifically in Brazil, theoretical and public...
Contagious Philosophy: A Review of Viral Critique
Viral Critique is the title of the short and intense book by Andityas Soares de Moura Costa Matos & Francis García Collado, published in English in February 2022 by Counterpress. This is one of those books whose strength is inverse to its size. It...
A Short History of Just War
Roman Priest (Louvre Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) Reading British newspapers' commentary on the Ukraine war gives a sense of deja vue. We have a return of the ‘West’, of the ‘Free World’, of the exreme demonisation of the opponent. Commentators are...
Animal Farm Revisited: A Feminist Allegory
Life on Nettle Farm was not easy. Patrick Arkey was a less than sensitive human farm owner. Still, the animals had tended to stick together, to find common cause in the face of their daily grind. Of course, there were gripes. The pigs sometimes felt their feed was...
Statement on the war in Ukraine
By NOMOS: CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH ON LAW, CULTURE AND POWER On February 24, 2022, Russia has begun waging war on Ukraine. Fighting is taking place all over Ukraine, civilians are being killed or forced to flee their homes. In just seven days about 800.000...
The work of art as power and destruction
Excerpt from the novel " Gabriel’s Horn" (Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo. 2020, Uniediciones, Colombia) Well then, I also want to address the subject of the immortality of art as a religious, mercantilist and mediocre idea. My...
How did we get here?
Ukraine’s sovereignty cannot be questioned. The invasion of Ukraine is illegal and must be condemned. The mobilization of civilians ordered by the Ukrainian president can be read as a desperate act, but it does suggest that a guerrilla war looms in the future. Putin...
How the British Museum Changed its Story About the Gweagal Shield
When Lieutenant James Cook landed, uninvited, onto the continent now known as Australia, he began a colossal theft. The British colonial project initiated by his landing not only involved the mass theft of Aboriginal land, but also of sacred Aboriginal objects made...
Storytelling Round the Circle of Life & Death
Copyright: Sakaba Storytelling, confession, and bearing witness, circulates and is encircled by life and death. The promise of life, knowledge, truth, is always under the threat of death, fiction, forgetfulness. These conditions do not stand in opposition to one...
Lessons from the general elections in Portugal
The results of the 30 January general elections in Portugal, with the Socialist Party (PS) winning an absolute majority, came as a surprise. Portugal will now be the only European country ruled by a government based on the absolute parliamentary majority of a single...
Farewell, Alan
Bruce Curtis, Justin Paulson, John Manwaring, Stacy Douglas, and Jennifer Henderson farewell, alan Alan Hunt, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Sociology, chose a medically-assisted death, with Rosalind Allchin, his partner of 42 years, by his side, on 8 December...
In Memory of Alan Hunt
in memory of alan hunt I never had the pleasure of meeting Alan Hunt, though I suppose that is hardly a necessary condition to be influenced by someone’s work. Alan’s constitutive theory of law formed and continues to form a cornerstone of how I think about law and...
A Reminder
Umut Özsu a reminder I was never able to meet Alan Hunt. My relation to him is mediated in a double sense—first, in that my only points of entry into his unique and impressive world are through his many and varied writings; second, in that I happen to teach in the...
Alan Hunt, intellectual, academic, radical
alan hunt, intellectual, academic, radical I met Alan in the summer of 1979 at the Communist University in London. The University, partly Alan’s idea, was a week-long series of lessons organised around the main academic disciplines. I was carrying out my doctoral...
Alan Hunt
alan hunt Alan Hunt passed away on Wednesday 8 December 2021. He was at home with his partner Ros in Ottawa, Canada. Many had complicated relations with Alan, but he was no doubt a towering figure in the Department of Law and Legal Studies and at Carleton, as well as...
António Guterres’s hour
There is a clear discomfort among international activists and commentators who follow the United Nations, as well as among former UN senior officials and special rapporteurs, with the organization’s growing irrelevance as the world is faced with increasingly complex...
The Politics of Erection
“Homo homini lupus” or “a man is a wolf to another man” has historically been one of the most popular dicta used in political philosophy to denote the hypothetical primal condition of human societies and justify their need for submission to a sovereign authority. In...
A Pagan Christmas
For early Christians, celebrations of birth were broadly viewed as sinful. With the death and resurrection of Jesus at the center of the early message, and with Jesus expected to return at any moment, early Christians recorded the dates of their deaths but not the...