CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Vertigo of Self-Grounding (Symposium)
There is an image by M.C. Escher in which a staircase rises in perfect geometrical order, each step aligned, each angle exact — yet the ascent loops back upon itself. The movement is continuous, coherent, even rigorous; what unsettles is not disorder but correspondence. One climbs, and finds oneself where one began. In The Wrong of Law, Valerie Kerruish identifies a comparable motif at the heart of modern rationality. Across Hegel’s identity of method and content, Marx’s definition of value as a self-reproducing abstraction, Frege’s reduction of arithmetic to logic, and Gödel’s incompleteness proofs, she traces a single architectonic problem: the attempt of a system to ground itself from within. The trajectory of The Wrong of Law is organised around what Kerruish calls “thought surprising itself”: the moment in which a system that seeks to secure its own foundation discovers that its ground cannot be established without remainder. In her reading of Hegel’s Science...
ARTICLES
The Case Against Agamben’s Impotence
Another appraisal of Aristotle´s configuration of potentiality and actuality and the latter as a division between Entelecheia and Energeia may open up a new consideration of being and power. Through it, we may dispel Agamben´s interpretation of power that shrouds...
Recognising the right to food does not mean handouts but radical transformations
Four years after the Lombardia regional council in Italy approved the first law on the ‘Recognition, Protection and Fulfilment of the Right to Food’ in the European context, time seems to be ripe to put food at the centre of analogous political and legislative...
A ‘Dred Scott Moment’ – but not only for the UK Supreme Court!
When Aidan O’Neill QC, counsel for SNP MP Joanna Cherry and the other parliamentarians, asked the UK Supreme Court to save the “Mother of all Parliaments from being shut down by the father of all lies” it was justifiably a sensation. Finally the crux of the case about...
Law & Critique: Technology elsewhere, (yet) phantasmically present
While in some corners it has been argued that “post-modernism” (in these tellings, usually a metonymy for any theory that questions authority, the stability of meaning and the normalization of various forms of sovereignty and their violence) bears a certain level of...
What now, Brazil?
The words that come to mind the most are astonishment and perplexity. The Brazilian government has slipped into the abyss of absurdity, into an absolute trivialization of abuse and aggression, into a gross violation of the most basic rules of democratic coexistence —...
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 Photo: Street in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1941. FSA-Office of War Information Collection. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., USA.This photograph of a street in San Juan,...
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...
