CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
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 person under whose supervision I wished to pursue my doctoral research. I had first heard Costas speak at a conference, and it was then that I decided to write to him, convinced, with the characteristic certainty of a graduate student, that he was the right person to guide my work. There was no reply. I wrote again. Still nothing. The silence ended only because someone intervened. At another conference, a professor whose work I admired introduced us after her presentation. I mentioned the unanswered emails and my wish to study with him. She turned to Costas and said, almost as an instruction, that he should not miss someone like me. He agreed to meet. Reluctantly. For fifteen minutes. We talked for an hour and a half. By...
ARTICLES
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...
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...
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...
