CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
How to Reanimate Rotting Brains in the Age of AI
As artificial intelligence (AI) seeps into our daily lives, its impact on our thinking capacities is becoming increasingly clear. AI is replacing our jobs, increasing government and corporate surveillance, and luring vulnerable internet users into rabbit holes of loneliness and psychosis. In particular, large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have rapidly become part of our daily routines. A lot of workers use LLMs every day to write e-mails, summarise reports or brainstorm ideas. More and more people are forming opinions on all kinds of topics by discussing them with an LLM. Many use ChatGPT and its equivalents as personal assistants to coordinate their calendars, as secretaries to write their emails or student essays, or even as 24/7 therapists when access to mental health care is becoming scarcer and more expensive. Meanwhile, the impact of LLMs on our cognitive skills is also becoming increasingly clear: the more people outsource argumentation and critical thinking to...
ARTICLES
Sexual Violence at the University
TW: Sexual Violence Since 18th March 2021, students at the University of Warwick have occupied the Piazza, at the centre of the campus, demanding change in the way that the institution deals with sexual violence. At the time of writing, they have been in...
International Solidarity Call: Mediterranea Saving Humans
Mediterranea Saving Humans is under attack in Italy. Several members of Mediterranea are accused by the Office of Public Prosecutor of Ragusa of “facilitating illegal immigration.” It is definitely not the first time that such an accusation has been...
The Begum Judgment on the Couch
The Supreme Court’s judgment in the Begum case[i] has already attracted multiple readings and commentary. This comment will attempt a different kind of reading, and of listening, given the judgment was not only published but also broadcast live as delivered by...
The Turmoil of Studying Law: Falling Inside the Outside
“ …for the language I spoke was that of the world from which I came.”Khalil Gibran, The Madman.[1] I write this piece as my course on critical legal thinking comes to an end.[2] I am now a peculiar embodiment of imperfect juxtapositions – of hope and...
Law & Critique: On Arendt, Race and Lawbreaking
Hannah Arendt was conservative in more ways than one.[1] She valued the unprecedented, the unexpected, and the new,[2] yet in ‘Civil Disobedience’ and other essays crafted at the end of the rebellious 1960s, struggled to square this valuation with a palpable desire...
The Anti-System
The global rise of the far right has given new relevance to the concept of anti-system in the context of politics. In order to understand what is happening, we need to go back a few decades. This is not the place to dwell on how rich this period was, politically...
Beyond Criminalisation: Torture as a Political Category
It has been almost a year now that the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill has been discussed in the British Parliament. The Bill is currently at Committee stage before the House of Lords and, if proposed amendments do not succeed, it...
Ode to Reza Barati on the seventh anniversary of his death
Reza Barati was a Kurdish Iranian man who was killed on Manus Island - Australia's immigration prison in Papua New Guinea. Reza was killed on 17 February, 2014. He was 24 years old. The Kurdish Iranian writer Mardin Arvin was his friend. Imprisoned with him on Manus...
Patent Capital in the Covid-19 Pandemic: Critical Intellectual Property Law
The current controversy around intellectual property rights has focused on the role of intellectual property in the current Covid-19 vaccine shortage. But the present situation should not be understood as a manifestation of an exceptional legal event. Rather, it is a...
Palestine at the ICC: Law Overcoming Violence?
With the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Pre-Trial Chamber I ruling of 5 February 2021, a path is paved for the investigation of war crimes committed in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in 2014. By recognising that its jurisdiction...
Salvaging the ‘RF’: Radical Feminism and Trans Exclusion
In late 2020, I found myself teaching a course on gender, law and development.[1] I decided to start with the basics, including a crash course on feminist legal theory for those of my students who were not familiar with it. Before I knew it, I was knee-deep in...
A calculated, jubilant violence and the meanings of “lawful”
As Rose Parfitt explains in her essay Mob Constitutionalism: The Riot in the Rights, the siege on the U.S. Capitol building on 6 January 2021 appears to represent a contradiction: “as soon as we look closely at the motivations of these ‘domestic terrorists’...
The End of the Portuguese Dream?
Given the circumstances, the presidential election was a marvel of organization, revealing a civic-mindedness that may have come as a surprise even to the well-advised. The abstention rate was high, but still much lower than predicted. There were two major winners:...
Manifestos & Counter-Manifestos: An explainer for the 1776 Commission
The President's Advisory 1776 Commission, which reported in the last days of the Trump Administration in the US, is a direct retort to the New York Times 1619 Project. In contrast to the 1619 Project which centred on slavery and its role in shaping the US, the...
Blocking puberty blockers: Boobs for all in latest anti-trans craze judgment
The far-reaching and immediately impactful High Court judicial review decision of Bell and A v The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust [2020] EWHC 3274 (Admin) conflates puberty blockers and medical transition and holds puberty blockers should...
From Dynastics to Genealogy
I’ve written about The Punitive Society course by Foucault before, particularly in a review essay which appeared in Historical Materialism, and then in my book Foucault: The Birth of Power which appeared with Polity in 2017. That was a book...
Mob Constitutionalism: The Riot in the Rights
The Trump presidency has been a rocky road for pretty much everyone to the left of Trump himself. Nonetheless, the lethal efforts of the President’s supporters, at his command, to storm the Capitol and overturn 2020’s supposedly ‘fraudulent’ result by force, seems to...
Trump won’t take cyanide
Trump speaking at the "Stop the Steal" rally on January 6, 2021Voice of America, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Trump is not Hitler, the US is not Nazi Germany, no invading army is heading toward the White House. All this notwithstanding, it is impossible not to...
Moving Beyond Being Punitive
St. Quentin State Prison, CA This text was presented in a seminar on ‘Beyond the Punitive Society’ on 7th January 2021, as part of the seminar series ‘Abolition Democracy 13/13’, co-hosted by the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought at Columbia University...
My favourite CRT: Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings
Cathy Park Hong is a poet of South Korean descent, raised and living in the US. In 2020 she published her book of creative non-fiction, “Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition”. She calls minor feelings: “the racialized range of emotions that are...
Anthropocenic Pandemic: Laws of Exposure & Encounter
CDC/ Hannah A Bullock; Azaibi Tamin (2020) A human body, at any given moment, might be inhabited by over 380 trillion viruses, traversing internal and external bodily surfaces. This community, known as the human virome, forms part of a holobiont – a term used to...
