CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Normopathy Today: Norms Behaving Badly
It is clear now, one-year into the second coming of Donald Trump, that the normative international order in place since World War II has been breached. Trump recently pronounced that he doesn’t need to follow international law because all that counts is his “own morality.”1 The context was his shakedown of Venezuela to grab its oil. The same day saw him shamelessly lying about the murder by ICE of a woman in Minnesota, even though anyone with the inclination to open their eyes could plainly see the lie in a widely distributed video. Trump’s paean to morality notwithstanding, the norms of individual behaviour associated with the well-tempered enlightenment subject, not to mention the bourgeois subject of capitalism’s erstwhile Protestant ethic with its putative embrace of moderation, have similarly eroded. This was clear as early as Trump’s first run for the White House, when he bragged about being entitled to “grab pussy” at will or even randomly shoot someone on Fifth Avenue...
ARTICLES
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,...
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
The Flower Carrier by Diego Rivera (1935) 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...
KEY CONCEPTS
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