CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Vigilante and the ‘Great Criminal’: On Law, Violence, and Assassination
In December 2024, two events occurred which can help us to understand the relation between violence and law in line with the critique outlined over a century ago by Walter Benjamin. Let’s begin with the more recent event, which emerged in two parts. First, on 6th December, Judge Maxwell Wiley dropped the charge of manslaughter against Daniel Penny, the US Marine Corps veteran who killed unhoused Black man Jordan Neely on a New York City subway in May 2023. Three days later, Penny was found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide. Several days prior, while the jury in Daniel Penny’s case was under deliberation, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare Brian Thompson was shot and killed outside of a hotel in New York. At time of writing, authorities have arrested and charged Luigi Mangione for the killing, having found him in Altoona, PA in possession of a 3D-printed pistol, a so-called ‘manifesto’ criticising the US healthcare system, and multiple fraudulent...
ARTICLES
The Vigilante and the ‘Great Criminal’: On Law, Violence, and Assassination
In December 2024, two events occurred which can help us to understand the relation between violence and law in line with the critique outlined over a century ago by Walter Benjamin. Let’s begin with the more recent event, which emerged in two parts. First,...
Radical Hope and/as Insurgent Humanism
I first met Lara Montesinos-Coleman at a workshop in 2016. I recall a discussion on Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment with respect to everyday resistance and it being necessarily cruddy and mundane. We soon got to talking about our personal lives, and I remember...
Scenes of Violence: Between Ultraobjective and Ultrasubjective Forms of Violence
In the context of the 'claims adjuster' assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Jason Read suggested that readers might return to this piece from 2017, saying: "Obsession with the ultrasubjective violence of assassinations and terrorism is often coupled...
Legal Education in Palestine
Earlier this year, the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context and the International State Crime Initiative, based in the School of Law, partnered with Birzeit University’s Institute of Law in Palestine. The partnership was inaugurated on 28 November with an...
Struggle as Co-Labouring, Con-Versing, and Con-Spiring
At the core of Struggles for the Human lies the struggle for human rights. Lara Montesinos Coleman dares ask the question that many a jaded critic has already relinquished: Does a radical potential remain in human rights, a system that has been widely...
The Rupture of the New: Struggles for the Human
Human rights rise to geopolitical significance in the 1980s and 90s, and since then we have seen important waves of Marxist, poststructuralist, postcolonial and feminist critiques. At particular moments we see fresh texts setting new agendas, creating new directions...
“We found love in a hopeless place”
I agree with Ntina Tzouvala when she says that the book “resists easy categorisation” and, thus, an “easy review process.” Perhaps one reason for this difficulty both of us encountered was because the book, “was never meant to be” (p. xxxi). As Oishik points, this was...
Reification and Tilt in the Critique of Trusts
Extract from Roger Cotterrell’s ‘Afterword: Trust and Critique after Three Decades’ in Critical Trusts Law: Reading Roger Cotterrell, eds Nick Piška and Hayley Gibson, available fair access from COUNTERPRESS. 'Power, Property and the Law of Trusts: A Partial...
South Asian Constitutionalisms and Ethical Scholarship: Commentary on Oishik Sircar’s Violent Modernities
It was a pleasure reading Oishik Sircar’s “Violent Modernities”, which is an excellent and essential read for anyone interested in a broader understanding of constitution, law, rights, citizenship and the postcolonial state. Although the focus of the book is on India,...
The desire to escape that is not escapism
The Stage When Hegel wrote the Phenomenology of Spirit (2004) in 1807, he had one thing in mind. He wanted to provide an accurate philosophical and scientific process through which the mind comes to acquire knowledge of oneself and the world. Hegel, like Kant and...
New Directions for Critical Legal Studies in India: Oishik Sircar’s Violent Modernities
In reading Oishik Sircar’s Violent Modernities I found something akin to a fortune cookie: wrapped in the wafer is a gift in the form of an implicit message. The medium of this message is Oishik’s style, citational practice, acknowledgments, footnotes of gratitude;...
Law and the Inhuman: Concluding remarks
Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014) Every moment in Relation to another. Every Earth a broken ground. Kathryn Yusoff, ‘a geologic dirge’, in Geologic Life The Law and the Inhuman roundtable discussions compiled in this CLT forum opened on the morning...
The Inhuman as Refusal
Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014) The fourth roundtable of the Law and the Inhuman workshop was entitled ‘The Inhuman as Refusal’, and was curated and chaired by Marie Petersmann. The two speakers were Juliana M. Streva and Sarah Riley Case.[1]...
The Inhuman as the Human
Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014) The second roundtable of the Law and the Inhuman workshop was entitled ‘The Inhuman as the Human’, and was curated and chaired by Afshin Akhtar-Khavari. The two speakers were Matilda Arvidsson and Connal Parsley....
The Inhuman in the Human
Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014) The first roundtable of the Law and the Inhuman workshop was entitled ‘The Inhuman in the Human’, and was curated and chaired by Kathleen Birrell. The two speakers were Daniel Matthews and Scott Veitch. Kathleen...
Law and the Inhuman: Introductory remarks
On 8 April 2024, the workshop ‘Law and the Inhuman’ took place at Tilburg Law School (TLS), in the Netherlands, convened by Marie Petersmann, Julia Dehm, Kathleen Birrell and Afshin Akhtar-Khavari. The workshop gathered ten speakers from different disciplines, who...
Kerstin Anér, Pioneering Thinker of Data Power – Towards A Critical Reimagining the History of Data Law and Policy
Questions of data, law, feminism and the environment are not new, and contrary to popular perceptions, were not discovered as a field of critical thought by contemporary scholars. These debates were already taking place in national and international fora in the 1960s...
Live and let live: the mythological projection of police in the killing of Chris Kaba
Continuing our responses to A Philosophical History of Police Killing, today we bring you Carson Arthur's response to the book. In the UK, we are seeing the attempted rewriting of ‘police accountability.’ This in response to the prosecution and in preparation for the...
Are the Police Anarchic?
Following the publication of Melayna Lamb's superb book A Philosophical History of Police Power, we have asked James Martel and Carson Arthur to respond to the book. Today we bring you James' response. Melayna Lamb’s A Philosophical History of Police Power makes the...
The Colonial Breach and the Colonial Bind
Reposted from Interregnum. Whatever the contentions on the term we use to express the scale and method of killing we are witnessing in Gaza, the description at the International Court of Justice as a 'live-streamed genocide' is both apt and particular to our age. For...
Robert Michels’ Lessons for the Left
Tim Christiaens In the early 2010s, many people on the left proclaimed the death of state-based socialism, the political party, and any kind of organizational authority. From Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring, the 2011 revolts put their faith in horizontalist...
