The Legal Humanities Association (LHA) is a new learned society. It aims to foster a community dedicated to cultural understandings of law. It nurtures humanities-inflected legal scholarship, seeking innovative forms of legal knowledge and analysis. The LHA will be a...
Twenty years have passed since Jacques Derrida's death, yet his profound philosophical contributions to the Critical Legal Studies movement in both the UK and the US continue to reverberate. His concept of deconstruction, which challenges traditional philosophical...
Centre for Policy, Citizenship and Society + Department of Social and Political Sciences, Nottingham Trent University April 5th to April 6th, 2024 Call for Stream Proposals – deadline September 11th 2023 The Call for Stream Proposals is now open for the 1st annual...
This is a working paper for a keynote presented at the McGill Law and the City Conference in May 2021, reproduced with kind permission. Theo van Doeburg, Architectuuranalyse (1923) I. The strange case of Pierre Menard 1. In 1934, we are told,J-L Borges, ‘Pierre...
Republished with permission from Discover Society. A number of vice chancellors have claimed that they are constrained in how they can approach the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by financial agreements. This means that they wouldn’t be able to cover...
We are pleased to announce that registration is now open for the Critical Legal Conference 2018: Regeneration at The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK from 6-8th September 2018 (doctoral workshop on afternoon of 5th September). Registration is through Eventbrite and...
When Sam Gyimah announced a traffic light rating system for universities this week many poured scorn on the ineptness of the attempt to classify higher education by a simplified metric drawn, no doubt, from Mr Gyimah’s previous life as an investment banker. Yet the...
A catastrophe is only violent in its uncalled for appearing, and its coming is all around us in the smallest things. This year’s Critical Legal Conference takes place at Warwick under the title Catastrophe. This is not without reason, for it sees the notion of...
Part I - The nature and significance of the conatus Spinoza’s ‘conatus’ is a signal concept of his thought and one which appears as an axiom of modern treatments, particularly those of a political nature. Famously, the conatus doctrine provides: Each thing insofar as...
Finance and teleology Critical finance law is the study of one of the most significant teloi of the modern era: the settlement of debt. Why is the settlement of debt a telos? Well it is perhaps no surprise that just as the Scholastic concept of the causa finalis, or...
A surfeit of sense Interpretation might initially be defined as the art of finding the situs of that which refuses to be localisable. One may slice up the commodity into its tiniest parts and never find its value, for the value is intermixed totally. So the sense of...
Note: readers should first study the key concepts Power (potentia) and Natural Right before proceeding. A practical comprehension of Spinoza’s theory of natural right allows us to begin to use this conceptual tool to construct our world. This is the essence of...
Note: readers should first study the key concept Power (potentia) before proceeding. When students (res)trained in law approach Spinoza’s theory of natural right (ius naturale) they face precisely the formidable terminological barrier which Spinoza endeavours to teach...
In this article I will focus exclusively on Spinoza’s theory of power (potentia) which forms a key element of his theories of natural right and imperium. For the legal theoretical importance of potentia in the areas, see the forthcoming articles NATURAL RIGHT and...
The following text is the first study of a two-part monograph written by Nikolai Berdyaev, the former Marxist militant turned autodidact and Christian existentialist, and was published in the journal Put' in Febraury 1930. It seems...
As Nicolaus Cusanus' thought developed from the ground-breaking Docta Ignorantia one can detect that movement that each thinker must make as they pass to the limit, and pass right through. In the following selection, Maurice de Gandillac shows us how Cusanus (here de...
To see the debt of Nikolaus von Kues (Nicolas Cusanus, Nicolaus de Cusa) to Meister Eckhart, it perhaps suffices for the casual reader to compare yesterday's post here to the selection translated below, this being the primary purpose of presenting the two texts...
The following selected extracts from Meister Eckhart’s extremely fecund Expositio sancti Evangelii secundum Iohannem have been picked because, while ostensibly working through the difference between justice and the just, they do so using theoretical tools of...
The London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) is an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional event created to foster emergent critical thought and provide new avenues for critically orientated scholarship and collaboration. It welcomes diverse and...
It is worth remarking that three broad types of response to debt crisis could be found in antiquity, in the Mediterranean-Mesopotamian area. We say broad types because it is quite possible that the particular type remarked upon was rather the predominant or defining...
We record for posterity the views of Stephen Roach, non-executive chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and faculty member of Yale University. According to Mr. Roach (paywall): The global economy is being hobbled by a new generation of zombies – the economic walking dead....
In his critique of free will, Spinoza’s first argument against his opponents, named (Heereboord) and unnamed (Descartes, Aquinas, Burgersdijk) is that the intellect is not only the same as the will, but that in no way can the will be said to exceed the...
The special issue of the Utrecht Law Review, containing a selection of papers presented at the Critical Legal Conference 2010, is now online. See: http://www.utrechtlawreview.org/index.php/ulr
The ‘domino effect’ is a remarkably crude mechanical metaphor which once again implicitly informs mainstream characterisations of the revolutions in play in Tunisia, Egypt, and to a lesser...
(Streifzüge durch die Umwelten der Tieren und Menschen (1933), translated by Stephen Connelly [*]) Translator's note: In this short introduction von Uexküll outlines his view of passive consciousness and its relation to affective being which would prove so...
Within the alchemical legal doctrine of royal circles, the doubling of the heir to the throne’s body as the expression of the nation’s future health requires, as Ian Jack has noted, that the utmost composure be displayed.Thus mirroring ‘the king’s two bodies’:...