CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Vertigo of Self-Grounding (Symposium)
There is an image by M.C. Escher in which a staircase rises in perfect geometrical order, each step aligned, each angle exact — yet the ascent loops back upon itself. The movement is continuous, coherent, even rigorous; what unsettles is not disorder but correspondence. One climbs, and finds oneself where one began. In The Wrong of Law, Valerie Kerruish identifies a comparable motif at the heart of modern rationality. Across Hegel’s identity of method and content, Marx’s definition of value as a self-reproducing abstraction, Frege’s reduction of arithmetic to logic, and Gödel’s incompleteness proofs, she traces a single architectonic problem: the attempt of a system to ground itself from within. The trajectory of The Wrong of Law is organised around what Kerruish calls “thought surprising itself”: the moment in which a system that seeks to secure its own foundation discovers that its ground cannot be established without remainder. In her reading of Hegel’s Science...
ARTICLES
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...
ARI
Ari, Perugia, 2019 With Ari’s death, a radiant intensity has been extinguished. That should be mourned, but that it existed at all must be celebrated. In physics, intensity of radiant energy is the power transferred per unit area, where the area is measured on the...
No Future: Punk Against the Boredom of the Law
Punk is … the transgressive politics of boredom. Being nothing other than a pawn in their game – who has not sometimes woken up in the middle of the night imagining this. The Big Other that pulls the strings has various figures: national and transnational law and order apparatuses, global capital and the alleged economic necessities, bureaucratic and administrative regulations, the demands of social security, educational standards, images, ideas and idols constantly produced and re-produced by the mass-media, and so on and so forth. Things go from bad to worse when one starts to wonder who really is in charge, since today sovereignty is fragmented, which does not make it less pervasive and omnipotent. Then again, you may find some comfort from the fact that this is not your paranoid delusion but reality, “the only things we got today” as The Clash already told us in “Hate and War”, which you’ll find from their first LP, The Clash, released in 1977: “An’ if I close my eyes / They will not go away / You have to deal with it / It is the currency”.
‘Not a Nazi … But’: Forstater v CGD Europe
This article considers the decision of the Employment Appeal Tribunal in the case of Forstater v CGD Europe.[1]Forstater is the most recent in a series of crowdfunded cases brought by ‘gender critical’ activists . In addition to addressing the relevant legal...
The Forstater Case: How should law deal with sex and gender?
The recent Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) decision in Forstater v CGD Europe and others [2021] immediately generated headlines in most British newspapers. The Telegraph saw it as “inject[ing] some good sense into the toxic trans debate”, the Times said the “ruling...
On Israel’s Colonial Occupation of Palestine: The Final Solution Without End
Yet another ceasefire like so many others before it, in Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestine; yet another death count for the archives of oblivion; yet another occasion to ease the conscience of the international community, especially in North America and Europe;...
Law & Critique: Que(e)rying the ECHR’s ‘European Consensus’
Continuing our cooperation with the journal Law & Critique, the full text of Claerwen O'Hara's recent article can be found here. ‘European consensus’ is an interpretive method used by the European Court of Human Rights (the Court). Broadly, it refers to the...
Last seen: Black people missing & dying in the UK
Evidence waits. It has been nearly three weeks since we received an update from the Metropolitan police in regards to Richard Okorogheye’s death. I wonder if they have told Richard’s mother, Evidence Joel, but asked that she not share until their investigation is...
