International economic law (IEL), broadly defined, refers to the rules governing the cross-border movement of goods, people, technology and finance capital, as well as the institutions created to design and enforce such rules. IEL has, over the past three decades, developed exponentially as a field of study, evolving from a sub-field of public international law…
Many European countries have by now been in lockdown for more than a week. This has given everyone ample time to reflect on our current condition. Many of the world’s leading critical thinkers have shared their thoughts with us through op-eds, blog posts, and so on. Among the more troubling are three opinion pieces Giorgio…
“This episode of Black Mirror sucks!” The slogan that briefly went viral in the United States after the election of Trump has now acquired an even more infectious, irresistible irony for many in coronavirus-stricken Europe. The fear of loved ones and ourselves getting infected by the inconspicuous threat that is Covid-19 has merged with confusion…
The outbreak of Covid-19 is billed as a ‘once in a century event’. It has appeared as the prophesised rupture in our social, economic and political fabric of the world, with the recognition that what follows may not resemble what humanity has become used to. It is posed as a discontinuity in the normality of…
It is too early to predict how the COVID-19 pandemic will unfold and over what period of time. But we should expect that, much like September 11, the world afterwards will be very different to the world before. We know we should never waste a crisis, but the right seems more adept than the left…
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 notion of biopolitics, as it was formulated by Michel Foucault, has been a very important contribution to our…
As academics in a post-truth world, I believe we have an urgent and important task. In a world where emotional appeals and emotive decision-making are seemingly the norm, academia should be in the business of truth. Rather than lament reality, we should be revealing the reasons for the possibility of our reality and charting a…
Key Concept The economic and political management of human populations through their exposure to death has become a global phenomenon. Wars, genocides, refugee “crisis”, ecocide and contemporary processes of pauperization and precarization reveal how increasing masses of individuals are now governed through their direct and indirect exposure to death. In order to unpack those processes,…
Available in paperback now from online bookshops and as a ‘fair access’ E-book from Counterpress Author: Ari Hirvonen Adjunct Professor in Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory at the University of Helsinki B & W 229 x 152 mm | Perfect Bound on White w/Matte Laminate | 344 pages | Paperback ISBN 978-1-910761-09-0 | E-book…
Dig Station is an idle tapping game, with grinder overtones, produced by C6H6 and available on the Amazon app store. The premise is that you are in control of a station that is digging into the earth’s crust in order to mine resources. You begin simply with a drill: your ‘core drill’, which slowly and…
If the debates incited by the 2019 Hong Kong Protest Movement, known as the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (or Anti-ELAB) Movement, have revolved around conflicting interpretations that favor differently weighted readings of geopolitics and more fundamental questions about the extent to which geopolitics can serve as a reliable index for understanding local insurrection, the bulk…
The Law and Humanities Summer School is an intensive one-week study programme, to be held at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, from 15 to 19 June 2020. The school is co-organised by the following partners: Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies – lucernaiuris, University of Lucerne Centre for Law, Arts and Humanities, The Australian National University…
The Universalist conceptions of humanity that were forged in the Enlightenment revolutionised thinking about human life, its ethics, and its political organisation. Inscribed into the modern declarations that shaped the post-Enlightenment political project, these conceptions paved the way for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Universalisms remain central to modernity’s legal discourse and are indispensable to…
In radical or alternative left movements, the idea of safety is paramount. It is rare to go to a meeting about feminist, anti racist, queer, or otherwise progressive politics without a safe (or safer) spaces policy being presented. This document, whether read aloud or pinned to a wall, is implicitly a contract between participants regarding…
FRANKENLAW COMMUNITY DIVISION MODERNITY Critical Legal Conference 2020 University of Dundee 3-5 September Call for Streams I lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland. I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts; but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the…
This is one of a series of key concepts in Marxist legal theory organized in collaboration with our friends at Legal Form: A Form for Marxist Analysis of Law. All articles in this series, including the present one, will appear concurrently on Legal Form and Critical Legal Thinking. The Marxist concept of dictatorship has a different meaning…
We write as members of the UK academic community. We are deeply concerned by the marginalisation of expertise in the media coverage of the general election. In particular we would like to highlight the lack of attention paid to recent analyses by economists and employment lawyers in relation to the possibilities that the Labour Manifesto presents…
Coloquio Internacional «Prácticas Constituyentes: Constituciones, imaginarios políticos y formas democráticas de vida» Núcleo de Teoría Social UDP, junto con el Janey Program in Latin American Studies de la The New School for Social Research y el Centro de Investigación en Teoría Política y Socia de la Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, organizan el Coloquio Internacional «Practicas Constituyentes: Constituciones,…
External examiners for Liverpool Law School today resigned en masse over Liverpool University management’s threats to students. With the authors’ permission we reproduce the letter below. Solidarity with everyone striking this week! We, the undersigned, have tendered our collective resignation from the School of Law and Social Justice at the University of Liverpool in…
We want to introduce a page that will intervene in the way law is being taught around the world. So we are calling for contributions to a new pedagogy page: Critical Legal Teaching. We are particularly interested in short reflections on teaching materials; texts, music, videos & poetry (readings and counter-readings); bibliographies aimed at students;…