CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Seminar: Receiving Traditions of Civility
Continuing our seminar series in conjunction with the Warwick Centre for Critical Legal Studies, we are thrilled to have a paper from Adil Hasan Khan on traditions of civility in the South Asian context, particularly thinking about the Citizenship protests of 2020. You can subscribe to our seminar series here on youtube. https://youtu.be/Em3aKHnH1OQ Abstract: 'This talk provides a genealogy of the concepts of the secular, religion and politics in early modern and colonial South Asia in order to make intelligible a tradition of civility, one that rivals the project of colonial modernity and cultivates the conditions of co-habitation of different denominations in South Asia. It was prepared in the wake of the then ongoing protests against the adoption of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in India, widely perceived to threaten civic co-habitation. The talk also reflects upon how being attentive to a tradition of civility demands a different...
ARTICLES
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...
Our Favourite CRT: Kimberlé Crenshaw & Patricia J Williams
KimberlÈ Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and leading scholar of critical race theory. She is a full professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues. Credit: Felix Clay, eyevine, Redux Contact...
Our Favourite CRT: Donna Awatere
Donna Awatere, Māori Sovereignty (Broadsheet 1984) My mother’s people are from Ōpōtiki on the East Cape of Aotearoa and it wasn’t until I was an adult that I came to have some understanding of my Māoritanga, or our people’s history. Our iwi (tribe)...
Our favourite CRT: James Baldwin
James Baldwin, Speech at Berkeley (1979) I call myself a child of this world of empire. The colony I was born in bore recent witness to British district officers who met with one of my grandfathers. My other grandfather was schooled by Scottish missionaries....
Our Favourite CRT: Attia Hosain
Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column (Chatto and Windus 1961) A few years ago, I was offered the opportunity to participate in a workshop in India to support early career academics with their writing. The workshop was geared towards addressing the...
Our Favourite Critical Race Theory – Introduction
As if this annus horribilis wasn’t horribilis enough in the last few weeks the Conservative government, the depth of whose depravity is impossible to fathom from one day to the next, have commenced a McCarthy-esque censorship initiative that would...
Policing Capitalist Exploitation: An Interview with Alex Vitale & Mark Neocleous (Part 2)
Today Petr Kupka and Vaclaw Walach continue the interview with Mark Neocleous and Alex Vitale, discussing their critical analyses of policing. VW&PK: On the other hand, there are cases that appear to show that policing is not just about working-class people and...
Policing Capitalist Exploitation: An Interview with Alex Vitale & Mark Neocleous (Part 1)
On 14 July Petr Kupka and I sat down (virtually) with Mark Neocleous and Alex Vitale to discuss their critical analyses of policing. Vitale is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and has been frequently interviewed on the issue of policing in connection with...
The De-Aging of the World
Social age does not coincide with physiological age. But the degree of the discrepancy varies according to historical period, including its social context and the other collective circumstances surrounding it. The same applies to societies. The industrialized world in...
CLC Dundee: undeed and duende.
Had the virus not intruded, I, and many of CLT’s readers, would be in Dundee right now, for the annual Critical Legal Conference, an event that has happened every autumn since the mid-1980s. The CLC has often proclaimed its non-existence for all but three days of the...
An Escape Route for Brazil
Brazil is at an existential crossroads, the magnitude of which we can only begin to imagine. This is a country where the pandemic has caused one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world. With only about 2.8 percent of the world population, Brazil accounts for...
A Second Manifesto for the World Social Forum? From an Open Space to a Space for Action
Is the World Social Forum (WSF), which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2021, just an open space or can it (should it) also be a space for action? This question has been discussed for years in the WSF International Council, and so far, it has not been possible to...
Sharing Myth (A Critique of the Sharing Economy)
In his 1957 book Mythologies, Roland Barthes explores how wine functions not only as France’s national emblem, but also as a myth that helps grasp the ambiguity within French capitalist society. Wine, he argues, is a defining part of France’s experience because it...
What Kind of Justice for a ‘Global New Deal’?
Delivering the 2020 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres recently set out a wide ranging critique of the current global order, characterised by pervasive, institutionalised inequality, and failed, nationalistic responses...
After Open Access
We are a collective of intersectional feminist and social justice journal editors. We reject the narrow values of efficiency, transparency and compliance that inform current developments and policies in open access and platform publishing. Together, we seek further...
Denise Ferreira da Silva: Analytics of Raciality
Key Concept In the glossary to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), you won’t find raciality under the letter ‘R’. Instead reference to the term is found under ‘A’; analytics of raciality. Before proceeding to explore this term it is...
Marxist Legal Theory: The State
Key Concept This is part of a series of key concepts in Marxist legal theory organized in collaboration with our friends at Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis of Law. All articles in this series, including the present one, will appear concurrently on Legal...
The Statues of our Discontent
Statues look a lot like the past, which is why, whenever they are called into question, we turn to historians. The truth is that statues are a thing of the past only as long as they stand quietly in squares, as indifferent to us as we are to them. At such times, which...
Postcolonial Liberalism’s Double Binds
“We need Covid Trials. In an international court,” is Arundhati Roy’s “post-lockdown reverie”. She wants the Indian government to be held accountable for its treatment of migrant workers as refuse and the ongoing assault on the civil rights of dissenters in the wake...
