CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
New Translation of Pashukanis: The Right of Asylum and the Practice of Bourgeois Governments
Ilya Repin: They Did Not Expect Him, 1884-88 Introductory Note by Igor Shoikhedbrod E.B. Pashukanis (1891-1937) is best known for his General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924), where he offered an original account of the genesis of the legal form under generalized conditions of capitalist commodity exchange and explained the reasons for its necessary disappearance under fully developed communism. Until recently,[1] Pashukanis’ reputation as the token Marxist legal theorist has generally eclipsed his influential contributions as a seasoned revolutionary representing the USSR on the international stage. Nowhere is this clearer than in the domain of international criminal law and in Pashukanis’ consistent and vociferous defence of the right of asylum. In the 1929 essay that follows, Pashukanis—writing under the auspicious of the International Red Aid—offers a scathing indictment of the extradition of working class and communist political prisoners by capitalist countries...
ARTICLES
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...
Crisis and Resistance at the Periphery: Bosnian responses to Covid-19
My mother tells me that it’s lucky that this time around we have electricity. She was two years older than I am now when the siege of Sarajevo began. I was born during the first summer of the siege and so she had found herself caring for a premature infant in the...
The Unjust City: Mapping Exclusion through Aesthetics
Imre Azem's documentary ‘Ecumenopolis: City Without Limits’ and the research of Manis K. Jha and Pushpendra Kumar help us to explore on the project of neoliberalism, offering a scathing critique of the exclusion and inaccessibility that accompanies its political...
The Plague was Already Present (Critique in Times of Coronavirus)
No philosopher took as brave a stand against the political approach of the Coronavirus than the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Although his thoughts were for the most part rejected by both the academic world as public opinion, he stood his ground. What a...
A Violence Which Must Be Named (Critique in Times of Coronavirus)
Across the UK two narratives currently dominate and frame much of the critique of the British government’s current response to the Coronavirus pandemic. The first is that of incompetence. The story so far unfolding is that of a government which has ignored both the...
Prisoners of State (Critique in Times of Coronavirus)
We have all become prisoners of the State. Wherever we are across the whole planet. It's a time like no other time in human history or natural history. Is it a force of Nature as virus Covid-19 that has brought this about; or is it something to do with the nature of...
Two Problems with Democratic Biopolitics (Critique in times of Coronavirus)
COVID-19 has led to renewed interest in Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, but it has also revealed that this concept is widely misunderstood. Too many commentators have relied upon an overly broad definition of biopolitics as a ‘politics of health’ or a...
Responding to gender critical feminism: On gender, sex and a generous feminist politics in anxious times
Can feminism develop and grow if the room for reasonable divergence between us becomes ever narrower? We need spaces where we can discuss feminist politics to improve all our feminisms. The cheerleading, backslapping and feuding of twitter is not a good substitute....
Law & Critique: Chile’s ‘Constituent Moment’
Few documents speak more clearly of the alliance between market thinking and authoritarian constitutionalism than a letter written by Margaret Thatcher in February 1982 in response to a letter sent to her by Hayek and, more likely, to a conversation that took place...
Humanity’s Catastrophe: Following Sylvia Wynter in the Age of Coronavirus
The news of Kayla Williams, a black woman from Peckham, dying of suspected Covid-19 after being rendered “not a priority” by paramedics on the scene has sat like a stone within me. Apart from being further proof that communities sitting at the intersection of racial...
‘The King is Naked’: Bolsonaro & the Pandemic (Critique in times of Coronavirus)
The current president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has been relentlessly downplaying the dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic comparing it with a simple flue. He has claimed that the lowest social categories of the Brazilian population would be immune to diseases (“the...
Begin from the Beginning: Revisiting Agamben (Critique in times of Corona)
The overcharged attacks on Agamben don't come as a surprise. Since we are amidst a pandemic, there is an urgency palpable in people’s writings. For a reader of Agamben, it should be clear not to place an unfair burden on a philosopher who primarily deals with...
Anthropocene Authoritarianism (Critique in Times of Corona)
There has been much discussion of the biopolitics of the global response to the Coronavirus onCritical Legal Thinking and elsewhere. Many of the pieces have engaged critically with Giorgio Agamben’s interventions, polarising debate.[1]Thus, Karsten Schubert and...
