CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
A Red Winter: On war and the Iranian struggle for freedom
Its shadow/ had swallowed the entire city;/ we thought/ it was a mountain…/ until it collapsed, and we saw/ it was a bubble/ blown straight from the mouth of darkness!/ Let them say that death is the end,/ but I say:/ The death of a dictator/ is the only day when calendars/ truly feel the touch of spring./ Baktash Abtin* The omnipotent tyrant who ruled over the lives and deaths of Iranians for over thirty-six years is dead, and I wonder what his voice would be like when, and if, he had to talk from the defendant’s dock and not from his usual throne of blood?Would he be overwhelmed by the prosecutor’s relentless cascade of questions? Would he stumble into the legal snares so carefully laid by the sharp-minded lawyers of Madaran-e-dadkhah (Mothers seeking justice for the executed and the disappeared)? Would he lose his composure and allow a glimpse of regret, shame, or sorrow to surface? Might we see that he, too, is merely a human? Fragile, vulnerable like the rest of us,...
ARTICLES
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...
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...
Open Letter: Calling all Students and Staff to Resist ‘Prevent Duty’ at their University
Today, 1 April 2016 (this is no April fools) marks a key date in terms of institutionalising toxic policies regarding the Prevent duty at universities around the UK. The 1 April 2016 marks an important date for the future of the university and the wellbeing of its...
Brexit: Whose Europe, Theirs or Ours?
Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. — Antonio Machado I. Introduction The referendum on whether or not Britain should remain within the European Union (EU) is now fully underway. This debate...
Brazil: Democracy on the Edge of Chaos and the Dangers of Legal Disorder
With legal order turned into legal disorder and democracy being highjacked by the non-elected sovereign body, political and social life has become a potential field of spoils at the mercy of political adventurers and vultures. When I began studying the judicial system...
Terrorism, Brussels, etc … Think Before you Hunt
Look at the swamps created by the differential of exterminability and mournability between Muslims and non-Muslims. It is in those and similar dips in the affective tectonic plates in which we are all embedded where some of the emotional propellors of Islamic...
Markets are the Measure of All Things: George Osborne’s Devolution Agenda and All-Academies Policy
An analysis of George Osborne's devolution agenda and all-academies school policy in the budget he presented last week as a form of "market-fostering subsidiarity." Four legs good, two legs bad! — was the catchy maxim which first summarised the principles of the...
Doreen Massey has died
Doreen Massey died four days ago at her home in Kilburn. Even before her close friends and family could decide on how to announce her death, the social media were bursting with wishes for her peaceful rest: hundreds of mini memorials of 140 characters dedicated to a...
Hillary Clinton, Riot Grrrl and Subversive Property
I came late to riot grrrl. It was 2004 and there was a rush on tickets in Brisbane to see a band called Le Tigre. It seemed like every lesbian in the city was going. “What kind of music is it?” I asked my then girlfriend. “They’re girls”, she answered, “they shout a...
A philosophical dialogue on financial risk: the (dis)illusion of a singular meaning
Financial risk is a common term nowadays. It affects our life. It is the main reason of our existence since the start of the contagion risk. It was in 2008 that one of the biggest financial institutions collapsed in America: Lehman Brothers. Since that moment...
Wanted: Sovereignty — Dead or Alive
In the first flurry of publicity around the present referendum on the UK’s EU membership, the expected statement regarding the securing of UK sovereignty has not, perhaps surprisingly, been forthcoming. Instead we have been treated to rebuttals of Gove on the role of...
Podemos, 15M and Radical Change: A multiple process of the self-determination of life
‘There has never been so much talk about politics as there is now! ‘And so little about life…’ (A conversation with friends, in the ‘year of change’) How might we understand the fundamental nature of the political management of this economic crisis? I think we can...
KEY CONCEPTS
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