CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Foundational Wrong of Law (Symposium)
Stephen Connelly There is an implicit assumption in jurisprudential reasoning that this reason, as form, is without inconsistency. Error is procedural: it results either from misrecognition of the ‘true’ law, from ignorance of the true facts, or from misapplication of the law to the facts. The practical syllogism is itself unassailable; what is wrong in the law is a failure to reason in accordance with its form. If an inconsistency (or antinomy) appears in a particular judg(e)ment as a result of ‘difficult’ facts or intuitively unjust laws, the inconsistency is a defect of the judge, not of practical legal reason itself. The judge is referred back to the law (literally in civilian systems), until the ‘apparent’ inconsistency is ironed out and the facts are made to cohere once more. The wrong of law, Kerruish argues [WL255], is this exclusion ab initio from legal reasoning of the very methods of contradiction which could faithfully express the contingencies of...
ARTICLES
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...
Trump’s Law: Toward a Necropolitical Humanitarianism
On 5 April 2017, one day before authorizing missile strikes against Syrian targets, Donald Trump remarked during a press conference in the White House Rose Garden, ‘I will tell you that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me — big impact.’ He elaborated:...
A World of “Sound” and “Clash”: An Interview with Taru Dalmia (Part III of III)
We want to know more about the roots of your music. As we understand it, your music brings together a particular new take on reggae, ska, and techno sounds with powerful lyrics. How does this mixture relate to your aim to engage with social struggles? We are thinking here too about ‘tradition’ – an idea that for legal scholars simultaneously denotes social power, respect, order, patterns of thought, and, of course, obedience: inheritance, and mixing? T: In music as opposed to prose it is not just lyrics but sound that becomes a carrier of meaning. Bass music, dub music, deeply impacts upon people and can be powerful expressions of emotion, of political sentiment, even of metaphor. In the case of reggae in particular we feel that it lends itself very well to expressing the fractured militarised reality that we are engaging with…
A World of “Sound” and “Clash”: An Interview with Taru Dalmia (Part II of III)
Taru, as legal scholars the idea of soundclashing is extremely interesting. We know that speech and rhetoric have been always part of law, and yet it is hard to grasp the actual mechanics of using sound in our projects. How do you process, or how do you render into a material form, this idea of ‘soundclashing’? Specifically, how are technique and technology mixed at this point with politics, histories of violence and entrenched power asymmetries in order to produce something new, or at least something different? Taru [T]: There are different processes at play, depending first on whether we are talking about a recording or performance oriented endeavour and then also, the various musical outlets…
A World of “Sound” and “Clash”: An Interview with Taru Dalmia (Part I of III)
Introduction Taru Dalmia is a New Delhi-based Indian reggae/dancehall artist, poet, academic historian and social activist. Taru, also known as Delhi Sultanate, is the lead singer of The Ska Vengers, the mastermind behind Bass Foundations Roots - BFR Sound System...
Brexit is upon us: what is to be done?
To know where we are going we must know how we got here. A long-established online politics forum currently has a thread under the title ‘Creating Lexit: What is to be done?’ A reasonable enough question, and the ‘creating’ admits we are a long way from a left Brexit...
On Racial Injury: Fighting the Dilution of Anti-Racist Legislation Is More Important Than Anti-Racist Legislation
Last year, following the terrorist attack in Nice, I met a European friend and colleague at a conference in Milan. I asked him how his Palestinian boyfriend was, a lovely man I have grown to care about. My colleague visibly upset informed me that his boyfriend has had...
Governmentality and the Management of the Circulation of ‘Extreme’ Ideas
In October 2016, the University of Sussex published its Freedom of Speech Code of PracticeUniversity of Sussex - Office of Planning, Governance and Compliance, ‘Freedom of Speech - Code of Practice’...
Al Khan al Ahmar, international law and the paradox of hope
Imagine living day after day unsure of when your home will be demolished. That will most likely mean having to quickly move elsewhere out of necessity, not out of choice. Will you be able to salvage some of your belongings, comfort your traumatised children as a...
‘We did this’: Collective Guilt & the Tuam Mass Grave
“We all partied”: Fianna Fáil Finance Minister Brian Lenihan’s infamous phrase, in the early years of the financial crisis, encapsulated the drive, on the part of Ireland’s political and media establishment, to broaden collective responsibility for social and economic...
Europe must go back to the school of the world. As a student
In order to learn, Europe must be willing to un-learn many of its self-conceptions and many of its conceptions about the non-European world that brought it to its present place. Europe and the Global North as a whole are being assailed by a feeling of historical and...
KEY CONCEPTS
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