CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING

LAW AND THE POLITICAL

CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING

LAW AND THE POLITICAL

The Architecture of Inequality: What Apartheid Teaches About Qualified Immunity

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...

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ARTICLES

Notes on Rosa Luxemburg at 150

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....

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Hannah Jones’ Violent Ignorance

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...

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Being-with: Farewell, Jean-Luc Nancy

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...

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Church, State, Resistance

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....

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In Memoriam Jean-Luc Nancy

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’...

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The Redress of Politics

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...

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Neoliberalism’s Anthems

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...

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Books: Tools for Navigating Neoliberalism

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...

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Books: Neoliberalism’s Brand of Justice

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...

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Locke, Leibniz and the State Space

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...

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Yes, International Law is Really Law

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...

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A Day in the Lives of Public International Law

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...

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OVER A DECADE OF ARCHIVES

On Colonial Universality and other Legal Prerogatives: Reflections on Peter Fitzpatrick’s The Mythology of Modern Law

Following the death of Peter Fitzpatrick this month, we are reposting this series on The Mythology of Modern Law (first published on CLT on 3 August 2018) to mark the 25th anniversary of the book.2017 marked the 25th anniversary of Peter Fitzpatrick’s The Mythology of...

Against Agamben: Is a Democratic Biopolitics Possible?

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...

Law, Reading, and Power: The ‘S’ Joke, Why You Find it Funny and Why I Don’t (with Reply)

A guy walks into a bakery known for making fancy cakes. He says, “I’d like to have a cake shaped like the letter S.” The baker says he can do it, but the cake will be expensive. The man confirms that price is no object. The baker tells him to come back after three...

Law is a Fugue

BWV 895 Law is, metaphorically speaking, a fugue.Desmond Manderson has previously deployed the fugue metaphor to describe the mode with which he would present the aesthetic dimensions of law and justice. Here I am intensifying the metaphor in direct relation to...

Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction

Key Concept Img: Annie Vought | annievought.com Deconstruction by its very nature defies institutionalization in an authoritative definition. The concept was first outlined by Derrida in Of Grammatology where he explored the interplay between language and the...

Cupcake Fascism: Gentrification, Infantilisation and Cake

The Cupcake as Object The cupcake is barely a cake. When we think about what “the cake-like” ideal should be, it is something spongy, moist, characterized by excess, collapsing under its own weight of gooey jam, meringue, and cream. It is something sickly and wet that...

White Feminist Fatigue Syndrome

In her recent piece in Comment is Free, "How feminism became capitalism's handmaiden - and how to reclaim it” Nancy Fraser draws on her own work in political theory to argue that feminism at best has been co-opted by neoliberalism and at worst has been a...

Decolonizing the Teaching of Human Rights?

According to the new Bolivian constitution, education is "one of the most important functions and primary financial responsibilities of the State”; it is “unitary, public, universal, democratic, participatory, communitarian, decolonizing and of quality” (art. 78, I);...

#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics

01. INTRODUCTION: On the Conjuncture 1. At the beginning of the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, global civilization faces a new breed of cataclysm. These coming apocalypses ridicule the norms and organisational structures of the politics which were forged...

Coughing out the Law: Perversity and Sociality around an Eating Table

It was lunchtime at Sydney’s David Jones, Australia’s up-market department store chain. So I headed down to the ‘food floor’. Whenever I have to shop at DJs I try to make sure I go there around midday, precisely so I can go down to the food floor and order the...

Palestinian Resistance: The Political, Social and Human Right of Self-Defense

Once again the bombs are falling on the Gaza Strip, a stretch of territory excised from Palestine proper as a result of continuing illegal and illegitimate actions by Israel. In fact, Gaza has become a closed ghetto, first cut off from Palestine in violation of the...

Punk, Law, Resistance … “I have set my affair on nothing”

1. I, Punk In 1977 I was sixteen. Everything I have to say about punk is coloured by that fact, because sixteen was precisely the right age to be if punk was going to have a decisive impact on you. Because punk was not about your social class, gender or race, it was...

Anonymous & the Discourse of Human Rights

In the last months, we have seen the emergence of ‘Anonymous’. In particular, in the days after the widespread attack on Wikileaks (following their publication of leaked US diplomatic memos) they emerged with a fairly credible threat to take down major global internet...

Power, Violence, Law

Over the last two hundred years, the theory of right, now known as normative jurisprudence, has discovered its vocation in a frantic attempt to legitimise the exercise of power. It carries out this task by declaring that law and power are external to each other...