CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Architecture of Inequality: What Apartheid Teaches About Qualified Immunity
Oppression does not arrive wearing a hood; it arrives stamped, filed, and countersigned. What looks like order—forms, doctrines, jurisdiction—can be a choreography of domination. Fanon taught that colonial violence is not only the blow of the baton but the quiet grammar that makes the blow seem natural. In South Africa and in the United States, different histories enlist the same craft: turning harm into procedure, and procedure into permission. Apartheid’s statutes and America’s qualified immunity are not equivalents. But they rhyme. They show how a legal order can speak of rights while building exits for power. Consider the shared architecture. First, classification: decide who counts, and under what name. Second, space: draw lines, decide who may cross. Third, force: immunize the hands that keep the lines intact. Finally, memory: write rules that make yesterday’s injuries disappear in today’s paperwork. These are not metaphors. Apartheid’s Population Registration Act catalogued...
ARTICLES
On Trayvon Martin and the Cost of Suspicion
A few weeks ago, while walking to my car after teaching a class, I saw a white woman who was approaching me on the sidewalk clutch her purse on her hip, cross the street, and head past me continuing in the same direction. Out of curiosity, I looked backwards, and I...
Open Wounds in El Salvador: Action of the International Tribunal for the Application of Restorative Justice
The many experiences of transitional justice taking place in a number of countries today do not follow a predefined model. They are shaped by the variety of transitional processes which, in turn, vary according to the political and military repression through which...
Ask not what you can do for your country but what we can do for each other
I am thinking of the 77 year old Greek pensioner who took his life earlier today in Syntagma square, Athens. I am thinking of JFK’s 20th of January 1961 inaugural address speech where he uttered these well cited words: “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” The Greeks are not Americans. J.F. Kennedy in this inaugural speech was talking about a new world, where poverty, disease and injustice could be obliterated globally and where, “a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved”. And of course such a world could not be motivated into existence through this speech, nor does it exist […]
What follows farce?
At this week's UK Treasury Select Committee hearing on the Budget of 2012, attendees were invited to draw parallels between George Osborne's view of economics and the military stratagems of Field Marshall Haig. It seems that the British Chancellor of the Exchequer has...
Toxic Mega-mining in Mexico: Death and Despoilment 500 Years On
On 15 March this year, when many families were preparing to get away for the bridge weekend (or in reality the few able to), Bernardo Vázquez Sánchez, leader of the committee of the United Peoples of Ocotlán (Coordinadora de Pueblos Unidos del Valle de Ocotlán, CPUVO) was killed in a shooting that also left Rosalinda Canseco and Andrés Vázquez Sánchez wounded. The gunmen – clearly identified by the community – were sent by the Mayor of San José de Progreso, Alberto Mauro Sánchez who, accused of assassinating another opponent of the mining project on 18 January 2012, is a fugitive from justice. But it was the Canadian mining company, Fortuna Silver Mines (operating in Mexico under the name Minera Cuzcatlán) that was responsible directly for guiding the fingers that pulled the trigger, not to mention the impunity and disdain that holds sway in the administration of Gabino Cué, Governor of the state of Oaxaca […]
Kettling and the Fear of Revolution
In November 2010, British students staged a series of demonstrations in several cities of the UK and Northern Ireland. Organised by the National Campaign against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC), thousands marched against spending cuts to further education and an increase of the cap on tuition fees by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. The 2010 protests have marked something of a turning point in modern British history: the political protest was back. After the 2003 anti-Iraq war protest in London which attracted almost a million people, the 2010 protests showed once more that it is the political protest that shapes the world for the better. But if these protests made dissensus visible, and posited it at the heart of British politics, they also gave police an opportunity to widely use a scare tactic, ensuring that protest against the status quo is effective. The tactic is called ‘kettling’, which so easily turns a legitimate protest into a ‘violent disorder’ […]
Neither Capitalism nor Communism, but Decolonization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part I)
Christopher Mattison: During an interview that you gave with Madina Tlostanova in 2009, you posed the question (as a response) “Why save it at all?”—in regards to the economic system and the looming financial crisis. You continued by stating that it wasn’t the...
Large-Scale Housing Projects: Bombardment in the Cities
San José, Colombia. We were searching for the only house in the street left standing. Jump by jump, we dodged so much debris that I began to imagine I was moving through one of those photographs of the bombing that took place during the wars in Europe. What surprised...
The Muppet Show
Greg Smith’s resignation letter in the New York Times yesterday, announcing a bridge-burning departure from his position as Executive Director of Goldman Sachs’ Equity Derivatives Division (Europe, Asia, Africa) certainly brought Wall St. to a relative halt. GS cancelled conference calls and the Goldman Flacks (PR goons) were rounded up to pour scorn on Mr. Smiths allegations as “unrecognisable”.
The importance of the letter was not so much it’s revelation of a eat-what-you-kill culture in which clients are the main course, not even the contention that somehow GS had changed culture – it hadn’t any more than any other investment bank since the Big Bang. The letter was important because it effectively took GS clients’ faces and slammed them against the restaurant window, through which they could now see their GS contact engaged in anthropophagia between raucous tales of how the current dish had of its own volition signed up to sit on the plate […]
Rights, Politics and Paradise: Notes on Zizek’s Silent Voice of a New Beginning
The Silent Voice of a New Beginning was a talk given by Slavoj Zizek at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities on the 20th November 2011. Upon recently hearing a recording, it struck me as an incredibly rich session in terms of political substance—what is to be...
Revolutionary Ambition in an Age of Austerity: An Interview with Neil Smith
David Hugill (DH): You’ve suggested that the neoliberal project has started to exhaust itself, that it has ceased to be generative of new ideas. But doesn’t it seem like new fronts of neoliberal assault are always opening up? Take Governor Scott Walker’s attack on...
The Critique of Science: Von Braun and the Ethics of Techno-Capitalism
Like an empty vessel, an abstract practice floats aimlessly in suspense of its navigator. Once boarded, it acquires a direction, an intention – the first instance of its ethical contamination. The navigator harnesses the vessel’s potential for something, injecting it...
The Abaclat legacy: Investment Arbitration as an Obstacle to Greek Recovery
The agreement reached between the Eurogroup and the Greek government in the night between last February 20th and 21st has been considered by the former as ‘a comprehensive blueprint for putting the public finances and the economy of Greece on a sustainable footing and hence for safeguarding financial stability in Greece and in the Euro area as a whole’.
Unfortunately, the recent Abaclat award (2011), that affirmed the jurisdiction of an ad hoc panel of the World Bank’s arbitration arm the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (“ICSID”) over a claim filed by over 160,000 Italian bondholders against Argentina for breach of the Italy-Argentina Bilateral Investment Treaty (“BIT”), might represent an obstacle toward the achievement of the goals of the Greek restructuring. The effect of Abaclat amounted to a declaration that the effective protection of the investment represents the sole term of reference of investment arbitration, independently from the legitimate interest of the state, and that this effectively permitted re-interpretation (if not simply overrode) Argentinian law, the relevant BIT, the terms and conditions of the bonds in question, and even (with respect to “mass claims”) the procedural rules of ICSID itself.
Rescue the Greek People from their Rescuers!
At a time when one in two young Greeks is unemployed, when 25,000 homeless people wonder the streets of Athens, when 30% of the population has fallen below the poverty line, when thousands of families are forced to give up their children to save them from dying of...
Collaboration… With Our European Partners
On Sunday there were massive demonstrations in Spain, with half a million people on the streets of Madrid and 450,000 in Barcelona, protesting against the labour ‘reform’ planned by the Partido Popular, the right-wing party that most closely represents the interests...
Is History A Coherent Story?
Is history a coherent story? This is not the sort of question that is likely to be either asked or answered in the milieu I normally inhabit. In the universities of Europe and North America (and much of the rest of the world as well), the agenda has veered away asking...
The Illegality of Power
Law and juridical discourse play a central role in the configuration of power relations. In order to impose a programme of social cutbacks, a police action and even a protest mobilisation, force is needed. But so too is the ability to appeal to the law as a source of...
The EU & Greece: A capitalism that has persuaded the world that capitalism is the world
The behaviour of the EU states towards Greece is inexplicable in the terms in which the EU defines itself. It is, first and foremost, a failure of solidarity. The ‘austerity package’, as the newspapers like to call it, seeks to impose on Greece terms that no people...
Occupying Gender in the Singular Plural
Call me a sissy, but I’ve never particularly cared for being referred to as cisgender. Still, the work of transgendered activists within Occupy Wall Street has been one of things that keep me optimistic. At a November 13th teach-in at Zuccotti Park, just days before...
In Defence of Foucault: The Incessancy of Resistance
In a recent article, ‘Foucault and the Revolutionary Self-Castration of the Left’, Jérôme E. Roos argued that: "Because it connects power with knowledge through discourse, and because it posits that knowledge and power are continually reproduced through both formal...
New Latin American Constitutionalism: Challenging Eurocentrism & Decolonizing History
In the year in which the Colombian constitution celebrates its 20th anniversary, the topic of new Latin American constitutionalism seems to have been gathering significant attention. But there are, specifically, notable divergences over its characterization and...
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