CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Architecture of Inequality: What Apartheid Teaches About Qualified Immunity
Oppression does not arrive wearing a hood; it arrives stamped, filed, and countersigned. What looks like order—forms, doctrines, jurisdiction—can be a choreography of domination. Fanon taught that colonial violence is not only the blow of the baton but the quiet grammar that makes the blow seem natural. In South Africa and in the United States, different histories enlist the same craft: turning harm into procedure, and procedure into permission. Apartheid’s statutes and America’s qualified immunity are not equivalents. But they rhyme. They show how a legal order can speak of rights while building exits for power. Consider the shared architecture. First, classification: decide who counts, and under what name. Second, space: draw lines, decide who may cross. Third, force: immunize the hands that keep the lines intact. Finally, memory: write rules that make yesterday’s injuries disappear in today’s paperwork. These are not metaphors. Apartheid’s Population Registration Act catalogued...
ARTICLES
The Social Reproduction of the Informal Migrant Workforce in China
Series: Critical Legal Thinking on China As “the factory of the world,” China’s development of the manufacturing economy in the past four decades has relied on its large informal, precarious, and marginalized internal migrant workforce. Among the country’s 800...
Observations on Hong Kong
Series: Critical Legal Thinking on China It has been said that a poem is never finished, just abandoned. Academic writing has a touch of that too. The visions and revisions it has taken to get a text into decent shape could always do with one more run through, one...
Schmitt in Beijing
Series: Critical Legal Thinking on China On December 4, 2020, the keynote lecture for Hong Kong’s second annual official “Constitution Day Seminar” was delivered by Peking University law professor Chen Duanhong. In his remarks, Chen firmly supported the legal climate...
Introduction: Critical Legal Thinking on China
The return of China to the centre of international affairs invites a critical examination of its articulation of ‘law and the political’. In a world of nation-states, the Chinese ‘party-state’ is a singular political form that has been aptly described as a having a...
Notes on Rosa Luxemburg at 150
Simone Weil was fascinated by Rosa Luxemburg, reading her brought her joy. In the 1930s, in European left-wing circles, Luxemburg had an aura; a woman with a rigorous mind, a fighter, a revolutionary, a martyr – her name, when it was pronounced, appeared to glitter....
Hannah Jones’ Violent Ignorance
In her book Violent Ignorance Hannah Jones explores our ability to turn away from painful or uncomfortable knowledge. At the heart of the book she argues that this process – what she calls ‘violent ignorance’ – produces or allows the violence of racism, migration...
Abolitionary Listening: Propositions & Questions
If listening is a technique or practice of the law, which is to say also of politics/police, what would an abolitionary listening sound like? The state listens and demands a listening disposition, listening is critical to all processes of arrest,...
Constituent Power in a Minor Key: Carolyn Pedwell’s Revolutionary Routines
There is a tendency in discussions of constituent power to focus on the groups involved, the subjectivities produced and the discursive significance of the events themselves. Revolts are full of conflict and violence, they pull down sovereign orders and generate...
The animated organization: international organizations, international law, Frankenstein and Freud
Photo: Fram in the Arctic ocean, 1894, by Fridtjof Nansen (Nasjonalbiblioteket / National Library of Norway, Wikimedia Commons) Part 1: symptoms I want to start by citing Mary Shelley—the reproductive logic of her multiple framing narratives in the novel Frankenstein,...
Being-with: Farewell, Jean-Luc Nancy
“Are feelings finite?” This was a question Jean-Luc Nancy asked me as we travelled in a taxi from Heathrow to Central London in the summer of 2005. I had just welcomed Jean-Luc and his wife Hélène Sagan at the airport. They were among the extraordinary gathering of...
Church, State, Resistance
Following the sad death of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, we republish one of his most important essays which engages with law and the political. The essay was originally published in The Journal of Law and Society and translated by Véronique Voruz and Colin Perrin....
Colonialism and the Epistemology of Ignorance: A Lesson from Afghanistan
Kabul, Photo by Mohammad Rahmani on Unsplash The abrupt and chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in mid-August filled the news around the world. With more or less variations, these were the main topics: humiliation for the U.S. and its European allies; a repeat of...
In Memoriam Jean-Luc Nancy
Jean-Luc Nancy (26 July 1940 – 23 August 2021) Jean-Luc Nancy passed away on August 23. It is a huge loss of someone who both as a philosopher and as a friend was so important to many of us. His talk last January at the 'Left Theory in the 21st century’...
The Redress of Politics
Emilios Christodoulidis, The Redress of Law: Globalisation, Constitutionalism and Market Capture (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Page reference in brackets refer to the book. The Redress of Law is a major achievement. Major in every sense. It is large, a...
Neoliberalism’s Anthems
As I sit down to write a response to John Reynolds, Julia Emtseva, and Richard Clements, who generously reviewed my book, the musical accompaniment are the tunes of the Olympic Games of Tokyo 2020. National anthems in particular ring out. The familiar tunes and lyrics...
Books: Reading ‘Diplomat’ magazine through Marketing Global Justice
Concluding our engagement with Marketing Global Justice (CUP 2021), Richard Clements explores a particular moment of marketing the spectacle of global justice. ‘And here is now another example: I am at the barber's, and a copy of Paris-Match is offered to me. On the...
Books: Tools for Navigating Neoliberalism
Continuing our engagement with Christine Schwöbel Patel's Marketing Global Justice Julia Emtseva explores the role of donors in the global justice 'sector'. Marketing Global Justice is more than a mere description of how branding strategies are used to advance...
Books: Neoliberalism’s Brand of Justice
We are thrilled to launch a series on contemporary critical (legal) books. Our first text in this series is Christine Schwöbel Patel's Marketing Global Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Over three posts we will explore different aspects of the book, before...
Locke, Leibniz and the State Space
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...
Yes, International Law is Really Law
Public international law (PIL) is neocolonial in function. By this I mean that it continues to materialize the colonial functions of disciplining and plundering the under-developed world. Yet PIL is anti-colonial in form, officially committed to global inclusion and...
A Day in the Lives of Public International Law
Nicholas Rajkovic has recently introduced two concepts which, between them offer a fresh lens through which we can view our profession. Rajkovic developed these concepts, “performances of legality” and “vicarious litigation”, in his reflections on “lawfare”. But they...
