CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Wrong of Law and Marx’s Second Secret (Symposium)
I feel honored to have been invited to comment on Valerie Kerruish’s The Wrong of Law, a book bringing a great range of methodological approaches to bear on a problematic of great interest to me. The book’s focal point is the self-seriousness of legal discourse. It is a constitutive feature of law that it ‘thinks itself as right,’ and this makes it unable to recognize the outside on which it depends (Kerruish 2025, 5). Although the specific injustices that result from colonial legal practices form a part of the analysis (building on her earlier Jurisprudence as Ideology [Kerruish 1991]), the overall focus on the constitutive wrong of law means that law’s empirical wrongs play an illustrative, thus secondary, role (primarily in chapter 5). As Kerruish frames it, the wrong of law is an internal quality prior to any external effects that this or that legal regime might have: ‘The idea of the wrong of law… is a metaphysical/logical idea’ (Kerruish 2025, 6)....
ARTICLES
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...
Crises of Constitutionality
A Marxist problematization of the concept of constitutional crisis. Originally published by Legal Form. Republished by permission. What is a constitutional crisis? Can a diverse array of observed phenomena — such as the slow-motion coup in Brazil, the legal and...
Giorgio Agamben: Oath
Key Concept Today, the oath seems to us obscure and obsolete. As an enigmatic relic of earlier times, it invokes the authority of sacred and supernatural powers that go beyond the scope of human capabilities, and by doing so it realizes its aim—namely, truth-telling....
Demands Against the Long Crisis of the University
Next week the UCU (University and Colleges Union), which represents most people working as lecturers and researchers in universities, is beginning a wave of strikes. The strike is about cuts to pensions. Since there is a large financial hole in the main pension fund,...
Fee Strike
The University and College Union (UCU) is going on strike. Following the refusal of the employer’s association (Universities UK – the UUK) to negotiate on their proposed cut to pensions, the UCU balloted members and 88% voted in favour of strike action. Barring a...
Space, Assemblages, and the Hostile Border
Last year, I went to an art exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bonn by the Swedish duo Lundahl & Seitl. After trailing around the gallery led by text messages from an unknown sender called "the Collector", we were asked to don headphones and sightless goggles before we...
The New Thesis Eleven
Domination rests to such a degree on the society/nature duality that no liberation struggle will ever succeed unless that duality is overcome. Descartes Remix (CC) In 1845, shortly after he published the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx wrote...
Safe Spaces for Colonial Apologists
The recent controversies about Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar’s “Ethics and Empire” project and UK Universities Minister Jo Johnson’s attack on “safe space culture” have both been defended on freedom of speech grounds. However, they are better understood as retrenching...
Trials Begin in Turkey for Academics for Peace
International solidarity is crucial at this time when our colleagues are facing criminal trials. On December 5, 2017, the trials began for those who signed the Academics for Peace petition in January 2016. Conducted by High Criminal Courts in Istanbul, these trials...
Martti Koskenniemi: Indeterminacy
Key Concept In From Apology to Utopia (1989), the Finnish jurist and former diplomat Martti Koskenniemi presents his thesis on international law's fundamental indeterminacy. This would come to epitomize a critical moment in international law. Rather than repeat the...
Trump’s Upside Down
We have not lately – not until Trump's election – seen or heard the dog whistle politics of racism, sexism, Nativism, and homophobia so eagerly thrust aside by a Presidential candidate and, with such glee: traded for openly racist invective, division, misogyny,...
Is Fascism Making a Comeback? (Part II)
Continuing the reposted series from State of Nature, the question is whether Fascism is making a comeback? Laurence Davis Seventy-two years after the end of World War II, the spectre of fascism is again haunting the globe. The important questions we should be asking...
Is Fascism Making a Comeback? (Part I)
Each month, the wonderful State of Nature blog asks leading critical thinkers a question. This month that question is Fascism. Chiara Bottici In fact, fascism has never gone away. If by fascism, we mean the historical regime that created the name and embraced the...
The Politics of Recognition and the Limits of Emancipation through Law
There is much to celebrate about the BVerfG gender recognition decision. The court held the sole availability of M/F gender markers, combined with the obligation to register a gender, to be unconstitutional as it violates the right to ‘positive recognition’ of the...
Statement by Legal Scholars and International Lawyers Against Holding ESIL Forum at the Hebrew University in East Jerusalem
To add your name, please email: palpetition17@gmail.com. The statement is open to all law academics and international lawyers. You do not have to be a member of ESIL or based in Europe to sign. The European Society of International Law (ESIL) is holding its Research...
Welcome to the Molysmocene
As environmental law reveals, we now live in a new era: the Molysmocene, a geological era shaped by human waste and its management. The climate talks of 6–17 November 2017 in Bonn are now over. This 23rd Convention of the Parties of the United Nations Climate Change...
Michel Foucault: Discourse
Key Concept The idea of discourse constitutes a central element of Michel Foucault’s oeuvre, and one of the most readily appropriated Foucaultian terms, such that 'Foucaultian discourse analysis' now constitutes an academic field in its own right. This post therefore...
KEY CONCEPTS
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