CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Culpable Liberal, The Latte Legalist and the End of the Settler Siege at Sea
**We are delighted to say that this post has been translated into Japanese by Yota Negishi, available here** It is the early hours of the morning on the 8th September 2025 and I am in Tunis at Sidi Bou Said Port listening to the sounds of stress, solidarity, and the song of the sea…the Mediterranean Sea whose on whose rupturous surface the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) will set sail to break the siege on Gaza. I am in the port documenting the first of two drone attacks on Global Sumud Flotilla vessels that will take place in a 24 hour period for the legal support unit adjacent to the GSF that I am serving from Tunis. The praxis undergirding the words ‘from the river to the sea’ feels tangible in its surreality as Sumud sets sail amidst tides where waves of words move in a sea of deeds, steadfast.[1] Less than a week after the drone attack morality figures indicate that Israel and its accomplices have murdered nearly 700,000 Palestinians in the course of the...
ARTICLES
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...
Race, Civility & A Good Cup of Tea: Tottenham
This is an exerpt; Full text available at Canadian Dimension ... In response [to the summer's riots], many observers tried to comment on the situation, drawing out grand theories of the political, social, and economic context behind the events. Some blamed social...
Heirs of Marx
The 1996 book The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy authored by the duo (as one) of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham (J.K. Gibson-Graham) spelt out the ways in which certain types of thinking have warped our thoughts on...
The Indictment
The workers of a small bakery and corner shop in central Athens announced yesterday (Weds) that while they would not close because they are serving many vulnerable people they are joining the 2-day general strike by charging all products at cost. It must have been an...
Letter to Occupy Together Movement
I wish I could start with the ritual "I love you" which the Occupy Movement is supposed to inspire. To be honest, it has been a space of turmoil. But also, virulent optimism. What I outline below are not criticisms of the Occupy movement. I am inspired that the...
KEY CONCEPTS
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