Following the untimely death of Prof Emilios Christodoulidis, in February of this year a new group of managing editors was appointed for the journal Law & Critique.

We join Law and Critique as new Managing Editors with a desire to do justice to the tradition of the journal. For nearly four decades, Law and Critique has challenged the purported neutrality and autonomy of law, detailed its political and ideological nature, and discussed its complicity in structures of domination, exploitation and exclusion. Through the journal, a critical community has created a tradition of robust research, of political intervention and theoretical innovation that illuminates law’s work, law’s violence, and law’s potential. But these are radically different times to the “end of history” in the 1990s when the journal took off. If there was any residual promise in the emancipatory potential of law, it appears to have faded or disappeared in the genocide and epistemicide in Palestine. Legal institutions have failed to prevent these atrocities, verifying the critiques developed in the pages of this journal that law without a radical commitment to justice and without politics cannot save us. 

We see the role of the journal as being a key critical voice in these times of rising authoritarianism, techno-fascism, racism and misogyny, genocide, and climate catastrophe. We are determined to continue critiquing the law when it does not deliver justice, to keep resisting unaccountable power and capitalism, to keep imagining, writing and acting for a world of peace, democracy and justice. For the past three and a half decades, much of the object of critique was the hegemonic position of liberal and neoliberal legalism. Colleagues, comrades, students, and sympathisers joined us in highlighting the politics, indeterminacy, and complicity of liberal legalism. However, we aim to remain self-critical too, for we must ask ourselves whether the failures of law and its critique are also our failures. In this sense, the mood today is darker, more serious, more desperate and determined. Our aim is for the journal to be a place that readers turn to better understand these darker times, analyse the central role of law and resist the many injustices surrounding us. 

For this, we particularly want to invite contributions that are global in their diagnosis of the problems of racial and patriarchal capitalism, that are inter- and anti-disciplinary, and provide illuminating alternative ideas uncovered through histories of resistance, through a view to and from the Global South, including from Indigenous cosmologies. We believe it important to break down some of the old barriers (of the Left) that may have prevented a richer understanding of law’s structuring. We invite critical legal scholars, socio-legal scholars, Marxist scholars, scholars informed by critical race theory, post-, de-, and anti-colonial perspectives, feminist, queer, intersectional approaches, and Third World theory and praxis. This, we hope, creates new forms of connectivity and solidarity.

Connectivity and solidarity can be achieved through traditional peer-reviewed publications,  but also through blog posts, podcasts, longer deep-dive publications, and performance. As a critical community, we have pioneered schools of thought, now we aim to experiment with the form and writing. We will be seeking to link up with other editorial and organisational projects, including the Critical Legal Thinking blog and the Critical Legal Conference, and the burgeoning number of critical legal research centres and networks around the world. In times of anti-intellectualism, the attack on the humanities, the wider dismantling of the public higher education system, and the discrediting of our racialised colleagues, a critical mass of critical scholars and scholar-activists has never been more necessary.

Managing Editors

• Costas Douzinas (Emeritus, Birkbeck College, UK)
• Christine Schwöbel-Patel (University of Warwick, UK)
• Julia Chryssostalis (University of Westminster, UK)
• Illan rua Wall (University of Galway, Ireland)
• Sara Ramshaw (University of Victoria, Canada)
• Adam Gearey (Birkbeck College, UK)

Book Reviews Editor

• Elena Loizidou (Birkbeck College, UK)