CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Foundational Wrong of Law (Symposium)
Stephen Connelly There is an implicit assumption in jurisprudential reasoning that this reason, as form, is without inconsistency. Error is procedural: it results either from misrecognition of the ‘true’ law, from ignorance of the true facts, or from misapplication of the law to the facts. The practical syllogism is itself unassailable; what is wrong in the law is a failure to reason in accordance with its form. If an inconsistency (or antinomy) appears in a particular judg(e)ment as a result of ‘difficult’ facts or intuitively unjust laws, the inconsistency is a defect of the judge, not of practical legal reason itself. The judge is referred back to the law (literally in civilian systems), until the ‘apparent’ inconsistency is ironed out and the facts are made to cohere once more. The wrong of law, Kerruish argues [WL255], is this exclusion ab initio from legal reasoning of the very methods of contradiction which could faithfully express the contingencies of...
ARTICLES
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...
Relic or Portent: The View of Northern Ireland from Britain?
Time shows both the diagnosis and prognosis regarding Northern Ireland offered in the Break-Up of Britain to be well wide of the mark. That Nairn’s view from Britain is inaccurate is not that surprising to those used to hearing about Northern Ireland (and the wider...
States that Build Citizen Power and Joy
In her recent article for CLT, Davina Cooper calls for the urgent reimagination of the state. She calls upon critical theorists to move beyond critique of the current state form, and ask the deeper questions: what is the state for? What does it mean to be a state?...
On the Mark of Woman
It is true that men do not understand the refusal so well. It is true that women understand it all too well. Such that they make it their own. When the death of Eurydices Dixon in Melbourne re-evoked the chant “men fear women laughing at them, women fear men killing...
The An-Archic Nomos of the Nomads: Preliminary Thoughts on the Relationship Between Law and Anarchy
The relationship between law and anarchy tends to be characterised, to say the least, as an uncomfortable one. Taking, usually, a purely negative approach towards law, anarchist thought — in all its heterogenous tendencies — is, usually, characterised by a total...
The Urgent Task of Reimagining the State
Covid 19 has given new urgency to the radical task of rethinking the state. Illness, job losses, hospitalisation, and economic precarity demonstrate the need for scales and forms of governance that can organise and resource social welfare and public health...
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?...
