CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Gaza Tribunal: A Simulacrum of Justice
The contemporary discourse on genocide is dominated by international criminal law, designed to punish individuals after the fact. Yet the framework derived from Public International Law and the Genocide Convention’s founding purpose was not punishment but prevention. What remains today is an inversion of that project: law intervenes only when prevention has failed, when the catastrophe has already unfolded. The international community’s legal architecture thus performs justice retrospectively, as though theatrical re-enactment could substitute for interruption. Nowhere is this more evident than in the International Court of Justice’s hearings on Gaza, where the legal spectacle unfolds long after the fact, promising order while staging absence. What we encounter here is less a system of justice than an image of it—what Jean Baudrillard called the simulacrum: the copy that no longer has a connection to its original. International law, in its modern formation, operates through...
ARTICLES
Transcription: Angela Davis ‘Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities’
Birkbeck Annual Law lecture, London 25 October 2013. This is an unofficial transcription from an audio recording available at the Backdoor Broadcasting Company. Angela Davis delivers the Birkbeck Annual Law Lecture: 'Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and...
Black and Red Baiting: A Reply to Eric Heinze, ‘Angela Davis’s Racism’
It is to be hoped that most readers of Critical Legal Thinking who enjoy a passing acquaintance with twentieth-century history or the writing and activism of Angela Davis, will recognise Eric Heinze's article 'Angela Davis's Racism' for what it is: a pompous and...
Angela Davis’s Racism: A Glance at Morality and History
What might we have thought about high-profile personalities flying into Alabama or Mississippi in the 1950s—white figures meeting with white governors, white mayors, white police chiefs, to openly cheer those states’ ‘equitable solutions’ to social problems? Such...
Blockupy plan to disrupt ECB opening
The opening of the new European Central Bank headquarters should not take place without protests across the board in 2014. The Blockupy Alliance has called for disruption of the opening, planned for sometime in December 2014, with a foretaste coming with a week of...
Sovereignty Regained? Ireland Exits the EU-IMF Bailout
The bailout will soon be over. No longer will Ireland have to be subjected to the interference of external powers in its affairs. No more humiliating conditionalities imposed by mild-mannered Troika functionaries with a stern economic vision. Instead, thanks to the...
Socialism and rights: A reply to David Renton’s ‘Do socialists still have an alternative concept of rights?’
David Renton’s thoughtful and trenchant article in SL64 [Ed: republished 18 Nov 2013 on CLT] has done us all a great service, opening up questions of crucial importance to the Haldane Society. That is because we are socialists, committed to solidarity in resistance to...
Do socialists still have an alternative concept of rights?
An obvious starting point is Karl Marx’s position on human rights. We can begin with his response in 1844 to Bruno Bauer’s pamphlet The Jewish Question, in which Bauer opposed Jewish demands for political liberation on the grounds that no one in Germany was...
Rape is Different: Academic Impact Sinks to New Lows
Two weeks ago the LSE Department of Law hosted its inaugural ‘Debating Law’ public event, drawing an audience that filled all 400 seats of its largest lecture theatre and working with the LSE’s events team to ensure the debate attracted maximum media attention. The...
A Leaderless Resistance: Balochistan
In April 2010, Baloch guerilla commander Dr Allah Nazar gave a ceremonious reception to Jagoo at a Balochistan Liberation Front’s (BLF) camp in Balochistan’s Awaran district. Those BLF fighters, who hadn’t seen Jagoo before, gossiped in hushed tones about his...
Critical Finance Law
Finance and teleology Critical finance law is the study of one of the most significant teloi of the modern era: the settlement of debt. Why is the settlement of debt a telos? Well it is perhaps no surprise that just as the Scholastic concept of the causa finalis, or...
Letters on Legal Architecture
FIRST LETTER (New York on July 12th 2012) /// Dear Lucy, I read your essay Archiving Burroughs: Interzone, Law, Self-Medication with attention and appreciated, as usual, the way you manage to link narrative, law and space all together. I do think however that we...
Robert Webb is a Prick
Last week when I was writing about Russell Brand’s article in the New Statesman, I didn’t want to subject it to too close a reading because there are some things that are written with intentional precision and deserve to be read with precision, and there are other...
The Law of the Commons: Climate Change Protest in Buckfastleigh
On Thursday 17 October the community of Buckfastleigh, South Devon, heard the fate of their town, their livelihoods, the protection of their immediate environment and surrounding ecosystems, presented to them in the much awaited decision of a planning appeal...
Against Rebels
Rebels are not just boring, they are dangerous. We’ve had decades of rebel-worship now and if I see Che Guevara on one more t-shirt I’m going to start shooting the hostages. Che Guevara was a dick. I know this because I have the Bolivian Diary in my toilet and every...
Vulnerability and the Protestor Desired
I. In September of last year, Charlene González, a University of Puerto Rico undergraduate student removed her top in the University plaza as part of a performance/protest against institutionalized gender discrimination in the university and in Puerto Rican society at...
The Alien Body in Contemporary Netherlands: Incarceration and Force-feeding of Asylum Seekers
On 22 May 2013, the Dutch State Secretary of Security and Justice and Minister for Migration offered the House of Representatives a memorandum issued by the Council of State concerning ‘the options to administer food and drink to an alien in detention who is on hunger and/or thirst strike, against his will.’ This essay sets out to unpack the main premises of these recommendations in the framework of biopolitics, its colonial heritage and contemporary deployment in the Netherlands. Whilst understood in a historical continuum, this little document gains relevance as it represents a significant step over the threshold of the human …
Notes on the Thought of Walter Benjamin: Critique of Violence
“Critique of Violence” (Zur Kritik der Gewalt)In this article I will refer to the following translation of Zur Kritik der Gewalt: Walter Benjamin. 1996. Critique of Violence, Selected Writings; Volume 1;1913-1926. London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University...
Our ‘Angel in the City’: A Remembrance of Marshal Berman (1940-2013)
In the late nineties I was studying political theory and living in New York City. I had just finished my first year at the New School for Social Research, and wanted to explore what the City had to offer and take advantage of the university consortium the New School...
What’s “Left” of Communism? Part II of II
In my last article I was looking at the Left’s current return to communism and that, while the thinkers most often associated with this return are adamant that this is a new and more fluid communism than the communist projects of the 20th century, there are three...
What’s “Left” of Communism? Part I of II
In his 1980 book The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy famously claimed that communism is, “… no longer the unsurpassable horizon of our time.” Three years later Benedict Anderson, in his groundbreaking book Imagined Communities, showed us how alliances based on...
The Dreadful Dr Freud
Macedonian writer and Gender Studies devotee, Goce Smilevski, draws in his latest novel on an alleged episode from the life of Sigmund Freud to show that the founder of psychoanalysis was a misogynistic pervert, fascinated by Nazism, and obsessed with money and...
KEY CONCEPTS
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SERIES / SYMPOSIA
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