CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
New Translation of Pashukanis: The Right of Asylum and the Practice of Bourgeois Governments
Ilya Repin: They Did Not Expect Him, 1884-88 Introductory Note by Igor Shoikhedbrod E.B. Pashukanis (1891-1937) is best known for his General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924), where he offered an original account of the genesis of the legal form under generalized conditions of capitalist commodity exchange and explained the reasons for its necessary disappearance under fully developed communism. Until recently,[1] Pashukanis’ reputation as the token Marxist legal theorist has generally eclipsed his influential contributions as a seasoned revolutionary representing the USSR on the international stage. Nowhere is this clearer than in the domain of international criminal law and in Pashukanis’ consistent and vociferous defence of the right of asylum. In the 1929 essay that follows, Pashukanis—writing under the auspicious of the International Red Aid—offers a scathing indictment of the extradition of working class and communist political prisoners by capitalist countries...
ARTICLES
Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights From Colombia to Palestine:
A Response to the Symposium on Struggles for the Human On the anniversary of publication of Struggles for the Human: Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights (Duke University Press, 2024), it is a pleasure to respond to the contributors to...
Arendt, Gaza and Personal Responsibility Under Genocide
In an essay crafted in 1964, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” Hannah Arendt reflects on a set of moral issues concerning our capacity to judge.[1] The difficult questions she raises in this essay remain pertinent in our own genocidal times unfolding...
Bridging the Infinite Distance Between Us
While Kantian’s are concerned with duties, Aristotelians with human flourishing and consequentialists with aggregating value, Simone Weil’s central concern is the distance that separates us. Naturally, she has much to say about duties and human flourishing, but these...
The Miracle of Friendship
"Yes, and here’s to the few Who forgive what you do And the fewer who don’t even care" Leonard Cohen, Night Comes On When a human being is attached to another by a bond of affection which contains any degree of necessity, it is impossible that he should wish autonomy...
The Labour of Reading
Two mothers read a letter. One knows how to read and the other doesn’t. The mother who knows how to read reads and then faints. ‘Until the day she dies her eyes, her mouth, and her movements will never again be the same.’[1] The words ‘strik[e] her mind,...
Attention to the Silence
Heaps of ruining textiles lie in a clothing graveyard (Figure 1). The items, made through significant effort and environmental cost and then abandoned, imply a decadence to c21 consumer capitalism. Codes, diligence plans and disclosures by the...
What Matters?
Yet always there is another life, A life beyond this present knowing, A life lighter than this present splendor - Wallace Stevens, ‘The Sail of Ulysses’ It is the condition of the critical theorist to be constantly attuned to unnecessary suffering and injustice...
Between Alienation and Ecstasy: Simone Weil’s degrees of attention
L’attention humaine exerce seule légitimement la fonction judiciaire Simone Weil. Among the many inventions that the learned world owes to ancient Greece, the philosophical banquet is not the least valuable. The Greek word symposion has been retained to...
Friendship, Labour, Attention: Thinking with Simone Weil
In his beautiful and powerful book, The Redress of Law: Globalisation, Constitutionalism and Market Capture (2021), our friend, Emilios Christodoulidis, reads one of his – and our – favourite thinkers, Simone Weil, and says of her ‘precious...
The Vigilante and the ‘Great Criminal’: On Law, Violence, and Assassination
In December 2024, two events occurred which can help us to understand the relation between violence and law in line with the critique outlined over a century ago by Walter Benjamin. Let’s begin with the more recent event, which emerged in two parts. First,...
Radical Hope and/as Insurgent Humanism
I first met Lara Montesinos-Coleman at a workshop in 2016. I recall a discussion on Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment with respect to everyday resistance and it being necessarily cruddy and mundane. We soon got to talking about our personal lives, and I...
Scenes of Violence: Between Ultraobjective and Ultrasubjective Forms of Violence
In the context of the 'claims adjuster' assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Jason Read suggested that readers might return to this piece from 2017, saying: "Obsession with the ultrasubjective violence of assassinations and terrorism is often coupled...
Legal Education in Palestine
Earlier this year, the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context and the International State Crime Initiative, based in the School of Law, partnered with Birzeit University’s Institute of Law in Palestine. The partnership was inaugurated on 28 November with an...
Struggle as Co-Labouring, Con-Versing, and Con-Spiring
At the core of Struggles for the Human lies the struggle for human rights. Lara Montesinos Coleman dares ask the question that many a jaded critic has already relinquished: Does a radical potential remain in human rights, a system that has been widely...
The Rupture of the New: Struggles for the Human
Human rights rise to geopolitical significance in the 1980s and 90s, and since then we have seen important waves of Marxist, poststructuralist, postcolonial and feminist critiques. At particular moments we see fresh texts setting new agendas, creating new...
“We found love in a hopeless place”
I agree with Ntina Tzouvala when she says that the book “resists easy categorisation” and, thus, an “easy review process.” Perhaps one reason for this difficulty both of us encountered was because the book, “was never meant to be” (p. xxxi). As Oishik points, this was...
Reification and Tilt in the Critique of Trusts
Extract from Roger Cotterrell’s ‘Afterword: Trust and Critique after Three Decades’ in Critical Trusts Law: Reading Roger Cotterrell, eds Nick Piška and Hayley Gibson, available fair access from COUNTERPRESS. 'Power, Property and the Law of Trusts: A Partial...
South Asian Constitutionalisms and Ethical Scholarship: Commentary on Oishik Sircar’s Violent Modernities
It was a pleasure reading Oishik Sircar’s “Violent Modernities”, which is an excellent and essential read for anyone interested in a broader understanding of constitution, law, rights, citizenship and the postcolonial state. Although the focus of the book is on India,...
The desire to escape that is not escapism
The Stage When Hegel wrote the Phenomenology of Spirit (2004) in 1807, he had one thing in mind. He wanted to provide an accurate philosophical and scientific process through which the mind comes to acquire knowledge of oneself and the world. Hegel, like Kant and...
New Directions for Critical Legal Studies in India: Oishik Sircar’s Violent Modernities
In reading Oishik Sircar’s Violent Modernities I found something akin to a fortune cookie: wrapped in the wafer is a gift in the form of an implicit message. The medium of this message is Oishik’s style, citational practice, acknowledgments, footnotes of gratitude;...
Law and the Inhuman: Concluding remarks
Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014) Every moment in Relation to another. Every Earth a broken ground. Kathryn Yusoff, ‘a geologic dirge’, in Geologic Life The Law and the Inhuman roundtable discussions compiled in this CLT forum opened on the morning...
