CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Immanuel Kant: Categorical Imperative
To make moral decisions, to legislate for ourselves, we must be free to do so, otherwise we would be mechanically determined entities subject to the causal laws of nature. Freedom is therefore central to the categorical imperative. Moreover, if there is to be any form of beginning rather than an infinite regression of causes, he figured there needed to be a first cause that was not in itself determined by another cause. This is why Kant assumed ‘an absolute spontaneity of the cause’. That things could begin on their own became a key factor in his conceptualisation of freedom and the moral law. In order to properly discern the necessity and universality of the categorical imperative, practical reason has to be pure, a priori reason, independent of material experience. If it were not, it would be contaminated by natural inclinations and contingent objects of desire that would interfere with one’s freedom and duty.
ARTICLES
Crimmigration and the Ontology of Guilt: On Subjectivity and the Negation of Law
The contemporary figure of the foreigner is not judged for what they do, but for the fact of who they are. In regimes of crimmigration, guilt no longer follows the act—it precedes it. It attaches to presence, to mobility, to the mere fact of inhabiting without prior...
The abuse of UK anti-terror laws to proscribe direct action protest: The case of Palestine Action
The 13 February 2026 decision of the High Court inHuda Ammori v Secretary of State for the Home Department that the Home Secretary’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action was unlawful, provides a fascinating insight into the abuse of UK...
Defending Animal Rescue as a Moral Injury to a Relational Self
As individuals participating in the open rescue of animals increasingly adopt strategies of civil disobedience and “voluntary prosecution,” courts are pressed to adjudicate the definition of intent itself within an anthropocentric legal structure that excludes animals...
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...
The Wrong of Law and Marx’s Second Secret (Symposium)
I feel honored to have been invited to comment on Valerie Kerruish’s The Wrong of Law, a book bringing a great range of methodological approaches to bear on a problematic of great interest to me. The book’s focal point is the self-seriousness of legal discourse....
Surprising Law (Symposium)
In one of the moving tributes to Valerie Kerruish posted on Critical Legal Thinking1 shortly after her passing away, Emilios Christidoulidis wrote that “(h)er magnum opus The Wrong of Law, which she spent the last two decades of her life writing, remains devastatingly...
The Foundational Wrong of Law (Symposium)
Stephen Connelly There is an implicit assumption in jurisprudential reasoning that this reason, as form, is without inconsistency. Error is procedural: it results either from misrecognition of the ‘true’ law, from ignorance of the true facts, or from misapplication of...
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...
Symposium on Kerruish’s magnum opus: The Wrong of Law
When Valerie Kerruish died in 2022, Critical Legal Thinking hosted a series of reflections from her former colleagues, friends, and collaborators. As recounted there, Valerie spent decades from the mid-1960s teaching law in Australia with an abiding concern for the...
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...
A Red Winter: On war and the Iranian struggle for freedom
Its shadow/ had swallowed the entire city;/ we thought/ it was a mountain…/ until it collapsed, and we saw/ it was a bubble/ blown straight from the mouth of darkness!/ Let them say that death is the end,/ but I say:/ The death of a dictator/ is the only day when...
‘After’ the Rojava Revolution? Rethinking Political Hope in a Post-Autonomy Syria
Since early 2026, Rojava in North East Syria, has been under renewed assault by the new Syrian regime. A majority-Kurdish region, Rojava has, for more than 12 years been home to one of the world’s largest experiments in democratic autonomy and ecological living. The...
Iran and the ‘state of exception’
It seems that we have entered a period of endless war. The undeclared American war "Epic Fury" (the name of the attack on Iran) and Israel's new murderous campaign has replaced the "cosmopolitan order of rules" heralded by those who saw the "end of history" after the...
Emilios Christodoulides 1963–2026
It is with the greatest sadness that wish to inform you that our comrade, colleague, friend and amazing intellectual, Emilios Christodoulides, passed away yesterday. After a long illness that tormented him for the last two years, he passed away peacefully in...
The Diapausal Life of International Law: Gaza and Beyond
Few contemporary conflicts have been as saturated with legal language as Gaza. Provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice, arrest warrants sought by the International Criminal Court, findings by United Nations commissions of inquiry, emergency...
Normopathy Today: Norms Behaving Badly
It is clear now, one-year into the second coming of Donald Trump, that the normative international order in place since World War II has been breached. Trump recently pronounced that he doesn’t need to follow international law because all that counts is his “own...
Analysing the Iranian Uprising: Costas Douzinas interviews Leila Faghfouri Azar
This interview, conducted by Professor Costas Douzains for the Greek weekly newspaper Epohi, features Dr. Leila Faghfouri Azar and was originally published in Epohi’s special supplement on the Iranian uprising (24–25 January 2026). In the conversation, Faghfouri Azar...
One’s own morality as the highest court: A variation on Hegel’s concept of international law
Whether international law constitutes an independent legal domain endowed with sanctioning power with regard to its subjects is a question that has resurfaced in nearly every crisis that has emerged within the post Cold War new world order, and one that has most often...
Iran’s Uprising: Between Clerical Violence and Neo-colonial Aggression
None The beginning of 2026 marked yet another human tragedy for Iranian society. In January, hundreds of thousands of Iranian protesters took to the streets in over 100 cities in response to political repression and growing socio-economic hardships. This new wave of...
Greenland and the Spectre of Dispossession
When it came to grabbing territory, the British had effective techniques by the 1960s. Morning-tea at Downing Street could accomplish what a U.S President’s incontinent media posts have been threatening to do with much froth and fury since 2019. The creation of the...
Greenland between a Rock and a Hard Place
Amid US President Trump’s looming take-over of Greenland and attempted coercion of Western allies to agree to this, Western liberal international lawyers and commentators are busy reaffirming Danish sovereignty over the territory. However, an anti-colonial...
