CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Karl Marx: Alienation
Key Concept The Marxian concept of alienation (Entäußerung) or estrangement (Entfremdung) is one of the most discussed notions in the history of modern social and political theory. There is a long history of the term before Marx, from the giusnaturalistic and contractualist tradition to its role played in the work of Hegel and the Young Hegelians; but the Marxian formulation is undoubtedly the most influential. While being present in Capital, and recurring in the Grundrisse, it was explicitly theorised in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, published posthumously in 1932. Subsequently, alienation became a problematic and deeply divisive concept in Marxist discourse. Some Marxist intellectuals (such as Althusser) disqualifed the notion, attributing it to a “young Marx” who was still too much a philosopher and too little a scientist. Others considered it the ground of Marxism itself, without which the critique of political economy would not...
ARTICLES
Patent Capital in the Covid-19 Pandemic: Critical Intellectual Property Law
The current controversy around intellectual property rights has focused on the role of intellectual property in the current Covid-19 vaccine shortage. But the present situation should not be understood as a manifestation of an exceptional legal event. Rather, it is a...
Palestine at the ICC: Law Overcoming Violence?
With the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Pre-Trial Chamber I ruling of 5 February 2021, a path is paved for the investigation of war crimes committed in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in 2014. By recognising that its jurisdiction...
Salvaging the ‘RF’: Radical Feminism and Trans Exclusion
In late 2020, I found myself teaching a course on gender, law and development.[1] I decided to start with the basics, including a crash course on feminist legal theory for those of my students who were not familiar with it. Before I knew it, I was knee-deep in...
A calculated, jubilant violence and the meanings of “lawful”
As Rose Parfitt explains in her essay Mob Constitutionalism: The Riot in the Rights, the siege on the U.S. Capitol building on 6 January 2021 appears to represent a contradiction: “as soon as we look closely at the motivations of these ‘domestic terrorists’...
The End of the Portuguese Dream?
Given the circumstances, the presidential election was a marvel of organization, revealing a civic-mindedness that may have come as a surprise even to the well-advised. The abstention rate was high, but still much lower than predicted. There were two major winners:...
Manifestos & Counter-Manifestos: An explainer for the 1776 Commission
The President's Advisory 1776 Commission, which reported in the last days of the Trump Administration in the US, is a direct retort to the New York Times 1619 Project. In contrast to the 1619 Project which centred on slavery and its role in shaping the US, the...
Blocking puberty blockers: Boobs for all in latest anti-trans craze judgment
The far-reaching and immediately impactful High Court judicial review decision of Bell and A v The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust [2020] EWHC 3274 (Admin) conflates puberty blockers and medical transition and holds puberty blockers should...
From Dynastics to Genealogy
I’ve written about The Punitive Society course by Foucault before, particularly in a review essay which appeared in Historical Materialism, and then in my book Foucault: The Birth of Power which appeared with Polity in 2017. That was a book...
Mob Constitutionalism: The Riot in the Rights
The Trump presidency has been a rocky road for pretty much everyone to the left of Trump himself. Nonetheless, the lethal efforts of the President’s supporters, at his command, to storm the Capitol and overturn 2020’s supposedly ‘fraudulent’ result by force, seems to...
Trump won’t take cyanide
Trump speaking at the "Stop the Steal" rally on January 6, 2021Voice of America, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Trump is not Hitler, the US is not Nazi Germany, no invading army is heading toward the White House. All this notwithstanding, it is impossible not to...
Moving Beyond Being Punitive
St. Quentin State Prison, CA This text was presented in a seminar on ‘Beyond the Punitive Society’ on 7th January 2021, as part of the seminar series ‘Abolition Democracy 13/13’, co-hosted by the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought at Columbia University...
My favourite CRT: Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings
Cathy Park Hong is a poet of South Korean descent, raised and living in the US. In 2020 she published her book of creative non-fiction, “Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition”. She calls minor feelings: “the racialized range of emotions that are...
Anthropocenic Pandemic: Laws of Exposure & Encounter
CDC/ Hannah A Bullock; Azaibi Tamin (2020) A human body, at any given moment, might be inhabited by over 380 trillion viruses, traversing internal and external bodily surfaces. This community, known as the human virome, forms part of a holobiont – a term used to...
Unforming Police: The Impossibility of abolition
The many riots and anti-police demonstrations this year have led to long-fought movements for prison and police abolition being brought into mainstream media and policy – with calls to defund police and divert money towards community support issuing from across the...
Life and Language in the Virocene
Photo © andreaspm.com The Virocene Sorry, this seat is taken. Move out Anthropocene, enter the Virocene. Actually, the seat was never really for Anthropos. It was meant for a parasite that could take over this planet. Oh, wait. The Virocene is the age of the...
Fascism 2.0: An Intensive Course
It is impossible to predict what will happen in the US in the coming weeks. As I write, a number of crucial questions remain unanswered. Was there electoral fraud or not? If there was, was it enough to reverse the outcome? Will the transition be from Trump to Biden or...
Online Book launch: Constituent Power (14 January 2021)
Welcome to the online book launch seminar of Constituent Power: Law, Popular Rule and Politics (EUP 2020), co-edited by Matilda Arvidsson (Gothenburg), Leila Brännström (Lund) and Panu Minkkinen (Helsinki). Recent social and political developments, including the...
Our Favourite CRT: Steve Biko
Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (A Stubbs. ed) (Heinemann 1978) Although she was writing about the black existentialist novelist Ralph Ellison, Hortense Spillers could easily have also been referring to Stephen Bantu Biko when she invokes the figure of a...
Our Favourite CRT: Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander (Photo by Vivien Killilea/WireImage) Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (The New Press 2010) When I was a wandering recent law graduate, I found myself washed up in the murky bayous of New Orleans, working at an under-resourced,...
Our Favourite CRT: Gloria Anzaldúa
Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘The Coming of el Mundo Surdo’ in AnaLouise Keating (ed), The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (Duke 2009) How can we make sense of a global order that is founded upon the act of making “most of the world”[1] out of place, through the motions of...
Our Favourite CRT: Lewis Gordon
Lewis Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Routledge 2007) I’ve been called ‘Paki’, ‘flaco n*****’, ‘Ethiopian’ or ‘too Latin American’ more times than I care to count. Including during and about my teaching. But CRT is not about...
