CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Tony Blair Will Not Save Us from Climate Hysteria
A resident holds a sign warning passers-by to slow down to reduce wakes that exacerbate flooded streets in a suburb of Houston, Texas, as U.S Border Patrol riverine agents evacuate residents in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey August 30, 2017. U.S. Customs and Border Protection photo by Glenn Fawcett. Original public domain image from Flickr During the climate summits In the sterile corridors of climate summits, numbers drift like ghostly apparitions. Worrying numbers. Disturbing numbers. 1.5°C, 2°C, 3°C. 36.8 gigatonnes of CO2 released annually. 4 million human deaths since 2000 – a significant underestimate. 1 million species at risk of extinction. Tony Blair is busy Tony Blair is a man in motion. From one luxury hotel suite to the next he races, discreetly meeting leaders and helping countries – advising his ‘partners’. Partners, not clients; clients make you sound like Hakluyt. He cultivates, he advises, he influences, he promotes. ‘His presence sent a ripple of excitement...
ARTICLES
The Iraq War, Brexit and Imperial Blowback
Brexit is a disaster we can only understand in the context of Britain's imperial exploits. A Bullingdon boy (Oxford frat boy) gamble has thrown Britain into the deepest political and economic crisis since the second world war and has made minority groups across the UK...
Three Brexit lessons from our work at Kent Law School.
We are some of the staff who work at Kent Law School, one of the UK’s leading critical law schools. We value working in a place where people disagree with each other, where diverse colleagues, often from different schools of thought and political convictions, feel a...
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...
KEY CONCEPTS
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