CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Women and Colonialism in the UK Supreme Court’s decision in Re Dillon (2026)
There are many extraordinary things about the UK Supreme Court’s (UKSC) decision in Dillon. It unpicks at least half of Article 2 of the Windsor Framework – specifically undoing the elements that protect human rights in Northern Ireland post Brexit. Its use of interpretive tools to undertake what I’m sure it regards, to paraphrase Self-Esteem – as some kinda wizardry to arrive at absurdities of interpretation. Colin Murray in his blog posts outlines many of these legal high jinks in what he rightly calls a highly activist judgment. Reasonable sounding conservative judgments written in abstractions are rarely called out for their activism. Even where their apparent rationality and common sense are deployed to undo ordinary meanings and intentions. But here the UKSC, in seeing the controversial UK Legacy Act of 2023 as a way to narrow future protection of rights in Northern Ireland it is activist, including in ways that I will outline below, that impact...
ARTICLES
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...
Law & Critique: A Corporeal Law
Continuing our cooperation with the journal Law & Critique, Joshua Shaw writes about his recent article. The full text can be found here (link). The human body and its constitutive materials and effects are formative to law, just as law is formative to the body....
How do we see ‘most of the world’ from Sheikh Jarrah?
Isn’t this simply the matter? Isn’t this what ultimately unites us? These are the questions that wandered through my head as I observed the cartoon illustrated by Doaa el-Adl. Along with the hashtag #SaveSheikhJarrah, the cartoon shows a woman getting dragged from the...
Beware of the Cry of Expropriation
Santiago, October 2019, thousands of people occupied the streets asking for economic structural reforms. A demonstration that started with students complaining about an increase in the metro fare escalated quickly in a national movement demanding significant changes...
On the Government of the Faceless and the Deathless
It seems that in the new planetary order that is gaining form two things, apparently unrelated to each other, are destined to be completely removed: the face and death. We will endeavour to inquire if they are not somehow connected and what the meaning of their...
Defense or Domination: The Categories of Israel’s Occupation
In Sheikh Jarrah Palestinian man stands next to graffiti, which reads 'we will not leave'. The story started with protests in Jerusalem against racist policies of the Israeli government, it escalated with the parallel threat of yet another act of displacement against...
The Colombian Unrest – Tax Reform, Neoliberalism & Riot Cops
In recent weeks Colombia has seen massive unrest, with a general strike, huge crowds across the country and significant violence from ESMAD - the riot police. This short piece seeks to clarify the background and underline the significance of this revolt against...
Karl Marx: Alienation
The Marxian concept of alienation (Entäußerung) or estrangement (Entfremdung) is one of the most discussed notions in the history of modern social and political theory. There is a long history of the term before Marx, from the giusnaturalistic and...
Syllabus: Decolonizing Political Science
We are republishing a slightly abridged version of Prof Robbie Shilliam's brilliant Decolonizing Political Science syllabus (full version with assessment available here). We also welcome other radical syllabi (both those practiced and ideal) and hope that the act of...
Law, Metrics and the Scholarly Economy
As markets began to usurp other forms of social regulation throughout the 20thcentury, metrics became increasingly central to the coordination of new spheres of market-mediated relations. More recently, digital metrics have been operationalized to facilitate the...
