CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Teaching as a revolutionary activity
Neoliberal universities as a place where radical thoughts come to wither away. We are living in bad times (admittedly, I struggle to remember the good times, but the current bad times do seem quite bad). And in bad times there is an impulse amongst decent people to try and find meaningful ways of resisting the badness around us; a tendency to find hope in unsuspecting places, and to locate sites of political possibilities in formerly untapped corners of our lives. For academics (#NotAllAcademics) teaching is one such unsuspecting place, and a potential untapped corner: what if, we ask ourselves in desperation and exhaustion, teaching can be radical; what if it is a way to move the needle. Now, I love teaching as much as the next person (meaning, sometimes I enjoy it, and sometimes I find it exhausting and mind-numbingly repetitive), and over the last few years I have had the pleasure and a privilege of meeting some truly brilliant (politically, as much as intellectually) students,...
ARTICLES
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...
Obituary: Connor O’Callaghan
On Sunday July 8th, our friend and CLT contributor Connor O’Callaghan passed away in a water related accident on Chocolate Lake near Halifax, Nova Scotia. Connor was a third-year PhD Candidate in the Social and Political Thought program at York University, working on...
Obligations in the New Climatic Regime
The Anthropocene heralds a rupture within the modern imaginary, calling for modes of thinking in obligations beyond the co-ordinates that have hitherto defined that worldview. Mass extinctions, the melting of ice caps, the acidification of the oceans, and extreme...
Law, Reading, and Power: The ‘S’ Joke, Why You Find it Funny and Why I Don’t (with Reply)
A guy walks into a bakery known for making fancy cakes. He says, “I’d like to have a cake shaped like the letter S.” The baker says he can do it, but the cake will be expensive. The man confirms that price is no object. The baker tells him to come back after three...
Rethinking the University
Counterpress are pleased to announce the publication of Rethinking the University: Structure, Critique, Vocation by Soo Tian Lee. Dr Lee answers questions about his book. You use the theoretical framework of Kojin Karatani as inspiration for Rethinking the University....
Law & Critique: Burkini, Bikini & The Female (Un)dressed Body
Continuing our cooperation with Law & Critique, today Giorgia Baldi returns to her article 'The Burqa Avenger' (full text available here). In 2004, when Aheda Zanetti created the burkini, a swimsuit that covers the body leaving the face, hands and feet uncovered,...
The Labour of Legal Change: On the Final Days of the Irish Pro-Choice Referendum
I was on Liffey Street with the smokers when the referendum polls closed. A gang of us friends - canvassers and campaigners - had been having dinner together in an upstairs room in a restaurant on the quays. Two big raucous tables. Too much red wine. Loud, joking,...
Can Critical University Studies Survive the Toxic University?
Several things in the news recently have made me want to write again about Critical University Studies (CUS) – a discipline that has been given momentum in the UK by the USS pensions strikes of spring 2018. As I visited a number of campus rallies and teach-outs, I...
Law & Critique: Transitional Justice as ‘Omnus et Singulatim’
Continuing our cooperation with Law & Critique, today we are presenting the work of Josh Bowsher. A full text of the article published in Law & Critique can be viewed here. Our understanding of transitional justice is dominated by an avowedly normative body of...
Law & Critique: Encountering the Past
We are thrilled to be working with Law and Critique, the primary critical legal studies journal. In the coming months we will be featuring blogs from some of their most recently published authors, these will include links to open-access read-only versions of their...
Watching Women’s History in the Irish Pro-Choice Referendum
“None of this is happening. We think we’re here but we aren’t.” I am in Tigh Neachtain in Galway with Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A.on the 10th of April. We are having an abortion referendum in Ireland on May 25, to repeal the anti-abortion Amendment they put into the...
Did Baudrillard foretell the advent of fake news? From disinformation to hyperinformation
Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) is not the most often cited of the post-war French philosophers. Yet, radical, nihilistic, prophetic, Baudrillard’s philosophical critique of post-modern society, and specifically his idea of the ‘hyperinformation society’ emanating from...
On Rosa Parks’ Tomahawk, or, The US Strikes in Syria
In the wake of the most recent USA airstrike in Syria, Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former president of the American Society of International Law and U.S. State Department Director of Policy Planning between 2009 and 2011, took to Twitter to think through some of...
The Proposed Amendment to the South African Constitution: Finishing the Unfinished Business of Decolonisation?
On 27 February 2018, an overwhelming majority of members of South Africa’s National Assembly adopted a motion to begin the process of amending the ‘property clause’ in the constitution. Given the befuddled nature of the present clause, the proposed amendment seeks to...
Workshop: The Time(s) & Temporality of International Human Rights Law
This one-day workshop will bring together a diverse range of scholars to reflect on critical approaches to international human rights law and temporality. (2ndJuly 2018, School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast) 2018 marks the 70th anniversary of the Universal...
On Corbyn, Antisemitism and Things Jewish
Yet another episode in the story of Jeremy Corbyn’s antisemitism. This time from 2012, in expressed support for a graffiti artist’s free speech rights after the artist’s painting of white bankers playing monopoly on the backs of the globe’s dispossessed was declared...
Being set up to fail? The battle to save the UK’s Universities from speculative finance
When Sam Gyimah announced a traffic light rating system for universities this week many poured scorn on the ineptness of the attempt to classify higher education by a simplified metric drawn, no doubt, from Mr Gyimah’s previous life as an investment banker. Yet the...
UCU Strike Action – Open Letter
We the undersigned, Call on the UCU national leadership to reconsider its position reached in ACAS negotiations with UUK on the 12th March 2018. The current agreement kicks a serious solution to the pension dispute in the long grass, committing to a three year process...
