CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
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 the French Revolution. The great crime these organisations were deemed guilty of was to demand parliamentary reform and an end to Britain’s wars. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, then a young radical lecturing in Bristol, responded to Pitt’s “reign of alarm” with a pamphlet titled The Plot Discovered. His analysis of what those Bills represented remains strikingly relevant 230 years later, in the context of sustained assaults on democratic rights in Britain today. Writing about the two Acts, Coleridge warned that with their passage ‘[all] political controversy is at an end’. He went on to note, those ‘sudden breezes and noisy gusts, which purified the atmosphere they disturbed, are hushed to deathlike silence. The...
ARTICLES
Whose ideas are they anyway?
The academic world is a strange one. Sometimes, it seems like a place of tremendous sharing, generosity and trust. Other times, one of huge paranoia as competitive individuals scramble to protect ideas and work from the scavenging gaze of others. Attending an American...
Why Neoliberalism’s Unregulated Global Debt System is for the Birds (and Vultures)
An eerie sense of calm pervaded the bustling streets of Buenos Aires as local Porteños calmly went about their daily business. It was 31st July 2014 and the clock had just run out on the deadline for Argentina’s government to make a $539 million interest payment to...
Three Questions for Hamas
There is no doubt that Hamas has exhibited extraordinary resilience under the most difficult of conditions that have bedeviled its period of political leadership in the Gaza Strip that started in 2007. It also seems clear as persuasively argued by Sandy Tolan in a...
Finding the Hidden Constitution: Explaining Ireland’s Abortion Law
On Saturday, we heard of the Irish state's latest efforts to police its abortion law. The story has emerged from a series of High Court hearings. Reporting on the case is restricted by court order, and so facts have emerged drip by drip. On Tuesday, we heard a...
An Island of Saints and Sadists: Abortion in Ireland
People often ask me why I write such dark books. You’re such a sunny person, they say. I say: Look around you, what kind of a country do you think you’re living in? Here is a tale of the island of Saints and Sadists. A young woman came to our country for help, for a...
International Law 1914/2014
Looking back to mid-1914 from mid-2014, it is hard to see beyond the piles of bodies. History barely seems up to the task of grappling with this tumultuous interstice. Perhaps, rather than approaching this interval as a sequence of historical contexts, we might...
Civilians, Combatants, and Histories of International Law
In the media coverage of war, whether reports on individual incidents or the numbing tallies of casualties, the distinction between civilians and combatants is central and frequently contested. The killing of the four boys who had been playing soccer on a Gaza beach...
Repetition and Death in the Colony: On the Israeli Attacks on Gaza
At the moment of writing these lines, the BBC reports 100 deaths thus far in Gaza in the recent Israeli onslaught. As we have seen these scenes before, the invocation of repetition comes naturally. “Once again” is a commonly used word when it comes to death and...
Should we value academic fashions?
Fashions come and go, but what about academic or intellectual fashions? Are they like any other, with the same pleasures and limitations? Or should ideas be protected from the vagaries and currencies of what is current? Googling the phrase “academic fashion” produces...
The Infinity of the Silent Strike
We know from Burke that it is the noise of the crowd or throng which leads to the experience of the sublime. The cacophony of the many, gathered in their discharged state, draws us like a magnet. But the crowd in strike has a number of very different...
Civilisation & the Savage Crowd
Anyone familiar with ‘crowd theory’ will have been told repeatedly that Gustave Le Bon is an origin. This assertion is quickly masked by obfuscation. He is not a first, of course, preceded by the historian Taine and the early criminologists Lombroso...
The Open Crowd & The Kettle
Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power provides a useful starting point for this project. In it, he identifies a wide number of different crowds. They are determined by the temporality of their aims, the space in which they manifest themselves, the...
About ‘Crowded Sovereignty’
The crowd is not a technology or a subject of sovereignty. It is neither the ‘agent’ who could take, create or destroy sovereignty; nor a ‘means’ for others to become sovereign. The crowd is remarkable because of its prevalence and excision. It is often there in those...
The Prospect of Harmony and the Decolonial View of the World: Weihua He Interviews Walter Mignolo
Knowledge is always situated. As a young scholar from China working on western theories, I always felt frustrated with the eurocentrism embedded within them. The frustration comes first because they are not addressing the problems lingering in my mind; and second at...
Politics in Times of Anxiety
Politics in Times of Anxiety springs from the 9/11 attacks, when public safety and security turned into a central concern across the globe. The subsequent economic crisis that broke out in 2008 in the USA and its gradual spread across Europe initiated a protracted...
The Past and Future of the Legal Left: Celebrating Duncan Kennedy’s Scholarship
Below you can watch the conference on 'The Past and Future of the Legal Left: Celebrating Duncan Kennedy's Scholarship' which was held at SOAS, University of London on 22 May 2014. This conference honoured Professor Duncan Kennedy, one of the most influential legal...
Language: Notes on the Thought of Luce Irigaray
Luce Irigaray’s critique of masculine language systems follows logically from her broader critique of history and culture first elaborated 40 years ago in Speculum.Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, Gillian C. Gill (tr), (Cornell University Press...
Putin’s Dissertation and the Revenge of RuNet
The spectre of academic plagiarism by high-ranking officials is affecting much of Europe. Germany especially has been in the news: on 9 February 2013, the German Education Minister, Annette Schavan, resigned her position after the Heinrich Heine University in...
Wealth inequality denial
In the week a report established that 97.1% of scientists publishing on the subject have concluded that man-made climate change exists, it seems the right have re-opened an old front in their war on reality. In Saturday’s Financial Times the normally sober paper...
A Brief Reflection on the Hard Left
Why use the term ‘hard-left’ to describe candidates to the left of the Labour Party? What is ‘hard’ about these candidates, by contrast with political parties who oversee draconian cutbacks to expenditure in health and education and social services, or parties who set...
Is there a Right to Resistance and Revolution? Lecture by Costas Douzinas
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ197v4sq84] Professor Costas Douzinas delivered this year’s annual talk of the Post-structural and Critical Thought Cluster at the University of Manchester. This event also officially launched a 2-year cluster run project...
KEY CONCEPTS
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SERIES / SYMPOSIA
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