CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Outframe: How International Law’s Core Excludes Its Margins
International law is frequently represented as universal, neutral, and inclusive; however, from its inception, it has been influenced by, and primarily serves, a limited group of states historically categorised as "civilised.” This hierarchy is subtly embedded in foundational instruments such as Article 38(1) (c) of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Statute, which prioritises norms established by this elite community and positions them as globally applicable. Consequently, the outcome is not an impartial legal framework, but rather a curated paradigm, one that delineates legitimacy, marginalises the peripheral, and consolidates authority through exclusion. Nevertheless, legal considerations extend beyond the confines of this framework. Outside of it exists what may be termed the Outframe: a juridical realm occupied by states, peoples, and principles that are regarded as unworthy of full acknowledgement. The Outframe does not represent lawlessness or absence; instead,...
ARTICLES
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...
A Letter to The Colombian Student Movement: DON’T STOP, ALL IS TO BE DONE!
Given the massive student demonstrations of last December in the UK, it is perhaps surprising that more coverage has not gone to the recent events in Colombia. In early October the Santos government sought to introduce a law (Ley 30) that would, among other thing,...
The Irish Crisis: This budget is about political choices based on priorities of class
As we are forced to look at the budget over two days, a particular unnecessary cruelty, it’s worth emphasising, as those in the ULA and Sinn Fein have done, that this is a budget based on political choices. It is depressing to watch seasoned politicans like Pat...
The Irish Crisis: We do have choices
In the wake of yet another austerity addled budget, a strident chorus of our political leaders and self-proclaimed media statespersons, backed by a broad range of public comprador/organic intellectuals are echoing the sentiments if not the exact words of that great...
The Irish Crisis: We, the People, are too big to fail
The Ballyhea Bondholder Bailout Protest, now in its 40th week and joined with Charleville (their 25th week) is about one issue, and one issue only – the transference of private debt to the public purse. In one word, and very pure, very simple, it’s wrong. History On a...
The Irish Crisis: Europe Colonises Itself
In a recent brief exchange between Oscar Guardiola Rivera and Walter Mignolo, responding to an impossibly broad question about Europe’s current crisis, Guardiola Rivera quipped that Europe was colonising itself. Just think, he said, of the racialisation of Greek,...
The Irish Crisis: The Dynamics of Complicity
A year after all of the head-shaking and nay-saying assurances that ‘negotiations’ with the IMF and EU were mere ‘fiction’, the sense of betrayal that Irish people experienced about the then Government’s denial that the Irish nation was about to lose its economic...
The Irish Crisis: Global Crisis, Local Effects
A few years back, we had a Taoiseach who blamed US banks for the onset of Ireland's recession. Bertie Ahern claimed again recently in an interview that it was Lehman Brothers wot dun it, his imputation being that locally elected politicians could not be blamed for...
The Irish Crisis: Discipline and Punish
Enda Kenny's ‘state of the nation’ speech last night was little more than a footnote to the more revealing and fundamental address that he delivered last month to an audience of EU officials, bankers and representatives of the ‘troika’. That speech was, tellingly,...
The Irish Crisis: The Screwed up state we’re in
The State of the Nation, I’m afraid, can be summed up in one word - screwed. We can flesh things out a bit, but that’s the nub of it. Every strategic step taken over the past decade has ensured that the screwing would be comprehensive. The crisis isn’t about fiscal...
KEY CONCEPTS
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SERIES / SYMPOSIA
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