CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Gaza, Venezuela and International Law
Left: Maduro Captured (US Military, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) | Right: Trump with members of his cabinet at Mar-a-Lago during "Operation Absolute Resolve" (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) 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 was just a mask behind which hid a warmongering old man who was as excited about the military operation as a child who had just opened his New Year's gifts. "It was an excellent plan and many excellent military personnel and excellent people," Trump told the New York Times. "It was a brilliant operation." The legal language was left to others—ministers and government officials—who explained that Maduro would be "brought to justice" for corruption, drug trafficking, and...
ARTICLES
More than “the icing on the cake”: Can conservative Christians legitimately refuse to create pro-gay messages?
The legal drama over conservative Christian refusal to provide gay people with a printed or iced message has been seen as a political dispute between gay equality, on the one hand, and religious freedom or rights of expression on the other. This post argues for a...
Critical Bibliographies: Human Rights
We regularly get requests from students and activists looking for suggested readings on particular topics, so I thought it might be a good idea to supplement our critical concepts page with critical bibliographies on various important subjects for critical legal...
Solidarity, Labour, Law: Between Greece and Europe
Alain Supiot and Emilios Christodoulidis discuss the questions of solidarity and the protection of work in Greece. Emilios Christodoulidis holds the Chair of Jurisprudence at the University of Glasgow. Alain Supiot holds the Chair ‘Etat social et mondialisation:...
I’m a feminist, could that make me an extremist? Yes, according to Theresa May’s new definition
Unfortunately it is still the case that some people, for whatever reason, are yet to catch onto the monumental importance of feminism. That being said, I’ve found that it’s extremely rare, in the course of serious conversation, to encounter any expectation that I...
The Militarization of Care: the Military-Medical Gaze and the US-Mexico Border
The immigration crisis of summer 2014 made national news once more in February of 2015 when a federal judge granted an injunction on behalf of Central American mothers and children which ordered a stoppage to the Obama administration’s policy of detaining women and...
Left Thoughts from Podemos: Fear, Identity and Social change
A short while ago I spent a week in the United Kingdom, presenting Podemos in various cities, where I was able to discuss matters of major importance to Britain’s political tradition, such as the relation between parties and unions. The debate also got us involved in...
Why Muslims Can’t Trust the Legal System: The Lutfur Rahman Judgement and Institutional Racism
Institutional racism: "The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to...
The foodbank dilemma (part 2 of 2)
Read Part 1 here. A Last Resort While there are endless subtle varieties in the way different foodbanks operate, there is one fundamental similarity in the reasons why people use them. Professor Dowler and her colleagues, in their report to DEFRA, found that people...
The Foodbank Dilemma (part 1 of 2)
When I think about foodbanks now, more than anything else, I think about...
Migrant Lives: Not A Commodity
This text is written by a group of people living in the United Kingdom who are migrants, students and workers. In the last few weeks alone we have witnessed the deaths of hundreds of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea and we have mourned Pinakin Patel who died in...
Reflections on #FucktheTories
To those who are arguing that people don’t have a right to protest against a government that was “democratically” voted in: Yes we do. This is a government which is waging war on the poor, the homeless, the disabled, the unemployed, immigrants, students, single mums...
On the Horns of the Moon: 5 More Years Of Pain
As I walked along the pavement early yesterday morning to get the papers, under the heavy grey sky, cussing the cold temperatures and contemplating all that a Tory majority will mean for the next five years, a few party volunteers (presumably Labour, given the...
The Strange Lightness of History
Some people are just too small to be human, and maybe that has always been the case. But ever since Western modernity grew to span the world thanks to colonialism and capitalism, the contradiction between equal dignity for all human beings and the inhuman treatment of...
Deterrence unto Death: Running fast into a neighbour’s knife
Once gunships have driven them back to their shores, boats need to be confiscated and burned on a huge bonfire.” Katie Hopkins, UK Conservative Pundit (2015) We understand that by withdrawing this rescue cover we will be leaving innocent children, women and men to...
Ferries not Frontex! 10 points to really end the deaths of migrants at sea
On April 20, the Joint Foreign and Home Affairs Council of the EU released a ten-point action plan outlining their response to the recent deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. Many other proposals have also been made over the last few days. We are activists who...
The Atmosphere of Revolution?
I want to follow up on a post from last year about the general strike, using the idea of silence as that which binds it together in its negativity (or catastrophe as Sorel would say). As I reread that piece for a book that I’m trying to write about crowds, I realised...
Teaching: Notes on the Thought of Luce Irigaray
One of the major concerns for Irigaray regarding education, and in my view perhaps the most important one, involves the absence of horizontal relations in the classroom. Indeed, Irigaray writes: Education is still based on the characteristics of the male subject, and...
The Germanwings Disaster: A ‘Muslim-Australian’ Perspective
The intentional downing of the Germanwings aircraft on 24 March 2015 triggered an urgent media inquiry into the identity and motivations of co-pilot Andreas Lubitz. Armed with not much more than a grainy photograph of an unassuming man posing in front of the Golden...
Six Books: International Law, Human Rights and the Politics of the Turn to History
What do we mean by the turn to history in international law? We are speaking about a growing body of scholarship that is engaged in the task of bringing history to international law in a number of ways: telling the history of international law, contextualising...
JHRE Editorial: The Discourse of ‘Biocultural’ Rights
There can be little doubt of the multiple complexities facing law in the twenty-first century. Climate change alone presents a challenge of unprecedented global complexity for legal systems – a complexity arising, moreover, directly from the ‘complexity of the climate...
Australians overseas are calling for international protests against mandatory detention of asylum seekers
For decades Australia has been the subject of international institutional condemnation that has focused on Australia's policies of mandatory detention and off-shore processing of asylum seekers. In 2002 in the aftermath of Tampa, SIEV X, the spurious ‘children...
KEY CONCEPTS
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