CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Symposium on Kerruish’s magnum opus: The Wrong of Law
When Valerie Kerruish died in 2022, Critical Legal Thinking hosted a series of reflections from her former colleagues, friends, and collaborators. As recounted there, Valerie spent decades from the mid-1960s teaching law in Australia with an abiding concern for the dispossession of indigenous Australians and the unremitting violence they face. She then moved to Hamburg and founded, with Uwe Petersen and Matthias Kaiser, the Altonaer Stiftung für philosophische Grundlagenforschung. Val was my teacher, mentor, and friend. I can hardly imagine being an academic without her inspiring works and provocations. Emilios Christodoulidis, a legal philosopher very dear to Val, observed on her passing that she was a perfectionist, and thus her magnum opus had remained ‘devastatingly unfinished’. Emilios, too, has now left us; his life cruelly cut short. His oeuvre is a vast array of books and articles, so we can continue thinking with him. Val’s book that Emilios...
ARTICLES
Unforming Police: The Impossibility of abolition
The many riots and anti-police demonstrations this year have led to long-fought movements for prison and police abolition being brought into mainstream media and policy – with calls to defund police and divert money towards community support issuing from across the...
Life and Language in the Virocene
Photo © andreaspm.com The Virocene Sorry, this seat is taken. Move out Anthropocene, enter the Virocene. Actually, the seat was never really for Anthropos. It was meant for a parasite that could take over this planet. Oh, wait. The Virocene is the age of the...
Fascism 2.0: An Intensive Course
It is impossible to predict what will happen in the US in the coming weeks. As I write, a number of crucial questions remain unanswered. Was there electoral fraud or not? If there was, was it enough to reverse the outcome? Will the transition be from Trump to Biden or...
Online Book launch: Constituent Power (14 January 2021)
Welcome to the online book launch seminar of Constituent Power: Law, Popular Rule and Politics (EUP 2020), co-edited by Matilda Arvidsson (Gothenburg), Leila Brännström (Lund) and Panu Minkkinen (Helsinki). Recent social and political developments, including the...
Our Favourite CRT: Steve Biko
Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (A Stubbs. ed) (Heinemann 1978) Although she was writing about the black existentialist novelist Ralph Ellison, Hortense Spillers could easily have also been referring to Stephen Bantu Biko when she invokes the figure of a...
Our Favourite CRT: Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander (Photo by Vivien Killilea/WireImage) Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (The New Press 2010) When I was a wandering recent law graduate, I found myself washed up in the murky bayous of New Orleans, working at an under-resourced,...
Our Favourite CRT: Gloria Anzaldúa
Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘The Coming of el Mundo Surdo’ in AnaLouise Keating (ed), The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (Duke 2009) How can we make sense of a global order that is founded upon the act of making “most of the world”[1] out of place, through the motions of...
Our Favourite CRT: Lewis Gordon
Lewis Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Routledge 2007) I’ve been called ‘Paki’, ‘flaco n*****’, ‘Ethiopian’ or ‘too Latin American’ more times than I care to count. Including during and about my teaching. But CRT is not about...
Our Favourite CRT: Kimberlé Crenshaw & Patricia J Williams
KimberlÈ Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and leading scholar of critical race theory. She is a full professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues. Credit: Felix Clay, eyevine, Redux Contact...
Our Favourite CRT: Donna Awatere
Donna Awatere, Māori Sovereignty (Broadsheet 1984) My mother’s people are from Ōpōtiki on the East Cape of Aotearoa and it wasn’t until I was an adult that I came to have some understanding of my Māoritanga, or our people’s history. Our iwi (tribe)...
Our favourite CRT: James Baldwin
James Baldwin, Speech at Berkeley (1979) I call myself a child of this world of empire. The colony I was born in bore recent witness to British district officers who met with one of my grandfathers. My other grandfather was schooled by Scottish missionaries....
Our Favourite CRT: Attia Hosain
Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column (Chatto and Windus 1961) A few years ago, I was offered the opportunity to participate in a workshop in India to support early career academics with their writing. The workshop was geared towards addressing the...
Our Favourite Critical Race Theory – Introduction
As if this annus horribilis wasn’t horribilis enough in the last few weeks the Conservative government, the depth of whose depravity is impossible to fathom from one day to the next, have commenced a McCarthy-esque censorship initiative that would...
Policing Capitalist Exploitation: An Interview with Alex Vitale & Mark Neocleous (Part 2)
Today Petr Kupka and Vaclaw Walach continue the interview with Mark Neocleous and Alex Vitale, discussing their critical analyses of policing. VW&PK: On the other hand, there are cases that appear to show that policing is not just about working-class people and...
Policing Capitalist Exploitation: An Interview with Alex Vitale & Mark Neocleous (Part 1)
On 14 July Petr Kupka and I sat down (virtually) with Mark Neocleous and Alex Vitale to discuss their critical analyses of policing. Vitale is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and has been frequently interviewed on the issue of policing in connection with...
The De-Aging of the World
Social age does not coincide with physiological age. But the degree of the discrepancy varies according to historical period, including its social context and the other collective circumstances surrounding it. The same applies to societies. The industrialized world in...
CLC Dundee: undeed and duende.
Had the virus not intruded, I, and many of CLT’s readers, would be in Dundee right now, for the annual Critical Legal Conference, an event that has happened every autumn since the mid-1980s. The CLC has often proclaimed its non-existence for all but three days of the...
An Escape Route for Brazil
Brazil is at an existential crossroads, the magnitude of which we can only begin to imagine. This is a country where the pandemic has caused one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world. With only about 2.8 percent of the world population, Brazil accounts for...
A Second Manifesto for the World Social Forum? From an Open Space to a Space for Action
Is the World Social Forum (WSF), which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2021, just an open space or can it (should it) also be a space for action? This question has been discussed for years in the WSF International Council, and so far, it has not been possible to...
Sharing Myth (A Critique of the Sharing Economy)
In his 1957 book Mythologies, Roland Barthes explores how wine functions not only as France’s national emblem, but also as a myth that helps grasp the ambiguity within French capitalist society. Wine, he argues, is a defining part of France’s experience because it...
What Kind of Justice for a ‘Global New Deal’?
Delivering the 2020 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres recently set out a wide ranging critique of the current global order, characterised by pervasive, institutionalised inequality, and failed, nationalistic responses...
