CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Illegality and Law-full-ness
A week before the 13th Berlin Biennale’s opening in June 2025, a social media account took to criticizing Biennale curator Zasha Colah’s contention, made in a recently published interview, that “there is no censorship in Germany”.[1] The social media response was a result of some activists’ and artists’ perception that the curator was claiming that there is no legally-instantiated censorship in Germany. Individuals experiencing suppression of their words, especially those finding themselves out of work or targeted for being critical of Israel’s ongoing destruction of life in Gaza, took issue with the statement. My intervention here is to defend Colah’s assertion about the distinction between legally-articulated censorship and a more amorphous political culture of fear, discipline, and obedience, not because of a semantic difference, but because there is a strategic need for clarity. In most liberal democracies, it is somewhat straightforward to take a state to court when they...
ARTICLES
The Politics of International lawyers: Whose Legacy Is at Stake? Reflections on Martti Koskenniemi’s series on ‘The Politics of International Law’
The latest issue of the European Journal of International Law opens with the third instalment of Martti Koskenniemi’s The Politics of International Law series. This post offers some reflections on Koskenniemi’s article, although it is not intended as a full response...
Law & Critique: Property and the Interests of Things
We take it for granted that the very wealthy use trusts to leave their wealth to their children. Have they not always done so? After all, the aristocracy has used one or another variant of the trust form for centuries to pass on rolling hills, country piles and...
The Future of Sex Work: Labour unfreedom & Criminality at work
The central and uniting demand of the sex worker rights movement around the world is the decriminalization of consensual adult sex work. This is based on the recognition that criminal law intervention makes sex workers less rather than more safe, and that sex workers...
Brasília: Constituent Power, Architecture, Urban Planning
These notes belong to the same project on constitutional spaces that Panu Minkkinen has been working on for some time, and this piece was first published on his own blog. He says there that these notes represent a first attempt to look at the intersections of...
Art, Law and the Elements: The Turn of the Venice Biennale
58th Venice Art Biennale ‘May You Live in Interesting Times’ The 58th Venice Art Biennale is a sweeping turn towards the elemental. Aligned with many practices and disciplines (law and art amongst them), this turn to the elemental is everywhere in the Biennale: in the...
The Far-Right in Austria; Or why ousting the current government won’t change an extreme consensus
On Monday May 27th, a no-confidence vote against chancellor Sebastian Kurz’ (ÖVP) provisional minority government was successfully held in Austrian parliament.[i] This vote followed a political crisis provoked by a video recently circulated, which shows former...
Rights as a Distraction from ‘Belonging’: A Response to the Shamima Begum Ruling
I’m not an accomplished Tweeter. When I tried to Tweet about an event I spoke at recently and typed ‘Shamima’, the autocorrect changed it to ‘shaming’.[1]It’s funny how often that happens – some unintended link to a truth identified by autocorrect (my own surname...
A Short History of Throwing Food at Fascists
In the last month, milkshakes have been lobbed at several far right candidates in the Euro elections. First it was former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson, then UKIP’s misogynist YouTuber Carl Benjamin and now Nigel Farage as he was out campaigning in...
The Cost of ‘Justice’: Sexual Offence Complainants and Access to Personal Data
Monday last week saw the announcement of a new UK national policy requiring criminal complainants to sign consent forms authorising detectives to access data in their mobile phones. Conveyed in a joint briefing by Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Nick...
The Mytho-Poetics of Critical Legal (secret) Society
Adieu Ammenotep, Leonora Carrington, (1960) By all accounts the secret society began before the Boston body was found. It started in many different places, small groups began to form who consumed the scraps and leftovers from other tables. Clusters of interested...
Law & Critique: Law of Denial: The Armenian Genocide at the European Court of Human Rights
On 24 April 2019, France held its first official Armenian Genocide Commemoration Day, marking the 104th anniversary of the 1915 genocide. The national day of commemoration fulfilled an election pledge by President Emmanuel Macron, and drew the predictable angry tu...
Law & Critique: “Life is not simply fact” – aesthetics, atmosphere & the neoliberal university
What should we understand under neoliberalism in the context of the university? Anderson (2016:735) argues that neoliberalism should not be seen as something ‘singular, coherent … with a simple origin point. … New hybrids are formed as neoliberal styles of reasoning...
The Age of Pardon or the Age of Aggression?
Throughout the 20th century there were frequent apologies and claims for reparations for the atrocities committed in the context of the relations between peoples and countries, as illustrated by Germany's initiatives with regard to the Holocaust and by the US response...
One Token, Two Sides: Data Dysphoria & Fantasies of Control
New data horizons Cyberspace, as a shared dimension but unequal community, is in a moment of unease and alienation over the ways and means of data creation, dissemination and preservation, including methods of storage on- and offline. Communication and circulation of...
TWAIL Coordinates
Also available in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Farsi, Sinhala, and Turkish translation Street in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1941. FSA-Office of War Information Collection. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., USA. (Note on the photographThis...
Law & Critique: In the service of a total market: the Future of Legal Craft
In recent years, the growth of financial markets, the spread of information technology and institutional changes in democracies have often been associated with the rise of populist politics. Such developments, sometimes characterised as transformations resulting from...
What if we really protested Brexit? Constituent Power & Unrest
No one has really protested Brexit. Sure, lots of people have gone to the streets and politely walked around their major cities. But there is no real protest, no unrest, no potential for disorder. Instead there is an endless cycle of hot-takes: hot-air continuously...
Roma, or the Concealed Artist
The poet should endeavor, if possible, to combine all poetic elements; or failing that, the greatest number and those the most important; the more so, in face of the caviling criticism of the day. — Aristotle, Poetics Like all great aesthetic works, Roma by Alfonso...
Soft Power and Hotspot Life: The Lessons of Lesbos 2015–18
A hotspot, to explain, is the idea of detaining arriving migrants and refugees at one spot for processing, the hotspot RIC (Reception and Identification Centre). It is another instrument to add to a growing collection for a common European asylum policy. But that is a...
Are some feminists asking the wrong question about who counts as a “lesbian”?
Kindly reposted from Diva Magazine: Kathleen Stock, a Professor of Philosophy at Sussex University, and enfant terrible of gender critical feminism, has recently asked: “can a biological male be a lesbian?” Of course, framing the question in this way tends to suggest...
Gilles Deleuze: Ethics and Morality
Key Concept The place of ethics and morality in Deleuze’s thought The task of talking about ethics and morality, in relation to the philosophical thought of one of the most significant French philosophers of the 20th century, Gilles Deleuze, is not an easy one. This...
