CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Law & Critique: The death of Awaab Ishak and juridification of unliveable social housing
We are working with the leading critical legal journal Law & Critique to bring their brilliant output to a broader audience. Many of the papers published with Law & Critique will be accompanied by a shorter discussion on Critical Legal Thinking. In this case, please check out Rosie Woodhouse's full article which is available open access on the Law & Critique site. Awaab Ishak died on the 21 December 2020, eight days after his second birthday. The culminating inquest report heard at Rochdale Coroner’s Court on 15 November 2022 confirmed that he had died because of prolonged exposure to damp and toxic mould in his socially-rented home. After arriving in Britain from Sudan in 2016, Awaab’s father, Faisal—later joined by his wife Aisha before Awaab was born in Oldham in 2018—repeatedly raised issues regarding damp, mould, and ventilation in their flat with their housing provider, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH). The inquest cemented a truth already known to countless social and…
ARTICLES
Symposium on Kerruish’s magnum opus: The Wrong of Law
When Valerie Kerruish died in 2022, Critical Legal Thinking hosted a series of reflections from her former colleagues, friends, and collaborators. As recounted there, Valerie spent decades from the mid-1960s teaching law in Australia with an abiding concern for the…
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…
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…
‘After’ the Rojava Revolution? Rethinking Political Hope in a Post-Autonomy Syria
Since early 2026, Rojava in North East Syria, has been under renewed assault by the new Syrian regime. A majority-Kurdish region, Rojava has, for more than 12 years been home to one of the world’s largest experiments in democratic autonomy and ecological living. The…
Iran and the ‘state of exception’
It seems that we have entered a period of endless war. The undeclared American war "Epic Fury" (the name of the attack on Iran) and Israel's new murderous campaign has replaced the "cosmopolitan order of rules" heralded by those who saw the "end of history" after the…
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…
The Diapausal Life of International Law: Gaza and Beyond
Few contemporary conflicts have been as saturated with legal language as Gaza. Provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice, arrest warrants sought by the International Criminal Court, findings by United Nations commissions of inquiry, emergency…
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…
Analysing the Iranian Uprising: Costas Douzinas interviews Leila Faghfouri Azar
This interview, conducted by Professor Costas Douzains for the Greek weekly newspaper Epohi, features Dr. Leila Faghfouri Azar and was originally published in Epohi’s special supplement on the Iranian uprising (24–25 January 2026). In the conversation, Faghfouri Azar…
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…
Iran’s Uprising: Between Clerical Violence and Neo-colonial Aggression
The beginning of 2026 marked yet another human tragedy for Iranian society. In January, hundreds of thousands of Iranian protesters took to the streets in over 100 cities in response to political repression and growing socio-economic hardships. This new wave of…
Greenland and the Spectre of Dispossession
When it came to grabbing territory, the British had effective techniques by the 1960s. Morning-tea at Downing Street could accomplish what a U.S President’s incontinent media posts have been threatening to do with much froth and fury since 2019. The creation of the…
Greenland between a Rock and a Hard Place
Amid US President Trump’s looming take-over of Greenland and attempted coercion of Western allies to agree to this, Western liberal international lawyers and commentators are busy reaffirming Danish sovereignty over the territory. However, an anti-colonial…
Militant Democracy as Neurosis
Walter Benjamin invites us to think language in a radically different way: not as a neutral medium of communication, but as something living, something creative. For him, language is not exclusively human: everything that exists speaks. It may do so through gesture…
Cadaverous Tranquillity: Proscription, Anticipatory Repression and Coleridge
In December 1795, William Pitt’s government introduced the Treasonable Practices Bill and the Seditious Meetings Bill—the “Gagging Acts” as their opponents called them. They were designed to suppress the radical democratic societies that had flourished in the wake of…
Gaza, Venezuela and International Law
1. After the genocide in Gaza, we did not expect 2026 to be a year of peace. The biggest desire of Trump, "the great peacemaker," was to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But his first statements after the attack on Venezuela and Maduro's abduction show that the peacemaker…
Rage Against the End of International Law: From Venezuela to the Global
In a recent piece published at Opinio Juris, Nikolas M. Rajkovic calls on international lawyers to recalibrate their “ways of seeing” to account for the multi-scalar, relational, and interconnected nature of contemporary authority and power. His article invites a…
Why Human Rights fail Global Southern Women
Following a tumultuous start to her role as first lady of the United States of America, wherein she was accused of destroying ‘family values’ and promoting ‘militant feminism’, Hillary Clinton delivered a much-lauded speech condemning Chinese abuses of human rights…
Rap vs. The State (in a time of genocide)
We know the genocide in Gaza is a collective work, a sort of F35 genocide whose parts come from an imperial collective, a collective of old colonial states now led by the USA. So the denial of genocide, at least of its naming, is also shared by these states across…
A Preliminary Report on the Academic Office of Principal and Vice Chancellor
On 26 June 2025, Prof Iain Gillespie publicly accepted that he was ‘incompetent’ in his execution of the office of Principal and Vice Chancellor of the University of Dundee. The surprise revelation of a roughly £30 million deficit at the Scottish university in…
Discretionary Symbolism: An Analysis of Trump’s Policies for Latin America and Beyond
The international policies of the second Trump administration have caused quite an upheaval. From raising trading tariffs to (supposedly) ending wars efforts – while at the same time bombing small boast and sanctioning judges, it has not been easy to understand it.…
