CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
New Translation of Pashukanis: The Right of Asylum and the Practice of Bourgeois Governments
Ilya Repin: They Did Not Expect Him, 1884-88 Introductory Note by Igor Shoikhedbrod E.B. Pashukanis (1891-1937) is best known for his General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924), where he offered an original account of the genesis of the legal form under generalized conditions of capitalist commodity exchange and explained the reasons for its necessary disappearance under fully developed communism. Until recently,[1] Pashukanis’ reputation as the token Marxist legal theorist has generally eclipsed his influential contributions as a seasoned revolutionary representing the USSR on the international stage. Nowhere is this clearer than in the domain of international criminal law and in Pashukanis’ consistent and vociferous defence of the right of asylum. In the 1929 essay that follows, Pashukanis—writing under the auspicious of the International Red Aid—offers a scathing indictment of the extradition of working class and communist political prisoners by capitalist countries...
ARTICLES
New Translation of Pashukanis: The Right of Asylum and the Practice of Bourgeois Governments
Ilya Repin: They Did Not Expect Him, 1884-88 Introductory Note by Igor Shoikhedbrod E.B. Pashukanis (1891-1937) is best known for his General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924), where he offered an original account of the genesis of the legal form under...
Call for Expressions of Interest: The Future of Good Decisions – Live Action Role Play
Deadline for Expression of Interest: 24th April 2026 The Future of Good Decisions project is seeking expressions of interest for participation in a live action role play (LARP). A LARP is a form of game where participants play characters and interact to pursue goals...
Crimmigration and the Ontology of Guilt: On Subjectivity and the Negation of Law
The contemporary figure of the foreigner is not judged for what they do, but for the fact of who they are. In regimes of crimmigration, guilt no longer follows the act—it precedes it. It attaches to presence, to mobility, to the mere fact of inhabiting without prior...
The abuse of UK anti-terror laws to proscribe direct action protest: The case of Palestine Action
The 13 February 2026 decision of the High Court inHuda Ammori v Secretary of State for the Home Department that the Home Secretary’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action was unlawful, provides a fascinating insight into the abuse of UK...
Defending Animal Rescue as a Moral Injury to a Relational Self
As individuals participating in the open rescue of animals increasingly adopt strategies of civil disobedience and “voluntary prosecution,” courts are pressed to adjudicate the definition of intent itself within an anthropocentric legal structure that excludes animals...
Learning to be Surprised (Symposium)
Val was a proper old-school scholar, interested in ideas for their own sake and driven to understand and respond to the injustices of the world. As a serious intellectual she was not interested in academic trends or popularity, but in working through a set of...
The Wrong of Law and Marx’s Second Secret (Symposium)
I feel honored to have been invited to comment on Valerie Kerruish’s The Wrong of Law, a book bringing a great range of methodological approaches to bear on a problematic of great interest to me. The book’s focal point is the self-seriousness of legal discourse....
Surprising Law (Symposium)
In one of the moving tributes to Valerie Kerruish posted on Critical Legal Thinking[1] shortly after her passing away, Emilios Christidoulidis wrote that “(h)er magnum opus The Wrong of Law, which she spent the last two decades of her life writing,...
The Foundational Wrong of Law (Symposium)
Stephen Connelly There is an implicit assumption in jurisprudential reasoning that this reason, as form, is without inconsistency. Error is procedural: it results either from misrecognition of the ‘true’ law, from ignorance of the true facts, or from misapplication of...
The Vertigo of Self-Grounding (Symposium)
There is an image by M.C. Escher in which a staircase rises in perfect geometrical order, each step aligned, each angle exact — yet the ascent loops back upon itself. The movement is continuous, coherent, even rigorous; what unsettles is not disorder but...
Symposium on Kerruish’s magnum opus: The Wrong of Law
When Valerie Kerruish died in 2022, Critical Legal Thinking hosted a series of reflections from her former colleagues, friends, and collaborators. As recounted there, Valerie spent decades from the mid-1960s teaching law in Australia with an abiding concern...
Teaching as a revolutionary activity
Neoliberal universities as a place where radical thoughts come to wither away. We are living in bad times (admittedly, I struggle to remember the good times, but the current bad times do seem quite bad). And in bad times there is an impulse amongst decent people to...
A Red Winter: On war and the Iranian struggle for freedom
Its shadow/ had swallowed the entire city;/ we thought/ it was a mountain…/ until it collapsed, and we saw/ it was a bubble/ blown straight from the mouth of darkness!/ Let them say that death is the end,/ but I say:/ The death of a dictator/ is the only day when...
‘After’ the Rojava Revolution? Rethinking Political Hope in a Post-Autonomy Syria
Since early 2026, Rojava in North East Syria, has been under renewed assault by the new Syrian regime. A majority-Kurdish region, Rojava has, for more than 12 years been home to one of the world’s largest experiments in democratic autonomy and ecological living. The...
Iran and the ‘state of exception’
It seems that we have entered a period of endless war. The undeclared American war "Epic Fury" (the name of the attack on Iran) and Israel's new murderous campaign has replaced the "cosmopolitan order of rules" heralded by those who saw the "end of history" after the...
CfP LHub Four Nations Law and Humanities Forum
First Call for Papers Deadline 13th March 2026 The Four Nations Law and the Humanities Forums Glasgow Workshop 21st May 2026 in collaboration with: Queen's University Belfast; University of Warwick; and Cardiff University. We are excited to announce the calls for...
Emilios Christodoulides 1963–2026
It is with the greatest sadness that wish to inform you that our comrade, colleague, friend and amazing intellectual, Emilios Christodoulides, passed away yesterday. After a long illness that tormented him for the last two years, he passed away peacefully in...
The Diapausal Life of International Law: Gaza and Beyond
Few contemporary conflicts have been as saturated with legal language as Gaza. Provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice, arrest warrants sought by the International Criminal Court, findings by United Nations commissions of inquiry, emergency...
Normopathy Today: Norms Behaving Badly
It is clear now, one-year into the second coming of Donald Trump, that the normative international order in place since World War II has been breached. Trump recently pronounced that he doesn’t need to follow international law because all that counts is his “own...
Analysing the Iranian Uprising: Costas Douzinas interviews Leila Faghfouri Azar
This interview, conducted by Professor Costas Douzains for the Greek weekly newspaper Epohi, features Dr. Leila Faghfouri Azar and was originally published in Epohi’s special supplement on the Iranian uprising (24–25 January 2026). In the conversation, Faghfouri Azar...
One’s own morality as the highest court: A variation on Hegel’s concept of international law
Whether international law constitutes an independent legal domain endowed with sanctioning power with regard to its subjects is a question that has resurfaced in nearly every crisis that has emerged within the post Cold War new world order, and one that has most often...
