CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Teaching as a revolutionary activity
Neoliberal universities as a place where radical thoughts come to wither away. We are living in bad times (admittedly, I struggle to remember the good times, but the current bad times do seem quite bad). And in bad times there is an impulse amongst decent people to try and find meaningful ways of resisting the badness around us; a tendency to find hope in unsuspecting places, and to locate sites of political possibilities in formerly untapped corners of our lives. For academics (#NotAllAcademics) teaching is one such unsuspecting place, and a potential untapped corner: what if, we ask ourselves in desperation and exhaustion, teaching can be radical; what if it is a way to move the needle. Now, I love teaching as much as the next person (meaning, sometimes I enjoy it, and sometimes I find it exhausting and mind-numbingly repetitive), and over the last few years I have had the pleasure and a privilege of meeting some truly brilliant (politically, as much as intellectually) students,...
ARTICLES
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...
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,...
KEY CONCEPTS
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