CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Project 2025 and Manifestos for Undemocracy
A manifesto was instrumental in the formation of the constitutional democracy that was the United States of America, and we are currently witnessing its (re)inception as an undemocracy through the work of another manifesto. The Declaration of Independence – akin to the war manifestos of 18th century international law – called for a radical break from the imperial rule of Great Britain. At the time, such a demand must have felt nigh-on impossible to achieve. Indeed, manifestos are often utopian calls for radical change. It is this utopian – some might say, unfeasible, impossible, unimaginable – quality that means that manifestos are often overlooked within constitutional scholarship. These often-ephemeral texts used as part of broader political protests and social movements are discarded as quickly as they are produced. Yet, as we have argued elsewhere, manifestos need to be taken seriously within constitutional scholarship. In particular, we have demonstrated the...
ARTICLES
The Unbearable Weight of Staying
On the paradoxical semantic ambivalence at the root of the unrooted concept ‘host’ On Wednesday 22nd June 2016, during Refugee Week, Adbul Rahman Haroun was sentenced to nine months in prison under the Malicious Damage Act 1861, prosecuted for ‘dangerous obstruction’...
Disorder under Heaven
A crisis is to be taken seriously, without illusions, but also as a chance to be fully exploited. Late in his life, Freud asked the famous question “Was will das Weib?”, “What does a woman want?”, admitting his perplexity when faced with the enigma of the feminine...
After the Referendum: What’s Left?
There is nothing to celebrate today. The vote by a small (but significant) majority of people in the UK to leave the EU is not a victory for working people, for migrants, for socialists or left activists of any stripe. It could have been: if Labour and the main trade...
Europe at the Crossroads
Brexit campaigners would have us abdicate at the global level, all potential for the re-establishment of political and social self-determination over the economy. We, by contrast, should take our fight for the soul of economic liberalism to Europe. Order in Chaos Even...
Brexit as Nostalgia for Empire
The run up to the EU referendum has shown Britain for what it is. Woodwork: the washed-up bracken of the British Empire, and the ugly flotsam of its legacy of racism. This week Jo Cox, a pro-immigration Labour MP was brutally murdered by a man who shouted Britain...
‘Internalised homophobia’: The exception or the paradigm?
Shortly after the 11 June anti-LGBT massacre, it became clear that the perpetrator, Omar Mateen, had a gay profile of his own. Commentary poured out associating Mateen with internalised homophobia. What shall we make of that diagnosis? It’s not necessarily wrong....
Focus on the Funk: Review
Between 20–23 May 2016, a community of academics, activists and artists met at Birkbeck School of Law under an invitation to ‘Focus on the Funk.’ [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObOq-o_nDv8] Over three days, the likes of Gayatri Spivak, Alicia Garza, Nina...
Livability: Notes on the Thought of Judith Butler
Key Concept Livability is a term increasingly detectable in Judith Butler’s work from the early 2000’s onwards. The concept emerges as intimately caught up with Butler’s discussion of grievability and her wider question of “how can we have more viable and livable...
The Rise of Luxury Communism
In a post-capitalist world how will we establish a system which provides for the needs of all? The solution to this in a world with mechanized labor is clear: luxury communism The failing of the American liberal lies not in his or her message, which purports to be one...
Critique, Contradiction and the Law: Brit Crit History – The 1986 CLC
In 1986, people were wearing shoulder pads, watching Neighbours, and listening to Bananarama. Spain and Portugal had just joined the EEC (there was no EU), the London Stock Market had its big bang (massive deregulation), computers looked like the one below,...
Human Rights for Martians
The human rights movement can be seen as the ongoing but failing struggle to close the gap between the abstract man of the Declarations and the empirical human being. Has it succeeded? Yes and no. 2015 and 2016 have been marked by the heart-breaking images of a moving...
zionisms
... this is, in part, a plea to the left to stop saying ‘Zionist'. Two days ago, the news was full of Jeremy Corbyn’s recent decision to suspend Labour MP Naz Shah while her alleged antisemitism is investigated. Two years ago, before she became an MP and during the...
Who we are or what we could become? Musing on a remark of Judith Butler’s
How should queer politics respond to the attachment some people feel to a stable gender identity? This is the question Judith Butler poses in discussion with Sara Ahmed in the current issue of Sexualities. Butler asks: If ‘queer’ means that we are generally...
Universal Basic Income and the Politics of Production
Of late there have been a growing number of people who take seriously the promise of Unconditional Basic Income ("UBI") policy programs. Roughly, these advocates propose that UBI can allay the harms and legitimate social anxiety caused by cycles of un- and...
Reading Christian Human Rights in Latin America
Samuel Moyn’s most recent book, Christian Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania University Press 2015), tells the story of the relationship between European Human Rights and Christianity, both during the interwar period and after World War II. Among other things,...
Eye in the Sky: drones, the (human) ticking-time bomb scenario and law’s inhumanity
"The law is here to protect YOU" — Legal adviser of the UK military, Eye in the Sky Eye in the Sky is (unintentionally) a film about law’s profound inhumanity. (*Moderate spoilers to follow, proceed with caution.) Colonel Katherine Powell (Hellen Mirren) commands from...
The Left in Power? Notes on Syriza’s Rise, Fall, and (Possible) Second Rise
The left in power? Four enticing words. The most important thing here, however, is the question mark at the end. For what does the left mean today as ideology and vision, as organization and party, as movement and government? No single or simple answer exists. We have...
Taxing Citizens: Hegel On Having the Right Attitude
We hear a lot about tax, and about how people dislike paying it. But while there’s general agreement that there is a big difference between tax evasion (illegal: breaching the law to escape paying tax) and tax avoidance (minimising one’s tax liabilities in a legal...
Impolite Conversations around the ‘War on Waste’
I have few food-related memories of my childhood in Italy. One of these is certainly represented by my parents nudging me to eat all the food that was in my plate: no questions asked. It was the end of the 80s, and households in the Global North were for the first...
What is DiEM25, really? A Reply to the Open Letter
Note from the LeftEast editors: this is the reply of Yanis Varoufakis to the Open Letter by George Souvlis and Samuele Mazzolini about the Democracy in Europe Movement 2015 DiEM25, which appeared earlier this week on LeftEast. Varoufakis’s reply first appeared on...
An Open Letter to Yanis Varoufakis
In the following open letter (republished on AnalyzeGreece), George Souvlis and Samuele Mazzolini respond to the recent DiEM25 launch in Rome. Dear Yanis,We decided to write you this letter after following closely the launch of DiEM 25 in Rome on 23 March. The missive...
KEY CONCEPTS
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