CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Teaching as a revolutionary activity
Neoliberal universities as a place where radical thoughts come to wither away. We are living in bad times (admittedly, I struggle to remember the good times, but the current bad times do seem quite bad). And in bad times there is an impulse amongst decent people to try and find meaningful ways of resisting the badness around us; a tendency to find hope in unsuspecting places, and to locate sites of political possibilities in formerly untapped corners of our lives. For academics (#NotAllAcademics) teaching is one such unsuspecting place, and a potential untapped corner: what if, we ask ourselves in desperation and exhaustion, teaching can be radical; what if it is a way to move the needle. Now, I love teaching as much as the next person (meaning, sometimes I enjoy it, and sometimes I find it exhausting and mind-numbingly repetitive), and over the last few years I have had the pleasure and a privilege of meeting some truly brilliant (politically, as much as intellectually) students,...
ARTICLES
After Open Access
We are a collective of intersectional feminist and social justice journal editors. We reject the narrow values of efficiency, transparency and compliance that inform current developments and policies in open access and platform publishing. Together, we seek further...
Denise Ferreira da Silva: Analytics of Raciality
Key Concept In the glossary to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), you won’t find raciality under the letter ‘R’. Instead reference to the term is found under ‘A’; analytics of raciality. Before proceeding to explore this term it is...
Marxist Legal Theory: The State
Key Concept This is part of a series of key concepts in Marxist legal theory organized in collaboration with our friends at Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis of Law. All articles in this series, including the present one, will appear concurrently on Legal...
The Statues of our Discontent
Statues look a lot like the past, which is why, whenever they are called into question, we turn to historians. The truth is that statues are a thing of the past only as long as they stand quietly in squares, as indifferent to us as we are to them. At such times, which...
Postcolonial Liberalism’s Double Binds
“We need Covid Trials. In an international court,” is Arundhati Roy’s “post-lockdown reverie”. She wants the Indian government to be held accountable for its treatment of migrant workers as refuse and the ongoing assault on the civil rights of dissenters in the wake...
The Winter of Absolute Zero: Interview with Shaj Mohan
The silent 20th century consensus was that philosophy was Western, which then was split into ‘continental’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’. In recent decades we have seen the assertive presence of non-White philosophers including Achilles Mbembe, Anthony Appiah, Divya Dwivedi, and...
Complex Back Stories: Feminism, Survivor Politics and Trans Rights
On June 10, author JK Rowling published an article on her website, ‘JK Rowling Writes About her Reasons for Speaking Out about Sex and Gender Issues’ which offered a rationale for her public interventions opposing legislation in the UK designed to legally recognise...
Marxist Legal Theory: Security
Key Concept This is part of a series of key concepts in Marxist legal theory organized in collaboration with our friends at Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis of Law. All articles in this series, including the present one, will appear concurrently on Legal...
Remembering Peter Fitzpatrick (II)
I read for a PhD under Peter’s inimitable supervision at Birkbeck from 2005 until late 2008, at which point I told him that I had to return to Australia to finish the dissertation because the birth of my first child, Phoebe, was imminent. It sounds like I took drastic...
Institutional Vandalism: The University & Covid-19
The Guardian’s 29 May article (‘Soas to slash budgets and staff as debt crisis worsens in a pandemic’) has brought attention to a worrying development, which risks seeing losses of livelihoods and expertise at a unique and world-renowned institution. The danger is...
Universities, Finance Capital and Impact of COVID-19
Republished with permission from Discover Society. A number of vice chancellors have claimed that they are constrained in how they can approach the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by financial agreements. This means that they wouldn’t be able to cover...
The System Was Never Broken (it was built this way)
The unravelling developments in the United States of America (USA) amid the death of George Floyd are unsettling. The terminology ‘public order’ is used by popular political narrative to host and then employ a variety of techniques to deflect from the justified...
Beyond Brutality
I write this at great distance from the uprisings now taking place across the US sparked by the police killing of George Floyd. I am thousands of miles distant and witness police repression, and the anger of the protestors, via old and social media. I am a white...
The Sense of Public Order
With the widespread social unrest unfolding in the USA following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, we are once again confronted by the horrifying exceptionality of public order enforcement. The problem, however, is that we understand the videos of...
The Pandemic and Us: Enemy, Resistance, Desire
Much has already been written about the coronavirus’s impact on the legal phenomenon, as well as about the use of national laws in response to the contagion. In this post, I would like to pursue what David Graeber indicates as a compelling line of inquiry....
On Colonial Universality and other Legal Prerogatives: Reflections on Peter Fitzpatrick’s The Mythology of Modern Law
Following the death of Peter Fitzpatrick this month, we are reposting this series on The Mythology of Modern Law (first published on CLT on 3 August 2018) to mark the 25th anniversary of the book.2017 marked the 25th anniversary of Peter Fitzpatrick’s The Mythology of...
Remembering Peter Fitzpatrick
In her beautiful piece for CLT on the life and career of Professor Peter Fitzpatrick, Sundhya Pahuja offers a provocation for someone to write more on Peter’s years in Belfast, teaching Law at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) in the late 1960s/early 1970s. While...
Vale Peter Fitzpatrick (1 November 1941 – 20 May 2020)
Peter Fitzpatrick was widely revered as one of the most influential and original critical legal theorists in the English-speaking world. His work on the colonial and postcolonial dimensions of modern law changed the field of legal theory and inspired the research of...
Democratic Biopolitics Revisited: A Response to a Critique
In his recent intervention on CLT, Bryan Doniger offered a critique of my short intervention ‘Against Agamben: Is a Democratic Biopolitics Possible?’. The main points of this critique are (a) that I do not pay enough attention to the notion of biopolitics as it is...
Zoomism and Discipline for Productive Immobility
The virus lurks on car door handles, on doorknobs and the floor, on the breath of others or in a friend's hug, on onions in the supermarket, and on the hands of the valet who parks your car. If you venture outside, everything and everyone is a threat. So, it is better...
A Foucauldian enquiry in the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic management (Critique in Times of Coronavirus)
Arnold Böcklin, Plague, 1898, Kunstmuseum Basel Is the substantially global management of the coronavirus pandemic a novelty or would it be possible to trace its origin in an earlier order of things? Could the specific model selected for the governance of the ongoing...
