CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Emilios Christodoulides 1963–2026
It is with the greatest sadness that wish to inform you that our comrade, colleague, friend and amazing intellectual, Emilios Christodoulides, passed away yesterday. After a long illness that tormented him for the last two years, he passed away peacefully in Edinburgh, surrounded by his partner and three children. Those who knew him are aware of his calm and open spirit, his kindness and gentleness, his sense of humour and joie de vivre, his unwavering faith in principles and values, and, of course, his immense intellect, which set important new directions in constitutional law, labour law, critical and legal theory. Emilios was one of the most impressive critical legal scholars of his generation. He was the managing director of Law and Critique for the last four years and ensured that the journal pioneered the most radical and innovative theoretical trends in critical legal thought. The critical legal community mourns his passing and will appropriately celebrate his life, work and...
ARTICLES
Torture Works? Beccaria’s Forgotten Lesson
Power structures and governments will resort to euphemistic labelling in order to sanitize morally reprehensible or illegal behaviour — this is neither new nor surprising. A textbook example is the G. W. Bush Jr. Administration who tried to immunize inter alia...
The Control Room: War, Exception, Threat
If the machinery of intelligence-gathering and war is never switched off, then we have truly entered the permanent state of emergency. This 10-minute video essay looks at control rooms in film and television since the 1970s, and identifies an array of technological...
Open Letter to the Prime Minister from the UK Legal Academic Community
As the new US administration moves to enact a series of ever-more discriminatory policies, and as the material consequences of those policies begin to be felt around the world, those of us based in the UK face an additional blow as they watch their government throw...
The American Terrible
Someone recently asked me: if you don’t think Trump is a fascist, what do you think is going to happen? I answered her as truthfully as I could: I don’t know. The fact is: none of us knows. Not even, I suspect, Trump or Steve Bannon. In the course of several argumens...
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...
KEY CONCEPTS
No Results Found
The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.
