CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Beyond The Godfather: Italy, the Mafia, the People and the State
The Godfather, The Sopranos, The Irishman, Scarface, Goodfellas, Casino, Donnie Brasco, Gomorrah, A Bronx Tale, Once Upon a Time in America, and, closer to home, Legend, taught many of us how to imagine organised crime before we ever read a court judgment. They have given us dark restaurants, family dinners, long funerals, whispered betrayals, patriarchs in expensive suits, disturbing scenes of violence, some funny moments and a world where power moves through blood, loyalty, revenge, fear and money. This is the mafia: cinematic, brutal, seductive and frightening. We think we know its rules, its families, its codes, its hand gestures and its silences. We also think we know something else: that the mafia is Italian. Just as Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Galileo, Machiavelli, Caravaggio, Vivaldi, Christopher Columbus, Marco Polo, Amerigo Vespucci are all “Italians”. Yet many of these figures were...
ARTICLES
Punishing Heat: A Materialist Account of Solar Radiation and Carceral Institutions
Photo by Haim Charbit on Unsplash At the end of June 2026 much of Europe experienced its highest recorded temperatures since the 1950s. Cities like Paris approached 41°C, and large parts of the continent were placed under the highest red heat alert. As heatwaves...
Immanuel Kant: Categorical Imperative
Crop of Laszlo moholy-nagy, composizione A.XX, 1924 | Sailko, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law1 Act as if...
What we are reading… Jessica Whyte and Máiréad Enright
Jessica Whyte Adania Shibli, Minor Detail. Trans. Elisabeth Jaquette. (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020) Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail is a novel made of two stories of violence and domination, separated by more than six decades. In the first, set during the...
The Right of Asylum and the Return of “Enemy Criminal Law”
Konštantín Bauer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons CLT recently featured a translation of E.B. Pashukanis’ 1929 article “The Right of Asylum and the Practice of Bourgeois Governments,” originally published in the journal MOPR under the auspices of the...
The Case of the Filton 4: Labelled Terrorists Without the Charge
Several weeks ago, UK courts dealt a blow to the legal system in two cases. Both involve the group “Palestine Action”, whose aim is to end global complicity in the genocide in Gaza. The first case involves its proscription as a terrorist...
What is the role of the critic?
Strategic optimism as a concept for imagining and transforming justice, politics and resistance It is rare to attend a conference in honour of an author, in the presence of the said author. In all my 25 years of academic experience in both Brazilian, European and UK...
Key Concept: Law’s Violence
The conventional story runs like this: violence is what happens where law ends. Law is the alternative to the feud, the pacifier of the state of nature, and the substitution of process for force. On this account, violence and law occupy opposite ends of a single...
What we are reading… Maria Aristodemou and Aoife O’Donoghue
Maria Aristodemou Aaron Schuster, How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science (MIT Press, 2024) The narrator dog of one of Kafka’s short stories, “Investigations of a Dog”, declares that “all knowledge, all questions and all answers are contained...
The Discipline of Unease: A Conversation with Costas Douzinas
The first lesson Costas Douzinas gave me was silence. Not deliberately, I assume. But that is where the story began. It took me the better part of a career inside the state to understand what that silence had been teaching me. At the time, I believed I had found the...
What we are reading… Costas Douzinas and Luis Eslava
Costas Douzinas The Dalkey Archive by Flan O’Brien (First publication 1964, Fourth Estate, 2007) ‘Suspended Sentences”, a theatrical play that was published as a chapter in Postmodern Jurisprudence by Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington with Shaun McVeigh...
What we are reading… 2026
Many years ago when this blog began, we used to run a series called “what we are reading…”. The idea was simply to share some initial thoughts on texts that we were finding helpful or interesting. We hoped share a certain joy of texts, and to take pleasure in the...
Military Bases, Sovereignty, and the Longue Durée of British Decolonisation
Public Domain; Map Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. When the United Kingdom and Mauritius signed a historic treaty in May 2025 transferring sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago, the headlines proclaimed a...
Images of Courtroom in the age of Surveillance Capitalism
The 21st century has transformed the courtroom: Hearings that once drowned in paper now unfold through digital files, video links, virtual hearings, appellate courts’ YouTube channels, livestreams, e‑filing, digital case management, online bundles, and predictive...
Alt-McWorld: Tommy Robinson’s ‘Unite the Kingdom’ Rally, May 2026
Unite the Kingdom was a day for wearing St Georges flags that combined with the saturation demonising of Muslims and migrants. This from one of the keynote speakers, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, leader of the anti-transgender Party of Women: “It's not...
Call for Participation – Critical Legal Conference 2026
CLC2026 invites proposals for individual papers, performances, proof of concept participation, or entire sessions, that fall within the below streams. Each session should follow one of three modes: Works of Text, Performing Bodies, or Proof of Concept. Streams can...
Antinomies of Government by Chaos: Trump and the Pilgrims of Nothingness
In Greek mythology, Chaos is that primordial state which precedes the appearance of the Gods. A gaping void, a primordial non-time prior to the blossoming of light, which is necessary for the appearance of life. To evoke the origin of the gods, one must refer to Chaos...
Left and Right Strategies of Legislative Supremacy in Great Britain
Over at the LPE blog, a series of contributions has advanced why legislative supremacy ought to be part of a socialist left strategy. Partly, this is a response to the growing juridification of social and political life that has buttressed the power of the courts and,...
Women and Colonialism in the UK Supreme Court’s decision in Re Dillon (2026)
There are many extraordinary things about the UK Supreme Court’s (UKSC) decision in Dillon. It unpicks at least half of Article 2 of the Windsor Framework – specifically undoing the elements that protect human rights in Northern Ireland post Brexit. Its use of...
The Amazon as Juridical Ecosystem: Planetary Urgency, Juridical Possibility
Few places condense the contradictions of our planetary condition as sharply as the Amazon. The Amazon is at once central to planetary survival, and constantly exposed to processes that threaten it (here and here). It regulates climate, sustains...
Impunity Has a Carbon Footprint
A fuel handler refuels an F/A-18 Hornet aircraft on deck aboard the aircraft carrier USS CORAL SEA. A single F-35 fighter jet burns through roughly 5,600 litres of fuel for every hour it is in the air. A US aircraft carrier strike group on deployment consumes more oil...
What is ‘retrenchment’?
On September 7, 2018, in his first major address since leaving office, former President Barack Obama excoriated the administration of Donald J. Trump. By then, the latter president had been in office for over a year and a half. Obama, cajoling students at...
