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
Interview with Walter Mignolo: Activism, Trajectory, and Key Concepts
Alvina Hoffmann Interviews Walter Mignolo.Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor and Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. He is associated researcher at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, since 2002...
Spatial Justice and Diaspora: Foreword by Parvathi Raman
Spatial Justice and Diaspora, edited by Emma Patchett and Sarah Keenan, has just been published by Counterpress. We are pleased to republish the following foreword by Parvathi Raman, Chair of the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies, SOAS. When Emma Patchett and...
Boycott the National Student Survey
We are facing a truly pivotal moment in higher education. This government is set to usher in the full marketisation of the sector, with a wave of reforms which represent the most drastic shake-up in decades. Under the new proposals, market-oriented metrics will be...
Mourning from Aleppo to Cairo: An Insight into Gillian Rose’s Third City
Be ahead of all departure, as if it were already behind you, like the winter which is almost over. For among winters there is one so endlessly winter, that, wintering through it, may your heart survive. In times...
We are the enemy: on scholarly resistance to the conservative crush
Like many of my friends in academia, when Trump was elected I went online, just as I had done after Brexit, and Turnbull, and Abbott, and every other major election and political ‘event’ in the last decade or so. Facebook—the Facebook I inhabit—was on auto-pilot....
The End of the City and the Last Man: Urban Animals and the Law
If we begin to think about law and the absence of urban animals, or of law and the urban and the absence of animals, or even of the law and its production of lawful animals, we are overwhelmed by the evidence of what John Berger calls ‘the loneliness of man as a...
Of Critique and Straw Men: A Response to El-Enany & Keenan
“We must practice revolutionary democracy in every aspect of our [movement] . . . Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories”. - Amilcar Cabral...
Beware the Ivory Dwellings of the Left: Political Purity in the Face of Fascism
For some time we have been witnessing the rise of racist nationalism and fascism in many parts of the world. In Europe and North America, significant elements of both the Brexit and Trump campaigns propagated explicitly racist ideals, albeit to varying degrees....
The (in)stability of change: The Italian constitutional referendum
Basta un SI [a YES is enough], is the slogan coined by the campaign for the approval of the Italian constitutional reform to be either confirmed or rejected on December 4th, in the nth referendum of these troubled European years. If the reform is rejected, according...
Going Rogue
Though I do like breaking femurs You can count me with the dreamers Like everybody else, I got a dream… (I’ve got a dream, Tangled) The jig is finally up, politics isn’t running as normal anymore (although ‘the oppressed’ always knew that the ‘state of emergency’ was...
Seven Theses on Trump
The response to the election of Donald Trump has been sweeping and swift. Massive and continual protests have taken place in a number of cities across the United States. Students have led walkouts and called for the creation of sanctuaries on many university campuses....
Darker with the Day: Notes on Fascism, Exception & Primitive Accumulation
The particular historical juncture in which we find ourselves raises more than obvious concerns with regards to the status of our polities. To be sure, things were never neat and clean, as most things are within the capitalist horizon. Ominous signs of the looming...
You want it darker? Trump’s aberrant community & why he still won’t win
Trump comes as the deranged savior, channeling all the frustration and spite towards the ruling class, a sort of dark Angel of political retribution. But if anything, he will intensify the Washington Consensus, he will govern for the Davos people, with the Davos...
The Coming Culture Wars in Trumplandia
War was declared in United States of America last Tuesday. There was no official signing of authorisation, it was announced through the proliferation of images and slogans across 24-hour news-cycles, like our contemporary wars on drugs or terror. Following from those...
Give back the Gweagal shield
Even if you are a regular visitor at the British Museum, you probably haven’t noticed the Gweagal shield. It hangs on a hoall of the ‘Enlightenment’ room, a long regal chamber lined with glass cabinets and dotted with shiny white busts of colonial explorers. It has...
Trump, Mair and the Gods that Failed
The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, much like the Brexit vote in the UK earlier this year, has been greeted by mainstream commentators with a mixture of vapid incomprehension and shrill, moralistic denouncement. The emptiness of these...
The US election & the systematic failure of modern politics
Should we be surprised by Donald Trump’s new position as President Elect? According to exit polls, and the weight of media and expert opinion, we should be. Yet the highly unlikely, if not absolutely impossible, has happened, and with Hillary Clinton’s phone call to...
First Thoughts on Trump
Just woke up in Beirut to US Brexit surprise. Retitling my lecture this afternoon to WTF?? First thoughts: There are at least 4 big things going on--class, race, global context and gender. 1) Class: The neoliberal governing consensus is collapsing and the elites can...
The Political Party: When Politics Are Depoliticizing
So long as we operate on the premise of an abstract and immanentist national unity, political parties and the false economies upon which they operate will thrive. It is finally election day in the US and soon the drawn out, often intolerable, play of American...
Decolonizing Sexualities: Foreword by Walter Mignolo
Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions, edited by Sandeep Bakshi, Suhraiya Jivraj, and Silvia Posocco has just been published by Counterpress to much acclaim. CLT are pleased to republish the foreword by Walter Mignolo. Decolonial...
Remembering Pasolini, Thinking About Calais
Pasolini’s courage and passion is more relevant today than ever as Europe slips into the hands of a dangerous rhetoric of fear which finds shape in the form of normalisation of zones of exception. Forty-one years ago, on 2 November 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini, a...
KEY CONCEPTS
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