CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Native Title and the Juridical Field: Bourdieu in Australia
The 1992 Mabo v Queensland (No 2) decision marked a watershed in Australian legal history, as the High Court formally rejected the doctrine of terra nullius and acknowledged the existence of native title. But legal revolutions are rarely what they seem. This article argues that the recognition of native title in Mabo and its reaffirmation in Yunupingu v Commonwealth (2023) exemplify Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the juridical field as a space of symbolic power, where recognition operates through misrecognition, and legal change functions to preserve more profound continuities. Rather than view these cases as ruptures, we should read them as legal adaptations to shifting external pressures, filtered through the internal logic of the field. The law’s symbolic capital depends on its ability to appear autonomous and rational, even as it embeds colonial structures of domination. Native title law illustrates how the juridical field absorbs critique without...
ARTICLES
Catastrophe at Warwick
A catastrophe is only violent in its uncalled for appearing, and its coming is all around us in the smallest things. This year’s Critical Legal Conference takes place at Warwick under the title Catastrophe. This is not without reason, for it sees the notion of...
The Razor’s Edge of Politics: Notes on the Meaning of the Encryption of Power
The original theory of the encryption of power was formulated by Gabriel Méndez-Hincapíe and I in an article published in Spanish in 2012. In the following years, several panels regarding the theory where held at the Critical Legal Conference, in 2014 at the...
The Workerant
In the unfolding drama of work in the digital age, new circumstance demands new language. Gig economy, on-demand work, sharing economy, precarious work, automation, zero-hour contracts, outsourcing, workfare. Whilst the entire stage set changes, the central character...
Poverty, Indigeneity and the Socio-Legal Adjudication of Self-Sufficiency
A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.” — Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks In 2013, Darlene Necan, a homeless First Nations woman from northern Ontario, Canada, began the construction of a modest one-room...
What does ‘the crowd’ Want? Populism and the Origin of Democracy
The liberal critique of the recent rise of populism reveals an uneasiness toward ‘unruly’ emotional crowds and their leaders’ anti-democratic postures – albeit these figures have captured political power through democratic means.[i] Trump, Le Pen, Modi, and Erdogan...
Macron & Africa’s ‘civilisational’ problem
Mr Macron has been nostalgic lately. First, he was nostalgic for the 18th century and hereditary rule asserting that the French people did not want to execute the king and that the revolution has left a (king-shaped) void at the heart of the Republic that only other...
Protecting Public Space: The Gypsy and Traveller Community
The Gypsy and Traveller community is obliged to have respect for a system which both marginalises and excludes them. On 5 July 2017, a community of Travellers pulled up to Preston Park in Brighton. The council and the police soon descended on them to inform them that...
History and Historical Mystification: Critical Observations on Badiou’s Politics
Alain Badiou is one of continental philosophy’s most original and creative minds. His politics can be understood as evading both the temptations of analytical political theory and post-modern skepticism through his metaphysics. According to Badiou, the multiplicity of...
Looking in the mirror: reflections on the DUP and ‘the Irish problem’
The chatter, comments, and headlines are clear: the perennial 'Irish problem' has returned to haunt the British stage. But what is there to hear in the silence that frames the chatter? To the surprise and unease of many in Britain the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP)...
Radical Reconfigurations? Old and new futures in Northern Ireland
As the Conservative Party’s majority evaporated in the early hours of 9th June 2017, the new parliamentary power of the DUP quickly came into focus. With Sinn Fein resolutely abstaining from taking their seats, the Democratic Unionist Party find themselves in a...
Five theses on youth & the sociology of the UK election
(or some quickly gathered thoughts) Thesis 1. Contemporary capitalism rarely appears simple. Back in 1848 Marx wrote in the opening of The Communist Manifesto about how “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has...
Words Matter: Titles and Framing in the International Justice Scene
Sacrificing nuance, sensitivity and specificity for the sake of a ‘catchy’ title is not a neutral choice, but reiterates dominant narratives and is violently short sighted. Scrolling through my social media feed one evening last week, I came across an announcement...
Editorial: Labour’s Insurgent Electoral Campaign
Whatever happens in today's election in the UK, Corbyn's campaign has been a success. Not in generations has there been an insurgent electoral campaign from the Labour party. By this we mean a campaign that faced down almost universal media antipathy (even hatred) but...
The ‘Right to the City’ Emerges? Moscow’s Anti-Regeneration Protests
Last month saw some of the most populous and socially significant protests in Moscow. A series of rallies was held against the plans by the Moscow authorities to demolish old ex-public housing stock and resettle over a million residents. What was supposed to be an...
Why is it difficult to accept foreign policy plays a part in terrorism?
In the travel documentary, In America, Stephen Fry visits a tea party in Massachusetts to speak with Harvard Professor Peter Gomes. The conversation discusses the re-imagined history of the United States, describing how American political solutions are sought for...
Black Skin, White Masks? Training African Leaders in the Art of Universality
I was intrigued to see the recent advertisement for the Academy Africa Fellowship at Chatham House, a prestigious, London-based think tank on international affairs, with a Royal Charter granted in 1926, and originator of the famous ‘Chatham House Rule’. In its...
The Empire Strikes Back: On the recent general strike in Brazil
In a recent review of Alex Cuadros’ 2016 Brazzillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country (astonishingly, yet unsurprisingly, still unpublished in Portuguese and in Brazil) Patrick Iber, writing for the New Republic, declared that ‘if...
Michel Foucault: Biopolitics and Biopower
Key Concept Despite their prominence in subsequent academic writing, the concepts of “biopower” and “biopolitics” are perhaps the most elusive, and arguably the most compelling (given the attention...
How Long Will Critical Human Rights Theory Continue to Ignore Race and Gender?
Human rights need to be released from the confinements of whiteness and sexism. In a debate that took place in 1993 about the “reinvention of the left”, Tariq Modood highlighted that ethnic diversity and racial equality were new challenges for the left and thus, also,...
Doing the Russian Revolution Justice
The centenary of the 1917 revolution can be seen as a diversion from the trauma still fresh and experienced by every living Russian except the youngest. The Russian revolution of 1917 indelibly marked the course of the 20th century. Its centenary comes into a world...
Moving towards Meta-Politics: Notes on Alain Badiou’s Political Criticism
Since the publication of Being and Event[1. See Alain Badiou. Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham. (London, UK. Continuum, 2005)] in 1988, Alain Badiou has established himself as inarguably the most ambitious philosopher in the Continental tradition in quite some...
