CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Jesus Fights Back: Easter Torture & Reverse Racism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe3w5Gl7qMk Marcus De Matos[i] The short Easter video goes like this: Jesus, played by a black actor, is carrying his cross, surrounded by Roman soldiers. Suddenly, they started lashing him, as predicted in any representation of the Passion of Christ. However, the actors playing the soldiers were too heartily, and went too far: they hurt the actor, until he can take no more. Then, unexpectedly changing the script, Jesus fights back: the black actor turns and kicks the soldiers, in a desperate way, to make them stop. Although it was not possible to trace back the origins of the video, it was widely circulated in Latin America during Easter. The crowds in the video, as well as its audience on WhatsApp groups, were divided about it. Some laughed, some were concerned – either for the actor’s sake or for its impact on the meaning of the Christian festival they watched. I believe their troubled feelings emerged less from the brutally of the scene, than from...
ARTICLES
Jesus Fights Back: Easter Torture & Reverse Racism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe3w5Gl7qMk Marcus De Matos[i] The short Easter video goes like this: Jesus, played by a black actor, is carrying his cross, surrounded by Roman soldiers. Suddenly, they started lashing him, as predicted in any representation of the...
The Colombian Presidential Election, a Decolonial Turn!
“Colombia has elected its first leftist President” or some variation of that headline is the international’s press overwhelming description of Colombia’s presidential election last Sunday. It is correct, as correct as saying a small lot of prisoners revolted in a...
The Contraction of the West
What Westerners call the West or Western civilization is a geopolitical space that emerged in the 16th century and expanded continuously until the 20th century. On the eve of World War I, about 90% of the globe was Western or Western-dominated: Europe, Russia, the...
Welcome to the shitshow
‘Next time you go to the bathroom, there's a reasonable chance the person in the cubicle next to you is scrolling through Instagram’, reported HuffPost in 2017. Equally, Wired describe a very near future, in which ‘sensors might be embedded in your toilet bowl....
Neoliberalism and the Accumulation of Ghost Laws
Prudhoe ghost. Many people who have seen the picture believe the apparation has taken the form of a young girl. *Photo: David Wilkin Readers will be familiar with a certain argument for neoliberal government. By the end of the 1970s, we were told, welfare states had...
Baptizing the State – Vermeule’s Common Good
In April, Vanity Fair published an article by James Pogue on the ‘New Right’, a new mood in conservative politics in the US. The general idea is a break with neoliberal capitalism towards ‘a more economically populist, culturally conservative,...
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...