CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Learning to be Surprised (Symposium)
Val was a proper old-school scholar, interested in ideas for their own sake and driven to understand and respond to the injustices of the world. As a serious intellectual she was not interested in academic trends or popularity, but in working through a set of questions and problems – often with cigarette in hand. As an Australian who came to live in Hamburg, Germany, her thought constantly returned to the historical and ongoing process of Australian colonisation and to law’s complicity in colonial violence and genocide. The Wrong of Law builds upon Val’s long intellectual collaboration with her partner, Uwe Petersen, and his Hegelian approach to mathematical logic. Val’s work thus draws connections between mathematical logic, philosophy, social theory and law, and in this respect the text is often as challenging as it is unconventional. In the following reflections I try to draw out a number of key ideas from The Wrong of Law. It is only a partial account, and...
ARTICLES
Trump won’t take cyanide
Trump speaking at the "Stop the Steal" rally on January 6, 2021Voice of America, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Trump is not Hitler, the US is not Nazi Germany, no invading army is heading toward the White House. All this notwithstanding, it is impossible not to...
Moving Beyond Being Punitive
St. Quentin State Prison, CA This text was presented in a seminar on ‘Beyond the Punitive Society’ on 7th January 2021, as part of the seminar series ‘Abolition Democracy 13/13’, co-hosted by the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought at Columbia University...
My favourite CRT: Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings
Cathy Park Hong is a poet of South Korean descent, raised and living in the US. In 2020 she published her book of creative non-fiction, “Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition”. She calls minor feelings: “the racialized range of emotions that are...
Anthropocenic Pandemic: Laws of Exposure & Encounter
CDC/ Hannah A Bullock; Azaibi Tamin (2020) A human body, at any given moment, might be inhabited by over 380 trillion viruses, traversing internal and external bodily surfaces. This community, known as the human virome, forms part of a holobiont – a term used to...
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...
