CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
One’s own morality as the highest court: A variation on Hegel’s concept of international law
Whether international law constitutes an independent legal domain endowed with sanctioning power with regard to its subjects is a question that has resurfaced in nearly every crisis that has emerged within the post Cold War new world order, and one that has most often been answered in the negative. Unsurprisingly, in a significant portion of such triggering events, the politically decisive yet legally immune subject has been the United States of America. The newly shaped aggressiveness in the field of international relations that began with Donald Trump’s second term, along with the singular acts resulting from this aggressiveness, has once again rendered this longstanding issue debatable in the eyes of legal scholars. The abduction of the Venezuelan president from his own country in a manner resembling a domestic criminal investigation, followed by the declaration that Venezuela would be “ruled”[1] by the United States; the assertion that Greenland constitutes a strategic...
ARTICLES
Darkness Visible: A New Years Eve at the Calais Jungle with Black Sartre, White Fanon and friends.
This is a recounting of a New Year's eve night at the makeshift settlement known as the Calais 'jungle' that is the subject of so much media attention of late. A cold wet sludge of a jungle that's home to some 6000 people, the migrants of Calais. The encounters over...
The Left of the Future: A Sociology of Emergences
The future of the left is no more difficult to predict than any other social fact. The best way to address it is by way of what I term the sociology of emergences, which consists in paying special attention to signs from the present that can be read as trends or the...
Shut it Down #YarlsWood
Reading the migrant detention centre within a global economy of violence through new formations of resistance and solidarity. Yarl's Wood IRC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz1t3DFLplo On a wet windy November day in Bedfordshire, outside the notorious Yarl's Wood...
The Gardens of Atocha: Pablo Iglesias’ Election Night Speech
Kindly translated by Richard McAleavey over on the superb Cunning Hired Knaves. Translator's Note: This is a translation of the speech given by Pablo Iglesias following the election results on Sunday night. I do not have a satisfactory English translation for ‘patria‘...
The Weight of Our History
This is the long version of an essay that was first published on November 20, 2015 in L’humanité. Translation by Philippe Theophanidis with the help of Marie-Ève Morin and Marc James Léger. We would rather remain silent. In the face of the horror and emotion....
The Blind Leading the Blind: the Paris Attacks and the Construction of Infinite Evil
After the horrific attacks in Paris, the painting of the great Bruegel, The Blind Leading the Blind is in my mind. Bruegel finished this work in the year 1568. It was the year when the notorious Duke Alba arrived with his troops on behalf of the Spanish King in order...
Open Letter to the Australian Government
The following open letter was sent to Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton. It was signed by 600 refugees who are currently indefinitely imprisoned in the detention centre pursuant to Australia's 'Operation Sovereign Borders'. 30/11/15...
Concerning a Critical Legal Pedagogy: Exposing Race-Thinking in Political Canon
Locke’s philosophy worked to entrench slavery as a politically justifiable practice, effectively extending property rights to a select few while encouraging the political legitimacy of race-based persecution. John Locke is considered the most influential of...
Financial Indebtedness as a Political Strategy
Money in law is a form of debt Lawyers are not much concerned about, and economists have never really known, what money actually is. In microeconomics the issue of money does not appear at all: indeed, mainstream microeconomics has eliminated money entirely from the...
The folly of vengeance: Thinking through the Paris attacks with Simone de Beauvoir
‘…we said ourselves in an outburst of anger ‘They will pay’. And our anger seemed to promise a joy so heavy that we could scarcely believe ourselves able to bear it. They have paid. They are going to pay. They pay each day. And the joy has not risen up in our...
Capitalism and the Production of Difference
The defence of capitalism as a system of economic organization often takes the form of strangely pious declarations about how we have strayed from the path. This could involve over taxation, limiting incentives, government takeovers of industry. Crises, it is claimed,...
A Conversation with Duncan Kennedy
The recently published volume 10 of Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left reflects on the career of Duncan Kennedy, Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, Emeritus at Harvard Law School and a leading figure in the US Critical Legal Studies movement....
The Importance of the Women-y Fringe-y Excesses of Irish Pro-choice Activism
In the past year or so, Irish pro-choice protesting has taken on a new vitality. Some pro-choice actors have adopted the language of satire, humour, scandal and disobedience to show up the limits of the abortion regime. I have written before about the abortion pill...
On Selective Grief: Can we recognize all lives as equally precarious?
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris on 13/11, mounting criticism can be seen with regard to the outpouring of solidarity for Parisians and, at the same time, scarce expressions of empathy towards victims of other nations that have experienced similar...
The Redundant Refugee
“In the first place”, Hannah Arendt wrote in 1943, “we don’t like to be called “refugees”. She had escaped Germany, survived...
One Piece at a Time
On work, theft and the age of automation through a reading of Johnny Cash's classic song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18cW_yHo3PY Johnny Cash's One Piece at a Time is a song about how he makes his own dream Cadillac by smuggling out all the parts from the factory...
Break The Chains: Precarity in an Age of Anxiety
In our Age of Anxiety, society assaults us from every possible angle with an avalanche of uncertainty. How do we fight back under conditions of precarity? An Age of Anxiety is upon us, one where society assaults us from every possible angle with an avalanche of...
Human rights without humanism
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris on December 10, 1948. The result of two years of drafting by a committee of the Commission on Human Rights—whose famous chair was Eleanor Roosevelt—the text of...
14½ Truths Modestly Addressed to a Young Academic
1. You are always at a loss. This is not a problem. 2. A view cannot be anything but variable, you do not hold it, nor should an audience hear it as held. 3. Distrust anyone who all too willingly wishes to exercise his or her supposed benevolent power on you....
Izmir, International Law, and the Past and Present of Forced Migration
In September 1922, the city of Izmir served as the site of one of the most brutal episodes of forced migration of the early twentieth century. The event occurred toward the end of the 1919–22 Greek-Turkish War, a bloody and protracted struggle over western Anatolia...
Cynicism
Key Concept Philosophy can only hypocritically live out what it says, it takes cheek to say what is lived. (Critique of Cynical Reason)Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1987) 102....
KEY CONCEPTS
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