CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CfP LHub Four Nations Law and Humanities Forum
First Call for Papers Deadline 13th March 2026 The Four Nations Law and the Humanities Forums Glasgow Workshop 21st May 2026 in collaboration with: Queen's University Belfast; University of Warwick; and Cardiff University. We are excited to announce the calls for papers for the first of the Four Nations Law and the Humanities Forums 2026! Located at the University of Glasgow, this first forum in the series will happen in May, providing an important space to develop research excellence at the intersections of law and the humanities, and foster intellectual community, supporting early-career scholars. The Glasgow forum is one of four across the UK nations, initiated by the Law and the Humanities Hub (LHub) at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. Encouraging early career researchers’ based in or from Scotland to come and share their work in progress, the day will offer a rigorous context addressing the nature of interdisciplinary research in law and the humanities and opportunities...
ARTICLES
Gilles Deleuze: Ethics and Morality
Key Concept The place of ethics and morality in Deleuze’s thought The task of talking about ethics and morality, in relation to the philosophical thought of one of the most significant French philosophers of the 20th century, Gilles Deleuze, is not an easy one. This...
A Hegelian Logic Underlying Contemporary Conservative Populisms?
As Jair Bolsonaro takes office in Brazil, he seems to have become the latest in a worldwide trend of the last few years, of populist (at least would-be) strongmen who premise their right to ignore or violate longstanding norms of civility upon their representation of...
Sex, Gender and the Trans Debate
The recent debate on gender recognition reform, as played out in the press and on social media, has been painful to behold. With passions running high, much of the discourse has been marked by a lack of regard for the viewpoints of others, on occasion spiralling into...
The “Yellow Vests” Show How Much the Ground Moves Under Our Feet
Reposted from InfoShop News: If one feature of any truly revolutionary moment is the complete failure of conventional categories to describe what’s happening around us, then that’s a pretty good sign we’re living in revolutionary times. It strikes me that the profound...
The Problem with ‘Populism’
Last month, The Guardian published a series of articles on populism, which were accompanied by much hype from the newspaper’s social media accounts. They started the series with the front page splash, ‘Revealed: One in Four Europeans Vote Populist’. This series...
The Yellow Vest Movement: Between ‘ecological’ neoliberalism & ‘apolitical’ movements
CrimeThInc.com have very kindly allowed us to repost this really useful analysis of the Yellow Vest movement in France. The past weeks have seen a massive confrontational movement arise in France opposing President Emmanuel Macron’s “ecological” tax increase on gas....
Humour, Security and the Stansted 15
‘Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious.’ Sigmund Freud ‘Humour’ On 28 March 2017, activists known as the ‘Stansted 15’ obstructed a charter airplane, preventing it from taking deportees back to their countries of birth. The Stansted...
Crossing the Trenches: The Jungle and its Contentions of the Image
The image is the means by which we both avoid the Other and yet represent the Other. As the rights of movement in the global age demarcates who the Other is, a confrontation with the image becomes necessary to envisage a future based on an equal rights of movement....
Trump, or Capital in the Oval Office
The moment was of course metaphysically necessary—that capital incarnate itself as man and come among us. The question we must ask rather is how this descent occurs, for that determines all that follows. Trump is not a pope and he has not come down amongst his...
The X Game of Language: Decrypting Heidegger’s Ready to Hand
We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider's web with our fingers. — Ludwig Wittgenstein (PI, 106) Description of the game Imagine that tomorrow every single written sign of every written language is transformed into the letter “x” (all scripts become the extensive...
Brazil in Danger: Three Time Bombs
Brazilian democracy is on the brink of the abyss. The institutional coup that was set in motion with President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment and led to the unjust imprisonment of former President Lula da Silva is all but complete. The consummation of the coup has...
#We The Peoples of the World… Except you: Disaster Capitalism in Barbuda
Like a horrific traffic accident, the 2017 Hurricane season gripped much of the world with a morbid and awe-filled fascination. Through the remarkable advances of technology, Nature’s wrath as viewed from space was presented across all media in highest definition to...
How Liberal Zionists Sowed the Seeds of Israel’s Nation State Law
When Richard Spencer, one of the leaders of the Alt-Right movement in the United States, says that he is a “White Zionist”, and that he wants white people “to have a secure homeland that for us and ourselves just like you want a secure homeland in Israel”, he is often...
Organised State Abandonment: The Meaning of Grenfell
❝ My family were survivors of life, yeah? This is not the only traumatic thing that’s happened to us that’s been on the news, et cetera, yeah? And we’re fighters naturally, yeah? So who do you argue with? Who do I argue with? This has been my stress this year, this...
Reflections on a Strike: Friendship and/as the Future of Rights
It was a sunny afternoon in early March. We were a small group of about twelve and the event was a teach-in I was leading on the topic ‘Is it Useless to Revolt? The Strike as Counter-Conduct’ (part of a month of Sussex Strike events).[1] We quickly agreed that ‘is it...
Law & Critique: Welcome to A Law World without Jurists?
Does law need jurists (or lawyers, as they are called in the Common law tradition) to perform its regulatory functions? In the Western Legal Tradition, the answer is usually “yes.” The orthodox narrative tells us that law is a human construct in the sense that it...
Against Appeasement: What’s Wrong with Zionism?
In response to recent attacks on Jeremy Corbyn concerning “Anti-Semitism”, the British Labor Party leader sought to appease Zionist organisations in an op-ed in the Guardian (3 August 2018) in which he disavowed the notion that “Zionism is racism” as an old-fashioned...
New German Intersex Law: Third Gender but not as we want it
Last October, the German Constitutional Court found that an intersex person’s ‘right to positive gender recognition’ had been violated with the availability of only the M and F boxes combined with the obligation to tick one in the population register and many other...
A Manifesto for Feminist Global Constitutionalist Order
No society has a constitution without the guarantee of rights and the separation of powers; the constitution is null if the majority of individuals comprising the nation have not cooperated in drafting it. — Olympe de Gouges (Marie Gouze)[1. The Declaration of the...
Law & Critique: Bourdieu’s Divine State
What can the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu contribute to a critique of law? Throughout the last decades of his career, Bourdieu repeatedly returned to a quasi-theological reading of sociology. During his lectures at the Collège de France in the mid-1980s,...
“Whoever owns the land, the natives do not”: In Re Southern Rhodesia
One hundred years ago today, the British judiciary presented the Empire’s most expressly and egregiously racist justification for the land dispossession of indigenous peoples. As Zimbabweans go to the polls next week, no matter which way they turn, they continue to...
