CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Learning to be Surprised (Symposium)
Val was a proper old-school scholar, interested in ideas for their own sake and driven to understand and respond to the injustices of the world. As a serious intellectual she was not interested in academic trends or popularity, but in working through a set of questions and problems – often with cigarette in hand. As an Australian who came to live in Hamburg, Germany, her thought constantly returned to the historical and ongoing process of Australian colonisation and to law’s complicity in colonial violence and genocide. The Wrong of Law builds upon Val’s long intellectual collaboration with her partner, Uwe Petersen, and his Hegelian approach to mathematical logic. Val’s work thus draws connections between mathematical logic, philosophy, social theory and law, and in this respect the text is often as challenging as it is unconventional. In the following reflections I try to draw out a number of key ideas from The Wrong of Law. It is only a partial account, and...
ARTICLES
Speed Limit: What does it mean to regulate AI?
Elena Esposito argues that artificial intelligence is misnamed and that a more accurate descriptor would be ‘artificial communication’.[1] Here, communication is closely connected to the idea of being informed: a communication is pertinent to the extent...
On the relationship between trans politics and disability
In the aftermath of the decision in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers [2025] USCK 16, many disabled people sought to give practical solidarity to trans people. Disabled activists offered to share their RADAR keys with trans friends. Articles...
No Hearing, No Harm? Rethinking Jurisdiction and Protection in UAE v Sudan
On 5 May 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) removed the case of UAE v Sudan from its docket, declaring it “manifest” that it lacked jurisdiction under Article IX of the Genocide Convention (Order, para 14). Sudan alleged that...
How to Reanimate Rotting Brains in the Age of AI
As artificial intelligence (AI) seeps into our daily lives, its impact on our thinking capacities is becoming increasingly clear. AI is replacing our jobs, increasing government and corporate surveillance, and luring vulnerable internet users into rabbit holes of...
Reflections on the Proscription of Palestine Action
VX Photo/ Vudi Xhymshiti Remember that we are living, writing, waking up, sleeping, lamenting, breathing, resisting, and working amid an acceleration of Israel’s 75-year settler colonial project (underwritten by the US and Europe), or what we have come to...
Resisting Neocolonial Genocidal Hyperreality: A Middle Eastern Voice
Amidst the intellectual and political tumult surrounding the genocide of the Palestinian people, this essay seeks to foreground and amplify a marginalised voice. We aim to intervene in ongoing debates within academia and the wider public in the Global North, which...
In the Crack, a Method: Hope, Utopia, and the Critique of International Law
The rhetoric around the complete erosion of international law has recently proliferated mainstream political discourse and scholarship. But, surprisingly the current state of the international legal order or its lack thereof is not unprecedented. Trump’s...
CfP: Feminist Approaches to International Law in Times of Atrocity, Anthropocene and Authoritarian Capitalism
In a Declaration appended to the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) Advisory Opinion concerning the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 2024, Judge Hilary Charlesworth drew attention to the discriminatory effects of Israel’s policies on Palestinian women and...
Illegality and Law-full-ness
A week before the 13th Berlin Biennale’s opening in June 2025, a social media account took to criticizing Biennale curator Zasha Colah’s contention, made in a recently published interview, that “there is no censorship in Germany”.[1] The social media response was...
CfP: Critical Legal Conference – Exeter
The Call for Papers for this year's CLC will remain open until the 31st of July. Please read the full description below. If you would like to participate – send short abstract of your proposed paper to the stream organisers (as mentioned under their stream heading)....
Israel’s Military Aggression against Iran: Some preliminary reflections
We are excited to have the following piece by Iranian theorist Parviz Sedaghat,[1] translated into English by Leila Faghfouri Azar and first published in Farsi in pecritique.com. 1)Israel’s military attack against Iran started in the early hours of Friday June 13 by...
Humiliation by Design: The Legal Aesthetics of Marginalisation
In liberal democracies, we are often told that law is blind to appearance. Yet, the opposite is often true. Public law and policy repeatedly mobilise aesthetic categories—such as decorum, decency, and ugliness—to judge who belongs in public spaces and...
The Critique of Trump’s Lawlessness Misses the Point
The Trump administration has felt like a nonstop emergency: bigoted attacks on trans people, immigrants, and civil rights in the name of a war on so-called wokeness; the rollback of environmental and public health monitoring; attacks on public employees and the labor...
Native Title and the Juridical Field: Bourdieu in Australia
The 1992 Mabo v Queensland (No 2) decision marked a watershed in Australian legal history, as the High Court formally rejected the doctrine of terra nullius and acknowledged the existence of native title. But legal revolutions are rarely what they seem. This...
The Politics of Vision, Targeting, and Palestine
‘The whole history of Palestinian struggle has to do with the desire to be visible.’ Edward Said On the evening of March 3rd, 1991, Rodney King, a 25-year-old Black American, was pulled over by LAPD officers after a high-speed chase. What followed was recorded by...
Tony Blair Will Not Save Us from Climate Hysteria
A resident holds a sign warning passers-by to slow down to reduce wakes that exacerbate flooded streets in a suburb of Houston, Texas, as U.S Border Patrol riverine agents evacuate residents in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey August 30, 2017. U.S. Customs and Border...
Some Points about Contemporary Fascism
We are delighted to repost Brian Massumi's latest essay, first published on his new Substack. The maturation of the modern nation-state coincided with a progressive becoming-immanent of power to the social field. Concepts such as disciplinary power, governmentality,...
Project 2025 and Manifestos for Undemocracy
A manifesto was instrumental in the formation of the constitutional democracy that was the United States of America, and we are currently witnessing its (re)inception as an undemocracy through the work of another manifesto. The Declaration of Independence – akin to...
The Law and Political Economy of 21st-Century Authoritarianism
Democratic self-government and freedoms are under attack around the world. From the consolidation of an increasingly authoritarian and erratic administration in the USA to the Turkish Government’s open persecution of the political opposition, from Israel’s systematic...
The Pulse of Resistance: Beating Beneath Black Veils
Hey, you who sit on the shore, merry and bright! A soul in the water surrenders to night. One there is, flailing with desperate hand, On this fierce, dark, and weighty sea, as you apprehend.…Tell me, at what moment should I say? A soul in the water throws life...
CfP: Critical Legal Conference, 2025 – University of Exeter
The Call for Papers is now live. Please read the full description of the streams here. If you would like to participate - send short abstract of your proposed paper to the stream organisers (as mentioned under their stream heading). Graduate students who seek a fee...
