CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Blog Carnival: Discussing the Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Law
In her review of Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice, Isobel Roele mentions the use of ‘reverse-engineering’ as a method of counter-aesthetics. Sofia Stolk’s contribution to Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice, the first contribution in the book, reverse-engineered a screen play from an educational youtube video of the International Criminal Court. What this did was to expose technicalities behind the camera’s gaze as a form of highlighting the reproduction of biases, like the camera panning or zooming in. It made explicit some of the unspoken assumptions around the narration of victimhood in international criminal justice. In this response to our reviewers, we have used reverse-engineering as a method to bring us all into conversation. We respond to the three reviewers, who so generously engaged with the edited volume, as a reverse-engineered conversation between us and the reviewers, Maria Elander, Kate Miles, and Isobel...
ARTICLES
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...
Los Indignados: Manifesto Against the Plundering of the Commons
Spain has been the theatre of a prolonged speculative wave that ended abruptly in 2007, having been one of the world leaders in the cycle of real estate-financial accumulation. Spanish capitalism took advantage of an intensive use of the territory that guaranteed...
Occupy Wall Street and the Left
Occupy Wall Street, for all its talk of horizontality, autonomy, and decentralized process, is recentering the economy, engaging in class warfare without naming the working class as one of two great hostile forces but instead by presenting capitalism as a wrong...
A Play on Justice: The Trial of Phryne at (Occupied) Old Street Magistrates Court
Yet it is precisely the disenchantment of beauty in the experience of nudity, this sublime but also miserable exhibition of appearance beyond all mystery and all meaning, that can somehow defuse the theological apparatus and allow us to see, beyond the prestige of...
Something is Missing in the Hrant Dink Murder Ruling
Hrant Dink’s murder was the culminating point of a persecution campaign that can be traced back to February 2004, when he published claims to the effect that Sabiha Gökçen, the adopted daughter of Atatürk and the first woman war pilot of the Turkish Republic, was of...
From the Spanish Indignados: In Praise of Optimism
The elections came, that far off dance, and some voices are wondering what that whole commotion in the squares was about. they look for concrete facts, transformed realities, immediate horizons to get one's bearings in the economic and social state of exception that...
From the Spanish Indignados: Fear as a political weapon
The German writer Nemeitz published, in 1718, a book about Paris with "faithful instructions for travellers of standing". One of his pieces of advice is as follows: "I do not advise anyone to walk through the city amid the dark night. Because, although the round or...
Occupy: a brief note on three antique responses to debt crisis
It is worth remarking that three broad types of response to debt crisis could be found in antiquity, in the Mediterranean-Mesopotamian area. We say broad types because it is quite possible that the particular type remarked upon was rather the predominant or defining...
Wither Wall Street: The Challenge of the Occupy Movement
Over the last three months New York City has been electrified by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Prachi Patankar and I have been participating in some of the actions. We have also been part of a number of discussions within the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI)...
City Rogues
Vince Cable in yesterday’s Guardian accepted that the City is a ‘source of systemic instability, unfettered greed and industrial scale tax dodging’ but blamed the problem on a small number of rogue institutions. The task it seems is to find the “few rotten apples”...
Truth, critique and writing: Foucault, every-day
The mysterious sequence of these seemingly unconnected words made up the title of my presentation for this year’s Critical Legal Conference. It took me a good few days after the conference, however, to fully grasp what I might have had in mind when I decided to...
Dissensus, the Right to Education & A New Latin American Student Movement
Recently, there have been the rumblings of an emergent pan-Latin American student movement. Crucially, this potential movement coheres around the demand for a right to education. In Colombia and Chile a new front is being fought against the creation and maintenance of...
Consensus
I have been critical of the consensus-based, horizontal practices associated with contemporary anarchism. My criticism has been based on what I've viewed as an underlying individualism--no one has the right to speak for any other, each person must speak for...
KEY CONCEPTS
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