CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL

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 dispossession of indigenous Australians and the unremitting violence they face. She then moved to Hamburg and founded, with Uwe Petersen and Matthias Kaiser, the Altonaer Stiftung für philosophische Grundlagenforschung. Val was my teacher, mentor, and friend. I can hardly imagine being an academic without her inspiring works and provocations. Emilios Christodoulidis, a legal philosopher very dear to Val, observed on her passing that she was a perfectionist, and thus her magnum opus had remained ‘devastatingly unfinished’. Emilios, too, has now left us; his life cruelly cut short. His oeuvre is a vast array of books and articles, so we can continue thinking with him. Val’s book that Emilios...
ARTICLES
What if we really protested Brexit? Constituent Power & Unrest
No one has really protested Brexit. Sure, lots of people have gone to the streets and politely walked around their major cities. But there is no real protest, no unrest, no potential for disorder. Instead there is an endless cycle of hot-takes: hot-air continuously...
Roma, or the Concealed Artist
The poet should endeavor, if possible, to combine all poetic elements; or failing that, the greatest number and those the most important; the more so, in face of the caviling criticism of the day. — Aristotle, Poetics Like all great aesthetic works, Roma by Alfonso...
Soft Power and Hotspot Life: The Lessons of Lesbos 2015–18
A hotspot, to explain, is the idea of detaining arriving migrants and refugees at one spot for processing, the hotspot RIC (Reception and Identification Centre). It is another instrument to add to a growing collection for a common European asylum policy. But that is a...
Are some feminists asking the wrong question about who counts as a “lesbian”?
Kindly reposted from Diva Magazine: Kathleen Stock, a Professor of Philosophy at Sussex University, and enfant terrible of gender critical feminism, has recently asked: “can a biological male be a lesbian?” Of course, framing the question in this way tends to suggest...
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...





























