CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL

Native Title and the Juridical Field: Bourdieu in Australia
The 1992 Mabo v Queensland (No 2) decision marked a watershed in Australian legal history, as the High Court formally rejected the doctrine of terra nullius and acknowledged the existence of native title. But legal revolutions are rarely what they seem. This article argues that the recognition of native title in Mabo and its reaffirmation in Yunupingu v Commonwealth (2023) exemplify Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the juridical field as a space of symbolic power, where recognition operates through misrecognition, and legal change functions to preserve more profound continuities. Rather than view these cases as ruptures, we should read them as legal adaptations to shifting external pressures, filtered through the internal logic of the field. The law’s symbolic capital depends on its ability to appear autonomous and rational, even as it embeds colonial structures of domination. Native title law illustrates how the juridical field absorbs critique without...
ARTICLES
Native Title and the Juridical Field: Bourdieu in Australia
The 1992 Mabo v Queensland (No 2) decision marked a watershed in Australian legal history, as the High Court formally rejected the doctrine of terra nullius and acknowledged the existence of native title. But legal revolutions are rarely what they seem. This...
The Politics of Vision, Targeting, and Palestine
‘The whole history of Palestinian struggle has to do with the desire to be visible.’ Edward Said On the evening of March 3rd, 1991, Rodney King, a 25-year-old Black American, was pulled over by LAPD officers after a high-speed chase. What followed was recorded by...
Tony Blair Will Not Save Us from Climate Hysteria
A resident holds a sign warning passers-by to slow down to reduce wakes that exacerbate flooded streets in a suburb of Houston, Texas, as U.S Border Patrol riverine agents evacuate residents in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey August 30, 2017. U.S. Customs and Border...
Some Points about Contemporary Fascism
We are delighted to repost Brian Massumi's latest essay, first published on his new Substack. The maturation of the modern nation-state coincided with a progressive becoming-immanent of power to the social field. Concepts such as disciplinary power, governmentality,...
Project 2025 and Manifestos for Undemocracy
A manifesto was instrumental in the formation of the constitutional democracy that was the United States of America, and we are currently witnessing its (re)inception as an undemocracy through the work of another manifesto. The Declaration of Independence – akin to...
The Law and Political Economy of 21st-Century Authoritarianism
Democratic self-government and freedoms are under attack around the world. From the consolidation of an increasingly authoritarian and erratic administration in the USA to the Turkish Government’s open persecution of the political opposition, from Israel’s systematic...
The Pulse of Resistance: Beating Beneath Black Veils
Hey, you who sit on the shore, merry and bright! A soul in the water surrenders to night. One there is, flailing with desperate hand, On this fierce, dark, and weighty sea, as you apprehend.…Tell me, at what moment should I say? A soul in the water throws life...
CfP: Critical Legal Conference, 2025 – University of Exeter
The Call for Papers is now live. Please read the full description of the streams here. If you would like to participate - send short abstract of your proposed paper to the stream organisers (as mentioned under their stream heading). Graduate students who seek a fee...
Parody Alternative Judgment: For Women Scotland [2025]
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in the For Women case last week, colleagues thought it would help to have a case summary for use in making sense of the judgment. Accordingly, I have produced a summary sticking precisely to the Court’s language from...
Mandate 2.0
The word Mandate here refers to the arrangement by which the fate of the people in Palestine was handed to European colonial powers a century ago. A rereading of the Mandate at this time becomes a necessary act. Towards that, I distinguish between a Mandate 1.0 and a...
Shouting ‘what makes a real woman’ as the earth is on fire!*
Every border implies the violence of its maintenance. It’s just that the border guards differ. Borders come in many kinds. The borders this statement brings to mind could be geographical, international. Perhaps they are otherwise spatial, or temporal. This is a...
The Age of Lawiness
As the bold “TED” logo dissolves into a flurry of red dots, a slightly nasal voice asks us to examine a picture and consider the puzzle it presents.[1] ‘These African students are doing their homework under streetlights at the airport in the capital city because...
Swallowing the Snake’s Tail: Responding to Žižek’s Critique of my “Many Worlds Interpretation”
In his book Freedom a Disease Without Cure, (2023), Slavoj Žižek draws a lengthy critique of my article “Many Worlds Interpretation, Critical Theory and the (Immanent) Paradox of Power.” The critique stands on a tripod (we will develop below). 1. Difference...
German Staatsräson means deportation?
Germany has joined other nation-states – such as the US and Greece – in the repression via deportation of political action against their respective governments’ ongoing material and ideological facilitation of Israel’s genocide in Palestine. The specificity of the...
Forming the Legal Humanities Association
In late 2021, a small group of legal scholars began a discussion about possibly setting up a new academic association for law and humanities research which would be registered in the UK, but open to people around Europe and the world. This led to a small, reflective...
“Man is the only real enemy we have”: Feminist reflections on staging Animal Farm in the fall of 2024
In February of this year, a new feminist blog called The Morrigan launched in Ireland as part of the Doing Feminist Legal Work Network. It features a mixture of Irish and international feminist legal thinking. This piece is a cross-posting from The Morrigan. No set of...
To Reclaim or Resist: Can Digital Sovereignty Ever Be Feminist?
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven / AMVK; Bloem van Smarten (1990-1991) On 30 and 31 January 2025, a group of researchers participated in a workshop examining digital sovereignty through a feminist lens (see below for full list of contributors).[1] Digital or technological...
Ontology and Politics of Liberation: Two Paths to Decrypt Power
This analysis introduces two solid critical arguments—one ontological, the other historical—that illuminate the unique features of the theory of encryption of power, what sets it apart from other theoretical endeavors. The results are deeply intertwined, highlighting...
Tyranny at Europe’s Borders….
On Wednesday 10th April 2024, the bodies of three girls were recovered off the Greek island of Chios.[1] They drowned after a boat carrying migrants from Turkey to the EU ran into rocks. Another, fourteen people, including eight more children, were...
Transnational Disruption: On the meaning of J.D. Vance’s Munich Speech
In the speech he gave to the 2025 Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance apparently missed the point (video, transcript). According to immediate criticism, the format should be a platform for security policy exchange in...
Sleeping While Poor: The Use and Abuse of Criminal Law
On June 28, 2024, the United States Supreme Court upheld state and city-level bans on sleeping in public spaces—effectively, laws against homelessness. In his majority opinion for Grants Pass v. Johnson, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the local ordinance in Grants...