CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Translating Dark into Bright: Diary of a Post Critical Year
This video-diary describes and performs an act of translation. What are we attempting to translate? Dark possibilities into bright. Theory into life. Life into theory. The written into the visual. This short film - the first in a series - is an attempt to capture fragments of a reading project that emerged from a disenchantment with critical theory. As we tried to trace out a post-critical legal hermeneutics, we found ourselves on a journey through texts that inhabited hope, that concretized the utopian. We did so in a year where hope and utopia were particularly difficult to glimpse. By journey's end, we returned home to critical theory, even as we found its universe of possibilities had expanded. https://youtu.be/2xq5kBWzwM4 André Dao and Danish Sheikh are PhD candidates at Melbourne Law School and members of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities.
ARTICLES
Policing Capitalist Exploitation: An Interview with Alex Vitale & Mark Neocleous (Part 1)
On 14 July Petr Kupka and I sat down (virtually) with Mark Neocleous and Alex Vitale to discuss their critical analyses of policing. Vitale is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and has been frequently interviewed on the issue of policing in connection with...
The De-Aging of the World
Social age does not coincide with physiological age. But the degree of the discrepancy varies according to historical period, including its social context and the other collective circumstances surrounding it. The same applies to societies. The industrialized world in...
CLC Dundee: undeed and duende.
Had the virus not intruded, I, and many of CLT’s readers, would be in Dundee right now, for the annual Critical Legal Conference, an event that has happened every autumn since the mid-1980s. The CLC has often proclaimed its non-existence for all but three days of the...
An Escape Route for Brazil
Brazil is at an existential crossroads, the magnitude of which we can only begin to imagine. This is a country where the pandemic has caused one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world. With only about 2.8 percent of the world population, Brazil accounts for...
A Second Manifesto for the World Social Forum? From an Open Space to a Space for Action
Is the World Social Forum (WSF), which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2021, just an open space or can it (should it) also be a space for action? This question has been discussed for years in the WSF International Council, and so far, it has not been possible to...
Sharing Myth (A Critique of the Sharing Economy)
In his 1957 book Mythologies, Roland Barthes explores how wine functions not only as France’s national emblem, but also as a myth that helps grasp the ambiguity within French capitalist society. Wine, he argues, is a defining part of France’s experience because it...
What Kind of Justice for a ‘Global New Deal’?
Delivering the 2020 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres recently set out a wide ranging critique of the current global order, characterised by pervasive, institutionalised inequality, and failed, nationalistic responses...
After Open Access
We are a collective of intersectional feminist and social justice journal editors. We reject the narrow values of efficiency, transparency and compliance that inform current developments and policies in open access and platform publishing. Together, we seek further...
Denise Ferreira da Silva: Analytics of Raciality
Key Concept In the glossary to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), you won’t find raciality under the letter ‘R’. Instead reference to the term is found under ‘A’; analytics of raciality. Before proceeding to explore this term it is...
Marxist Legal Theory: The State
Key Concept This is part of a series of key concepts in Marxist legal theory organized in collaboration with our friends at Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis of Law. All articles in this series, including the present one, will appear concurrently on Legal...
The Statues of our Discontent
Statues look a lot like the past, which is why, whenever they are called into question, we turn to historians. The truth is that statues are a thing of the past only as long as they stand quietly in squares, as indifferent to us as we are to them. At such times, which...
Postcolonial Liberalism’s Double Binds
“We need Covid Trials. In an international court,” is Arundhati Roy’s “post-lockdown reverie”. She wants the Indian government to be held accountable for its treatment of migrant workers as refuse and the ongoing assault on the civil rights of dissenters in the wake...
The Winter of Absolute Zero: Interview with Shaj Mohan
The silent 20th century consensus was that philosophy was Western, which then was split into ‘continental’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’. In recent decades we have seen the assertive presence of non-White philosophers including Achilles Mbembe, Anthony Appiah, Divya Dwivedi, and...
Complex Back Stories: Feminism, Survivor Politics and Trans Rights
On June 10, author JK Rowling published an article on her website, ‘JK Rowling Writes About her Reasons for Speaking Out about Sex and Gender Issues’ which offered a rationale for her public interventions opposing legislation in the UK designed to legally recognise...
Roland Barthes: Myth
Key Concept Human communication is multi-layered, as our language relies on complicated systems of signification; for example uttering a given statement using specific terminology might indicate the ideological tendencies of the speaker. And like any other...
Marxist Legal Theory: Security
Key Concept This is part of a series of key concepts in Marxist legal theory organized in collaboration with our friends at Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis of Law. All articles in this series, including the present one, will appear concurrently on Legal...
Remembering Peter Fitzpatrick (II)
I read for a PhD under Peter’s inimitable supervision at Birkbeck from 2005 until late 2008, at which point I told him that I had to return to Australia to finish the dissertation because the birth of my first child, Phoebe, was imminent. It sounds like I took drastic...
Institutional Vandalism: The University & Covid-19
The Guardian’s 29 May article (‘Soas to slash budgets and staff as debt crisis worsens in a pandemic’) has brought attention to a worrying development, which risks seeing losses of livelihoods and expertise at a unique and world-renowned institution. The danger is...
Universities, Finance Capital and Impact of COVID-19
Republished with permission from Discover Society. A number of vice chancellors have claimed that they are constrained in how they can approach the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by financial agreements. This means that they wouldn’t be able to cover...
The System Was Never Broken (it was built this way)
The unravelling developments in the United States of America (USA) amid the death of George Floyd are unsettling. The terminology ‘public order’ is used by popular political narrative to host and then employ a variety of techniques to deflect from the justified...
Beyond Brutality
I write this at great distance from the uprisings now taking place across the US sparked by the police killing of George Floyd. I am thousands of miles distant and witness police repression, and the anger of the protestors, via old and social media. I am a white...
