CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Politics of Vision, Targeting, and Palestine
‘The whole history of Palestinian struggle has to do with the desire to be visible.’ Edward Said On the evening of March 3rd, 1991, Rodney King, a 25-year-old Black American, was pulled over by LAPD officers after a high-speed chase. What followed was recorded by George Holliday on a handheld camera. The grainy footage showed four officers—Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno, and Stacey Koon—brutally beating King with punches, kicks, tasers, and batons. In 85 seconds, King was struck 56 times. The video, aired by CNN, went viral, triggering global outrage and leading to a criminal case against the officers. This was the first time a court had access to such clear and visual evidence of police brutality against a young Black man. The video became the trial’s central piece of evidence. Having unprecedented confidence in this piece of evidence, the prosecutor opened his case by saying: ‘What more could you ask for? You have the videotape that shows objectively, without bias,...
ARTICLES
Africa in the Dock: On ICC Bias
The International Criminal Court does not, and cannot, exist outside politics and its activities reflect that. ‘Cheers and chants, tears and embraces, rhythmic stomping and applause’: such was the reaction by diplomats at the close of the Rome Conference in 1998...
#NauruFilesReading: Articulating the Violence of Australia’s Refugee Policy
Film captures unsanctioned live reading of the Nauru files outside the Australian High Commission, London. This year Australia House, London, has been on the receiving end of a high level of protest activity over Australia’s policy of indefinitely detaining refugees...
The Republics of the Jungle
The Jungle is not just a camp for the undocumented, it is also a social body and above all a political subject; the way it has evolved gives us insights into how the political problems that produced it can be resolved. On the 26th of September 2016 the President of...
Vertigo Sea: Migration Catastrophes
“I’m for the blur. I’m about trying to blur these boundaries and borders because I think more resonance comes out of things, narratives conversant with each other, than not.” In Border/Talks: a conversation with John Akomfrah on sea migration, borders, and art,...
Anything but disruptive: blockchain, capital and a case of fourth industrial age enclosure – Part II
Under the aegis of a feverish entrepreneurial spiritualism and redoubled post-crisis capitalism of the fourth industrial age, the radical transparency and openness once promised by blockchain is in retreat. We are witnessing blockchain-as-enclosure; enclosure through...
Anything but disruptive: blockchain, capital and a case of fourth industrial age enclosure – Part I
A critical turn is needed in discussions of blockchain — the tech that underpins the virtual currency bitcoin - especially with respect to it as a phenomenon of the so-called fourth industrial age.The fourth industrial age is the latest stage in the ongoing...
Our North is the South: A New Human Rights Agenda?
It has become more or less acceptable in the critical field, when working with contributions from Latin America, to use the map created by the Uruguayan Joaquín García in 1943 that shows the South facing upwards. It is not often recalled that, already in 1154, Al...
Colombia: Counter/Revolution in Present Tense
Facing the negative results from the plebiscite to ratify the peace agreements, Colombia is in the midst of a counter-revolution of sorts. But the country is not staying still. The day arrived, voting stations opened in the morning, they closed in the afternoon, and...
Law and Coloniality: An Interview with Brenna Bhandar
English version of interview with Brenna Bhandar* by Olivier Chassaing, translated by Chayma Drira for Période, the French online journal of Marxist theory, available here. Olivier Chassaing (‘OC’): By studying law, one can explore how capitalist societies rest upon...
The sharing economy blues
Tom Slee on Silicon Valley’s anti-regulation revolution It seems like politicians, journalists and pundits are lining up to praise the “innovative” promise of the so-called “sharing economy.” But is there something sinister lurking behind the collaborative facade that...
Colombia: The Rubble of History and the Future to Come
The Colombian peace agreement plebiscite to ratify the final agreement on the termination of the Colombian conflict on 2 October 2016 is a day when another Colombia and another world become possible. On 2 October 2016, a country of 48 million people will confront...
Solidarity Inside and Outside Colonial Borders
Can we evoke a critical form of solidarity using the emancipatory recognition of Indigenous sovereignty? Any critical solidarity finds difficulty in acknowledging Indigenous populations and refugees as “people forced to the edges of Australian society”, as stated by...
Movement For Justice (MFJ): Open Letter to Jeremy Corbyn
Following Jeremy Corbyn's landslide victory as leader of the Labour Party, MFJ have sent him this open letter... Uniting the struggles against racism and austerity: Amnesty for all immigrants without secure legal status; End immigration detention; Abolish the...
Why Trump Won’t Win and Why it Matters
Trump’s candidacy allows us to see the domestic contradictions that have always existed globally. There is a sinister umbilical cord between the inside of American politics and institutionalism and its unrestricted and savage outside. The American president resembles...
Letter to the Society of Legal Scholars
On 9th of September the Society of Legal Scholars invited the conservative British politician Michael Gove to address the dinner of its annual conference. In opening his talk, Mr Gove commented: ‘I feel rather like the grand wizard of the KKK giving an address to the...
Towards a post-liberal theory of free expression
Controversies about free expression now saturate the news more than ever before. They certainly erupt whenever Donald Trump opens his mouth. Questions have also arisen as to whether anti-immigration slurs incited post-Brexit attacks on minorities. By ‘expression’ I...
On a Recent Change of Tone in Politics and Law
This is the foreword by Costas Douzinas to Law and Critique in Central Europe: Questioning the Past, Resisting the Present, eds. Rafał Manko, Cosmin Cercel, and Adam Sulikowski (Oxford: Counterpress 2016). I am writing this preface in the Chamber of Hellenic...
How do you recognise an Assadist?
Some people whose interest in the Middle East is recent think that Assad is a uniquely Syrian phenomenon. I think the excessively harsh despotism and the equally excessive ability to cruelly exterminate your own population while believing yourself to be setting your...
A feminist case for Basic Income: An interview with Kathi Weeks
Katie Cruz: Since you wrote The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries in 2011, the demand for a basic income has received increasing attention from those of us on the Left. But I think what differentiates your work on basic...
When Seeing Isn’t Believing: On Images of Police Brutality
Our TV screens and social media feeds are saturated with images of police brutality towards African Americans; the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling among the most recent. While visual proof of police violence towards African Americans is not new — as...
Criminal Law to the Rescue? ‘Wolf-Whistling’ as Hate Crime
On July 13, 2016 Nottinghamshire police became the first force in the UK to recognise misogyny as a hate crime. Hate crime is defined as ‘any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a...
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