CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING

LAW AND THE POLITICAL

CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING

LAW AND THE POLITICAL

Prefigurative Law Reform: Creating a New Research Methodology of Radical Change

Prefigurative Law Reform: Creating a New Research Methodology of Radical Change

 Image by Noah Purifoy |  http://www.noahpurifoy.com/joshua-tree-outdoor-museum Prefigurative politics and law have long been seen as opposing phenomena – one a grassroots radical practice that embodies sought-after norms (horizontality, social justice, and ecology, for instance); the other an institutional structure that is typically hierarchical and backed by force. Yet, there is a growing interest in the relationship between the two.  In this short piece, I want to consider a specific form of prefigurative law – the imaginary law reform proposal. This is an experimental research method, I have been working with over the past 5 years, inspired by critical legal roleplaying – including the simulated progressive judgment-writing of feminist and other radical judgment projects. See, for instance, the current Anthropocene Judgment Project, producing anticipatory judgments for the ecological crises of the future. Crafting a law reform proposal can be prefigurative in...

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ARTICLES

We do this for each other

We do this for each other

It’s a tip, a trickle. I’ve read international law and international relations in three institutions and three countries. In each, I’ve twisted and turned, tripped and fallen willingly into rabbit holes and inexplicable complexities. People wrapped in clothes that...

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Critical Phenomenology as a Good Friend

Critical Phenomenology as a Good Friend

Aspiration concept and ambition idea as a chopped trunk casting a shadow of a tree as an achievement recovery and hope for futur success symbol in a 3D illustration style. When people ask me ‘why phenomenology?’ I usually point to emerging research in psychology and...

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Art as Legal Method

Art as Legal Method

Initially, our project was an experiment. What would happen if an artist created a visual response to a piece of legal scholarship that criticised how law regulates public spaces? What insights into art, law and justice might be generated?  What started as an art...

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Orienting oneself in the archive

Orienting oneself in the archive

"Let us then make up our minds to go forward untrammelled by the narrow and transient interests of nationalism in civil aviation towards the wider and more lasting goal of international welfare. If this Assembly achieves no more than to inculcate a lasting devotion to...

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Staying in Shape:  Writing, Questions, Method

Staying in Shape:  Writing, Questions, Method

The way one asks a question affects the way one is able to respond. This seems to be a truism. It also means that the way one shapes a question to turn it into the magical scholarly formula – a research question – is something that both enables and constrains...

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PURE VIBES

PURE VIBES

I write this blog as a Global South student and practitioner of international law. My education in the subjects of Legal Methods and International Law began at an Indian law school, amidst an ocean of monotony. Understandably, neither subject stirred any enthusiasm....

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The ‘Joy’ of Methodology

The ‘Joy’ of Methodology

The soul-crushing mind-numbing gut-wrenching heart-breaking “joy” of methodology. I was never taught me-tho-do-lo-gy. Whatever that is. Isn’t the method just 1. Idea, 2. Struggle, 3. Word vomit? That’s how I do it. I wonder, what if? What if I want to be inspired by...

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The Joy of Methodology: A Blog Carnival

The Joy of Methodology: A Blog Carnival

For many researchers, methodology and joy don’t belong in the same sentence. Legal researchers in particular often seem to place methods-talk somewhere between irritating impediment and unbridgeable chasm. Some of these anxieties are well founded: law school legal...

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OVER A DECADE OF ARCHIVES

On Colonial Universality and other Legal Prerogatives: Reflections on Peter Fitzpatrick’s The Mythology of Modern Law

Following the death of Peter Fitzpatrick this month, we are reposting this series on The Mythology of Modern Law (first published on CLT on 3 August 2018) to mark the 25th anniversary of the book.2017 marked the 25th anniversary of Peter Fitzpatrick’s The Mythology of...

Against Agamben: Is a Democratic Biopolitics Possible?

Giorgio Agamben’s recent intervention which characterizes the measures implemented in response to the Covid-19 pandemic as an exercise in the biopolitics of the ‘state of exception’ has sparked an important debate on how to think of biopolitics. The very...

Law, Reading, and Power: The ‘S’ Joke, Why You Find it Funny and Why I Don’t (with Reply)

A guy walks into a bakery known for making fancy cakes. He says, “I’d like to have a cake shaped like the letter S.” The baker says he can do it, but the cake will be expensive. The man confirms that price is no object. The baker tells him to come back after three...

Law is a Fugue

BWV 895 Law is, metaphorically speaking, a fugue.Desmond Manderson has previously deployed the fugue metaphor to describe the mode with which he would present the aesthetic dimensions of law and justice. Here I am intensifying the metaphor in direct relation to...

Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction

Key Concept Img: Annie Vought | annievought.com Deconstruction by its very nature defies institutionalization in an authoritative definition. The concept was first outlined by Derrida in Of Grammatology where he explored the interplay between language and the...

Cupcake Fascism: Gentrification, Infantilisation and Cake

The Cupcake as Object The cupcake is barely a cake. When we think about what “the cake-like” ideal should be, it is something spongy, moist, characterized by excess, collapsing under its own weight of gooey jam, meringue, and cream. It is something sickly and wet that...

White Feminist Fatigue Syndrome

In her recent piece in Comment is Free, "How feminism became capitalism's handmaiden - and how to reclaim it” Nancy Fraser draws on her own work in political theory to argue that feminism at best has been co-opted by neoliberalism and at worst has been a...

Decolonizing the Teaching of Human Rights?

According to the new Bolivian constitution, education is "one of the most important functions and primary financial responsibilities of the State”; it is “unitary, public, universal, democratic, participatory, communitarian, decolonizing and of quality” (art. 78, I);...

#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics

01. INTRODUCTION: On the Conjuncture 1. At the beginning of the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, global civilization faces a new breed of cataclysm. These coming apocalypses ridicule the norms and organisational structures of the politics which were forged...

Coughing out the Law: Perversity and Sociality around an Eating Table

It was lunchtime at Sydney’s David Jones, Australia’s up-market department store chain. So I headed down to the ‘food floor’. Whenever I have to shop at DJs I try to make sure I go there around midday, precisely so I can go down to the food floor and order the...

Palestinian Resistance: The Political, Social and Human Right of Self-Defense

Once again the bombs are falling on the Gaza Strip, a stretch of territory excised from Palestine proper as a result of continuing illegal and illegitimate actions by Israel. In fact, Gaza has become a closed ghetto, first cut off from Palestine in violation of the...

Punk, Law, Resistance … “I have set my affair on nothing”

1. I, Punk In 1977 I was sixteen. Everything I have to say about punk is coloured by that fact, because sixteen was precisely the right age to be if punk was going to have a decisive impact on you. Because punk was not about your social class, gender or race, it was...

Anonymous & the Discourse of Human Rights

In the last months, we have seen the emergence of ‘Anonymous’. In particular, in the days after the widespread attack on Wikileaks (following their publication of leaked US diplomatic memos) they emerged with a fairly credible threat to take down major global internet...

Power, Violence, Law

Over the last two hundred years, the theory of right, now known as normative jurisprudence, has discovered its vocation in a frantic attempt to legitimise the exercise of power. It carries out this task by declaring that law and power are external to each other...