CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Reclaiming the Ground: Lawful Expropriation and Land Justice in South Africa
Colonialism rarely dies; it mutates. Its uniforms change—from khaki to suits, from passbooks to policy papers—but the arrangement it protects remains the same: some live on the land, others live off it. Post-apartheid South Africa knows this intimately. Political rights were won; material power was not. Three decades on, the democratic state is asked to perform a contradiction: celebrate equality while administering an economic geography built to deny it. The debate over land reform—especially over compensation below market value, and in narrow cases at nil—turns on whether we still seek permission from the very market that grew fat on dispossession. Frantz Fanon warned that colonialism is not only a system of force; it is a pedagogy that trains the colonized to accept the master’s ledger as the measure of justice.[1] If decolonization begins with unlearning that pedagogy, then the first act is conceptual: stop asking the market to ratify the undoing of the market’s crimes. The...
ARTICLES
Anti-racism, Materialism and the Sewell Report
One might be forgiven for thinking that the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities’ Report was released a day early. The Report’s insistence that Britain is not institutionally racist, and indeed that Britain could serve as a ‘beacon’ for other...
Brighton and Hove’s Homeless Bill of Rights
On 25 March 2021 the City of Brighton & Hove voted (by 31 votes to 11, with 7 abstentions) to adopt the Homeless Bill of Rights. (The text, and much other material related to the campaign, may be found at the website: The Homeless Bill of Rights.) What does this...
Towards an Orwellian Police-State Apparatus: Education Reform in Greece
On February 11th, 2021, the neoliberal government of New Democracy in Greece endorsed a reform bill for tertiary education, establishing a special police force for the surveillance of university campuses. The bill was adopted with 166 votes in favor (versus...
A Decolonial Feminist Critique of Penality
Andrea Zambrano Rojas & Iván Zambrano. 'Staroutkinsk (Russia) and Quito (Ecuador)' 2021 Contemporary penal expansion does not have an exclusively neoliberal heritage, so how are we to make sense of penality thriving through progressive political discourses?...
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...
