CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
A Preliminary Report on the Academic Office of Principal and Vice Chancellor
On 26 June 2025, Prof Iain Gillespie publicly accepted that he was ‘incompetent’ in his execution of the office of Principal and Vice Chancellor of the University of Dundee.[1] The surprise revelation of a roughly £30 million deficit at the Scottish university in November 2024 had been widely reported, and indicated a lack of institutional awareness of the financial challenges the University of Dundee was facing. This, in turn, triggered the engagement of Scottish Government with Dundee’s financial governance and recovery (a process that remains on-going),[2] including the completion of an independent public investigation into the accounting and governance processes that led up to the deficit being discovered. This investigation resulted in the damning Gillies Report, a detailed work of forensic accountancy that documents the collapse of financial governance at the institution.[3] Given this report, and the live-streamed three-hour grilling of Prof Gillespie by the Scottish...
ANNOUNCEMENTS
ARTICLES
Immigration Manhunts and British Post-Colonial Identity
Last week the British government’s Border Agency (UKBA) pushed its new and controversial “go home” campaign into full effect along with an accompanying, and highly criticized immigration stop and search at several London tube stations. The vast majority of the...
Law cannot determine whether Assange is guilty of sexual assault
Like many others, I used to admire Julian Assange. In 2009 I took part in a campaign to nominate Assange for ‘Australian of the Year’, thinking that putting forward a journalist who actively publishes material that challenges nationalistic myths for a nationalistic...
Wanted For Love, But Not Here: The Travelling Rights of African LGBT Activists
One of the dangers of awareness campaigns centred on social media is that they risk being online popularity contests. The [Dutch] national “Wanted For Love” campaign—a collaborative initiative of Hivos and Human Rights Watch aimed at drawing attention to the plight of...
The Encrypted Constitution: A New Paradigm of Oppression
Ever since judicial supremacy was affirmed in Marbury v Madison [5 US 137 (1803)], the political content of US-inspired constitutions has been compressed and turned into purely techno-legal content (ordinary law). What has taken shape is a tradition in which the...
Law as Insurgent Critique: The Perspective of the Commons in Italy
We use law when it proves useful; we break the law when it prevents the realization of a more just common life (Teatro Valle Occupato, my trans.) The financial crisis and the subsequent series of austerity measures have prompted fierce resistance in the streets and...
Against Colonial Rubbishing
As my facebook friends know, I take my status updates seriously. This does not mean that I only treat serious topics, or that I take myself overly seriously. Indeed I can be very frivolous and I always maintain a healthy cynicism towards whichever way I happen to see...
Seven Counter-theses on Human Rights
In his 2007 book Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Costas Douzinas asks “Are human rights a defensive barrier against domination and oppression or the ideological gloss of an emerging empire?” (p.viii) In posts on this blog Douzinas...
The Dark Shores of Europe
This was August 2008 at Koraka's Cape beach in Lesvos. A local farmer told me that he saw a prosthetic leg on the beach. He said that the leg belonged to a boy, around 13 years old, who arrived on a rubber boat with his family. The coastguard were just behind the boat...
On the Zimmerman Verdict: Violence and Reason
George Zimmerman's acquittal is not a mere validation of one White man's fear of and disdain for young Black males and the deadly force with which these emotions were unleashed upon an innocent boy. Rather, it is a terrifying and heartbreaking expression of six White...
Prisoners’ Hunger Strike in California
Daletha Hayden hasn't hugged her son in four years. Since 2009, the only face-to-face contact they've had has been through thick glass. Even phone calls are not allowed in Tehachapi State Prison's isolation unit. Despite the separation, she said she has seen the...
The Gezi Spirit: When Concrete Actions Wane, Resistance will Fade
The Gezi resistance continues to create its own public spaces. Since the occupation at Gezi Park was forced out by the police on 15 June, public forums (popular assemblies) are being held in over 30 parks around Istanbul in the evenings, as well as in other cities...
‘This is not the time of Empires’: The Kidnap of Morales
As the Bolivian people and the whole world now knows, [last] Tuesday, at approximately three to half past three Bolivian time, when President Evo was returning from Moscow, - where he had a meeting with President Putin, the final meeting, returning to Latin America,...
Decolonial Strategies and Dialogue in the Human Rights Field
Some Christians encountered an Indian woman, who was carrying in her arms a child at suck; and since the dog they had with them was hungry, they tore the child from the mother’s arms and flung it still living to the dog, which proceeded to devour him before the...
Law and The Senses: Symposium, Performance, Phenomenon?
The announcement of the event 'Law and the Senses' at the University of Westminster sounded intriguing. The call for papers asked: What is Law’s relationship to senses? In a sense, Law, the anaesthetic par excellence, is constantly engaged in numbing the sense into...
The Revolutionary State: An Interview with Álvaro García Linera
As we approach the presidential election in Venezuela, is there a common project in South America? The interesting thing is that our processes are not tied to an exclusive model. They are plural searches, with differentiated speeds and degrees of intensity, to...
Brazil: The Price of Progress
With the election of President Dilma Roussef, Brazil sought to accelerate the pace in turning itself into a global power. Many of the initiatives in this direction came from beforehand, but they had a new impetus: the UN Conference on the Environment, Rio+20 in 2012,...
Alain Badiou on the Uprising in Turkey and Beyond
A large proportion of the educated youth all across Turkey are currently leading a vast movement against the government’s repressive and reactionary practices. This is a very important moment in what I have called “the rebirth of History.” In many countries around...
Notes on the Theology of Constituent Power
In its traditional conception, the constituent is a power that constitutes and reconstitutes the state. This is a dangerous, though important salve for the problem of corruption in the body politic. The people or their representatives may overthrow the constituted...
Surveillance: From Image to Archive
Surveillance has become alarmingly commonplace. CCTV cameras, mobile phones, aerial drones, webcams, automated number plate recognition, facial recognition and other biometric measures, DNA databases, radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in transport tickets...
Seven Theses on Human Rights: (7) Cosmopolitanism, Equality & Resistance
Against imperial arrogance and cosmopolitan naivety, we must insist that global neoliberal capitalism and human-rights-for-export are part of the same project. The two must be uncoupled; human rights can contribute little to the struggle against capitalist...
Anti-Colonial Events in Brazil
In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the...
KEY CONCEPTS
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