Liberal theories from Immanuel Kant to John Rawls present the self as a solitary and rational entity endowed with natural characteristics and rights and in full control of himself. Rights to life, liberty, and property are presented as integral to humanity’s...
Rights form the terrain on which people are distributed into rulers, ruled, and excluded. Power’s mode of operation is revealed, if we observe which people are given or deprived of which rights at which particular place or point in time. In this sense, human rights...
[image style="polaroid"]https://criticallegalthinking.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Guernica-Sun.jpg[/image] The debate about the meaning of humanity as the ground normative source is conducted between universalists and communitarians. The universalist claims that...
The School of Law, Birkbeck presents 2013 Annual Law Lecture IS THERE A RIGHT TO DISOBEDIENCE AND RESISTANCE? Professor Costas Douzinas Birkbeck, University of London 'The ‘new world order’ announced in 1989 was the shortest in history coming to an abrupt end in...
Why and how did this combination of neoliberal capitalism and humanitarianism emerge? Capitalism has always moralized the economy and applied a gloss of righteousness to profit-making and unregulated competition precisely because it is so hard to believe. From Adam...
We will explore the strong internal connection between these superficially antagonistic principles, at the point of their emergence in the late 18th century here and in the post-1989 order in the next part. The religious grounding of humanity was undermined by the...
If ‘humanity’ is the normative source of moral and legal rules, do we know what ‘humanity’ is? Important philosophical and ontological questions are involved here. Let me have a brief look at its history. Pre-modern societies did not develop a comprehensive idea of...
Delivered at The Southern Europe Crisis and Resistances, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, 25 November 2012. Listen to the free podcast. In the summer of 1918, Constantin Cavafy met E. M. Forster in Alexandria. Cavafy compared the Greeks with the English. The two...
The debate over the future of the Human Rights Act ('HRA') has been somewhat surreal. The Labour position is schizophrenic. Labour introduced the Act but was justifiably accused of violating most of its principles in its obsession with security. But schizophrenia is...
On 22 November 2012 academics from Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain gathered at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities to discuss the economic, political and humanitarian crisis austerity has created in South Europe. But PIGS can fly. The widespread protests of 2011...