A Sigh of Relief There was a sigh of relief when, after a farcical legal process, befitting an Ally McBeal-type scenario of the bizarre and surreal, Wilders (the anti-Islam/Muslim politician) was acquitted from incitement to hatred and criminal insult. The acquittal...
CONFERENCE Starts: Nov 17, 2011 09:00 AM Finishes: Nov 19, 2011 05:00 PM Location: Birkbeck, University of London A three-day (17-19 November) Conference hosted by Birkbeck School of Law, and sponsored by The Leverhulme Trust, Birkbeck Law School and LSE Law...
This is the second installment of the dictionary. I felt we needed new terms to help us describe the increasing intimidation of protesters in the UK. Kettle of First Resort: The use of ‘containment’ – holding people against their will and without intention to charge...
We are delighted to announce the Inaugural Professorial Lecture by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos on the 16th of November 2011 at 6.00pm (The Old Cinema, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW). Please register here. Abstract: What does it mean to be...
We are delighted to publicize a lecture by Professor Catherine Malabou, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University. With the discussants: Professor Jane Bennett, Department of Political Science, John Hopkins University and Professor Fred...
The Oxford Brookes Critical Approaches to Law Group is delighted to welcome Connal Parsley (Unversity of Melbourne) to speak this wednesday on: 'Within law and without? Some remarks on critical approaches to law and jurisprudence' On Wednesday 28th Sept;...
In a slight break from our usual style and approach, and to celebrate the great success of the 2011 Critical Legal Conference (organized by the Departments of Law and International Politics at the University of Aberystwyth), criticallegalthinking.com will be posting a...
The Melbourne Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory are hosting an interesting workshop on the 15-16th of December, on the relation between the technological apparatus and its accidents. The fourth annual workshop will again bring together higher research students and early...
In the wake of recent protests, and through the pre-emptive arrests for the royal wedding, the government and police have made it clear recently that only ‘legitimate’ protesters are protected by our ‘right’ to protest. I would expect them to make this distinction but...
Backdoor Broadcasting have just put up the podcast of last wednesday's event at Birkbeck on the recent events in Greece and Spain. The abstract reads: When Stephane Hessel wrote in Time for Outrage!that indignation with injustice should turn to ‘a peaceful...
The stream proposes to engage with the contemporary possibilities of resistance to everything that is or that can be associated with sovereignty, power or domination (sovereign power, sovereign practices, sovereign language, sovereign thought and the law of the...
Critical Legal Conference 2011 The relevance of time and temporality seems particularly pertinent for critical legal scholars interested in themes of memory, trauma, forgiveness, and post/colonialism. However, time also plays an important role in cases that are not...
Critical Legal Conference 2011 From a classical perspective, early societies worshipped divinities, pursued grand narratives and ideas, then moved on to fetishising machines and this stage has arguably been succeeded by the fetishisation of man by the machine. In this...
Critical Legal Conference 2011 Derrida ends Specters of Marx with an injunction for the 'scholar' of the future: let the ghost speak, let the revenant return, learn how to live by keeping up company with the specter. In the 'age of technology' where human interaction...
Critical Legal Conference 2011 Most law degree courses start with one or more introductory course to law. It is within these courses that students get acquainted with law, where it comes from, what it does and how a legal system is organised and structured. Usually,...
Critical Legal Conference 2011; General Stream Aberystwyth University, September 9 – 11 2011 The theme of this conference invites participants to reflect more profoundly on the fundamental questions faced by radical thought in its confrontation with law. Whilst...
London Consortium Event: Prof. Esther Leslie, Friday 24 June, 6.30 pm Birkbeck College, Room B20, Malet Street, Bloomsbury London WC1E 7HX Time and money , as the old adage goes, are co-articulated. This paper considers in particular the watch and the clock as they...
Wednesday 22nd, June: 6.30pm Room B04 Birkbeck Main Building: Free - open to all - no registration When Stephane Hessel wrote in Time for Outrage! that indignation with injustice should turn to ‘a peaceful insurrection’ perhaps he did not expect that the movement of...
The events of 11 September 2001 enabled western states to radically transform their counterterrorism practices. This conference aims to critically engage with this transformation; to map how the 'war on terror' is changing and shaping new areas of our everyday lives...
Following the Spanish los Indignados protests, a number of days ago a facebook page suggested a similar protest in Syntagma Square in Athens on the 25th of May, at 6pm. Similar events are occuring in Thessaloniki, Patras and Heraklion. The live feed (click the...
For the first time in Greece a documentary produced by the audience. “Debtocracy” seeks the causes of the debt crisis and proposes solutions, hidden by the government and the dominant media. www.debtocracy.gr
Criticallegalthinking.com is delighted to be involved in a new international grouping that seeks to challenge the necessity of austerity politics, entitled Mayday International. The introduction to this project reads: Europe stands at a crossroads. Successive waves of...
Birkbeck School of Law Centre for Law and the Humanities Benjamin's Law Monday 23rd May 2011 Info
In solidarity with striking lecturers and support staff students from UCL have occupied the Registry – the main administrative wing of the university. As students, we do not have the power to withdraw our labour in solidarity with staff, and so we have decided to...
The 2011 Critical Legal Conference, to be held at Aberystwyth, has announced its call for papers and theme. Stream proposals due by 4th of April and Paper proposals by the 6th of June. The organizers write: The theme of this conference invites participants to reflect...
Available now as a free e-book (see below). The first book to be produced by an 'editorial kettle' – all seven of its editors are under 30 and have been kettled by the police – Fight Back! features 350 pages of reports, analysis, images, reflections and overviews on...
What thread links the political experience of Tute Bianche with the Book Blocs we have seen last autumn on the streets of Rome and London? What is the link between the alter-globalisation movement of Seattle and Genoa and the student and youth movements that are now...
Newcastle Law School; Wednesday 9th March 2011: 9.30am – 4.15pm Newcastle Law School are running a one-day symposium focusing on the thought of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Agamben’s work has received a huge amount of exposure over the past decade, mostly...
A Workshop hosted by the Oxford Brookes Critical Approaches to Law Research Group - Friday 6th of May 2011 The ordering of space, a derivative of intellectual conceptualism, is an act of violence executed through aesthetic means. (Ronen Shamir, 2001) This workshop...
Just under three years ago, people in the village of Gumbi in Western Malawi went unexpectedly hungry. Not like Europeans do if they miss a meal or two, but that deep, gnawing hunger that prevents sleep and dulls the senses when there has been no food for weeks ......
A quick suggestion of reading from here: In the report we aimed to provide a comprehensive review of the development and implementation of the ‘terrorism lists’ over the last decade and document the crisis of legitimacy that is currently facing. Since the inception of...
In this period of economic crisis and neoliberal attack on labour and social rights in Greece, we also face a generalized attack on migrants’ rights, a broad campaign by the PASOK government and the mass media to use migrants as scapegoats for social insecurity,...
There is a superb new project in Ireland that we would like to suggest: As the prolonged period of economic boom came to a close, it might have been anticipated that there would be an opening up of public discourse in Ireland, that space would become available for new...
Further information at the London Thessaloniki Solidarity Group: http://www.salonikisolidarity.org.uk/
Following from Hara's post yesterday, we thought it might be a good idea to refresh our minds of some of the thinking behind and beyond the Dec 2008 Greek protests. We are republishing the statement of the occupied Athens School of Economics and Business and the...
The University For Strategic Optimism, in conjunction with the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, is pleased to announce a semester long course on Vol I of Karl Marx’s Capital. The course will be led by Professor John Hutnyk (Goldsmiths) and our very...
This is a quiet time on the blog, with most of our contributors preferring to spend time in front of home fires rather than those lit on Parliament Square. To fill in some of the empty space on the blog, we want to run a series over the holidays on what we are...
On this day, despite the protests, the plan to raise the cap on tuition was carried by 323 votes to 302. Like the Wu Ming in Italy, would anyone like to have a go at summarising a message of protest from the names of the books on their shields? Feel free to use the...
The right to protest ineffectually is enshrined in the Irish Constitution and we are here today to exercise that right. To ensure that the demonstration will have no effect whatsoever ICTU [the Irish Congress of Trade Unions] have taken certain sensible measures. The...
The Guardian have posted a brief interview with Hélène Cixous. In it she describes beautifully a symptom: The main theatre of the Sorbonne, with the portraits of men all along the walls - the institutions past. Then at the far end of the room, a 'silhouette of...
I want to draw attention to the recent interview with Prof. Wendy Brown on Human Rights in Ireland. Prof. Brown engages initially with the question of critique, and its relation to rights. She refuses to reject rights, but instead seeks to question the premises upon...