CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Blog Carnival: Sounding Justice
The sound of the spoken word rising, pausing, the rhythms of the lines, of the stanzas, of the silences, the poem verbalised. The images etched on the walls in black and white, comics, graphic novels, stretching across wall after wall, winding around the room. The feel of cloth under fingers running across soft folds of a deep-red, imprinted justice photomontage. Weaving together international law, academic analysis, the political, the artistic, and the sensory experience of sight, sound, and touch—this was the extraordinary launch of Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Robert Knox’s edited volume and accompanying exhibition, Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice, on a Tuesday afternoon in March 2024. Engagement with justice, and injustice, as material, cultural, and artistic expression is not new. Visual and non-visual works and practices have long been vehicles for the exploration of the human condition, stories of pain and power, injustice, violence, abuse,...
ARTICLES
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...
The Irish Crisis: Don’t mourn, organise
My dad died 31 years ago this week. My mom, who has taken up web-development in her mid-70s, went looking for an obscure picture of him to scan into an anniversary email to her children and grandchildren, but instead turned up this beautiful piece of organising...
The Irish Crisis
In recent months the Irish crisis has disappeared from the international news. But that has not stopped the crushing cuts. Last sunday night the Taoiseach (the leader of the executive) addressed the nation. On monday and tuesday, an exceptional two-day budget was...
Occupy Utrecht Statement
This statement expresses the vision and goals set by Occupy Utrecht (The Netherlands) in solidarity with all Occupy movements across the globe. Occupy The global Occupy movement consists of people who have spontaneously come into action for worldwide economical and...
Owning Up: Academic Responsibility in a Polarised Political Landscape
A Sigh of Relief There was a sigh of relief when, after a farcical legal process, befitting an Ally McBeal-type scenario of the bizarre and surreal, Wilders (the anti-Islam/Muslim politician) was acquitted from incitement to hatred and criminal insult. The acquittal...
Image as Interest: Occupy & the Pepper Spray Cop
In his Times column this morning, David Carr wonders about the future of the Occupy Wall Street movement and, specifically, its fate as an ongoing topic of mass-media conversation. “Occupy Wall Street left many all revved up with no place to go,” he writes. Which is a...
Occupy Wall Street as a Node of Resonance
The North American insurrection began when a handful of people occupied public space and began producing resonance. This is the material force that toppled three political regimes in North Africa and can only be produced by multitudes coming together on the streets....
Fiscal Crisis or the Neo-liberal Assault on Democracy
Of course, it is always possible, and very often the case, that the dominant media claims that a “fiscal crisis” has precipitated mass demonstrations, strikes, and new forms of political mobilization in Greece. Although it is true that there is fiscal crisis, it...
A Dictionary of Policing Protest
This is the second installment of the dictionary. I felt we needed new terms to help us describe the increasing intimidation of protesters in the UK. Kettle of First Resort: The use of ‘containment’ – holding people against their will and without intention to charge...
Be Unrealistic, Demand the Possible
There is a specter haunting Wall St, the specter of a people. We've got them spooked—that unholy alliance of closet fascists and pseudo-liberals who deny we exist: Bloomberg and Fox News, David Brooks and Larry Summers. Its high time that we speak for ourselves, that...
The Final Blackmail of Baron Papandreou
The unexpected announcement by Greek PM Papandreou yesterday that he is to call a referendum and ask people to vote about the October 24 agreement is the opening salvo in the endgame of the Greek tragedy. Is this extraordinary gambit a genuine request for a popular...
The Right to Protest
On 27 October the case against me for breeching Section 4 of the Public Order Act was dismissed less than half way through the hearing. The case arose out of the protest against David Willetts back in June. In total four people were arrested at that protest. The...
The Afterlife of a Sovereign Corpse: Gaddafi
The global circulation of the images of Gaddafi’s corpse and the long lines of people eager to see it in person reveal, rather than a generic fascination with gore, that this cadaver embodied a state that had been destroyed. The power of Gaddafi’s corpse to affect...
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