CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
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 fall of communism. The "perpetual peace" of Kant and Habermas has been replaced by "perpetual war and its threat." We live in a "global state of exception." A situation where governance, military strategies, and armaments are closely linked to the needs of capitalism. At the beginning of the century, the "rogue state" and the "failing state" were the ideological terms that justified attacks and invasions by the major powers and the neo-colonial occupation of regions and states. Today, references to these distinctions have been limited. Trump attacks Venezuela and Iran, gives every possible assistance to Israel without any specific explanation or credible justification. He simply boasts like a spoiled child in the...
ARTICLES
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....
Indigenous Peoples and the Legacies of Colonialism in International Criminal Law: The Challenging Crime of Genocide.
The Nazi Holocaust has become an essential reference point to identify the concept of genocide, marked by intensive and industrial scale murder. Nevertheless, long before the term was coined there were different cases of genocide. The genocide of indigenous peoples in...
Cameron, Slavery, History and the Enlightenment tradition
General Sir James Duff was an army officer and MP for Banffshire in Scotland during the late 1700s. Following the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, he was paid £3 million because 'reasonable Compensation should be made to the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of...
Dysfunctionalism – the financial order
So there I am sat in a room with central bankers, ex-central bankers, central bank lawyers, people from the IMF, Canadian Development Bank, Federal Reserves of a couple fo US states, and assorted financial academics, and I am clawing at my ears to make it all stop. ...
To Be Read in 2050: Reflecting on Utopia
One day, when we finally find we can describe the age we now live in, the greatest amazement of all will come from the realization that we lived it all with no sense of before and after, replacing causality with simultaneity, history with news, memory with silence,...
Privacy as Immunity
"The idea of immunity, which is needed for protecting our life, if carried past a certain threshold, winds up negating life. That is, immunity encages life such that not only is our freedom but also the very meaning of our individual and collective existence lost:...
Corbyn’s Victory: Misplaced Optimism and Amnesia?
Though having never voted for the Labour Party (and I can’t imagine I ever will) Corbyn’s resounding victory is a welcome episode for leftists, progressives, greens as well as women, diaspora communities etc. His positions against Capital hegemony, trident and...
Dear Jeremy Corbyn
I’m writing to tell you how delighted I am that you have won the Labour leadership – and so decisively too. It may come as a surprise to you to know that I and many many of my friends here in Ireland have been watching this contest with a mixture of hope and...
Whispers of Transnational Corporate Responsibility: Chevron
On the morning of the 4th of September, the Supreme Court of Canada released their judgment in Chevron Corp. v. Yaiguaje, and maybe the sun broke on something. Or maybe nothing happened at all. Much has been written on the case and much more will be written still. In...
A Labour Party of protest or government? Bringing politics back in
A party of protest or a party of government – according to Gordon Brown these are the options, the choices at stake, suggesting they are very different things, polarities even. Those who protest don’t govern and those who govern don’t protest. But is this right?...
Nils Christie’s ‘Ideal Victim’ applied: From Lions to Swarms
Gaining victim status under international law is a fickle privilege – as easily granted as it is taken away. Libya’s refugees and migrants who are escaping the country’s economic collapse and violence are a testament to the use and abuse of the victim label under...
Equities: A Review of the Equity & Trusts Research Network Workshop
Men of law have certain scruples and are unable to eliminate justice from the law completely without twinges of conscious. But it is not possible to retain it because of the difficulties it involves, the uncertainty of operation and unpredictability it entails. In a...
Sovereignty as Tension: Sri Lanka and Its North-East
Even as neo-liberalism attempts to trans-nationalize the globe, the nation continues to be popular among many communities in both Europe and the postcolony. For Marxist postcolonial thinkers like Neil Lazarus (1999:48) and Timothy Brennan (1999:25 – 26), the nation...
Is there only power or the wilderness? On Labour selecting a leader
Instead of obsessing about taking power in five years, Labour should support projects of social transformation today. This is the kind of leadership Labour needs. In power or in the wilderness, the British Labour Party it would seem has two settings. Or, at least...
A Tangled Web: The Vested Interests of the EU Right
UPDATED WITH ADDITIONS 14/7 at 10:30am BST To understand the Greek crisis and the stream of ever worsening deals between the EU and Greece, it is essential to understand just how involved the EU main players have been in the creation of this situation over the past...
Their Law: The New Energies of UK Squats, Social Centres and Eviction Resistances in the Fight Against Expropriation (Part 2 of 2)
The eviction resistances in London express the contestation of private re-appropriation of homes through powerful displays of collective strength. They are an emergent movement that demonstrates an ever co-dependant dance between law and protest. Private accumulation...
Their Law: The New Energies of UK Squats, Social Centres and Eviction Resistance in the Fight Against Expropriation (Part 1 of 2)
For anyone old enough to remember themselves as a teenager during the nineties, with fond memories of piercing their own ears (multiple times) whilst listening to the second album of The Prodigy ‘Music for a Jilted Generation’ [self-piercing nostalgia optional], they...
KEY CONCEPTS
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