CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Law & Critique: Green Grabbing and Constitutional Resistance in Mexico’s Lacandon Jungle
We are working with the leading critical legal journal Law & Critique to bring their brilliant output to a broader audience. Many of the papers published with Law & Critique will be accompanied by a shorter discussion on Critical Legal Thinking. In this case, please check out Anna, Julia, Alberto and Franklin’s full article which is available open access on the Law & Critique site. What happens when the protection of nature becomes a justification for dispossessing the people who have lived with, cultivated and cared for it for centuries? And what happens when those communities refuse to accept the premise that environmental protection is something that must be imposed upon them by the state? Across the world, the escalating ecological crisis has lent new urgency to governmental efforts to protect biodiversity, restore forests and conserve endangered ecosystems. Yet the politics of environmental protection are rarely as benign as the language of conservation might suggest. Behind…
ARTICLES
Illegality and Law-full-ness
A week before the 13th Berlin Biennale’s opening in June 2025, a social media account took to criticizing Biennale curator Zasha Colah’s contention, made in a recently published interview, that “there is no censorship in Germany”. The social media response was a…
CfP: Critical Legal Conference – Exeter
The Call for Papers for this year's CLC will remain open until the 31st of July. Please read the full description below. If you would like to participate – send short abstract of your proposed paper to the stream organisers (as mentioned under their stream heading).…
Israel’s Military Aggression against Iran: Some preliminary reflections
We are excited to have the following piece by Iranian theorist Parviz Sedaghat, translated into English by Leila Faghfouri Azar and first published in Farsi in pecritique.com. 1)Israel’s military attack against Iran started in the early hours of Friday June 13 by…
Humiliation by Design: The Legal Aesthetics of Marginalisation
In liberal democracies, we are often told that law is blind to appearance. Yet, the opposite is often true. Public law and policy repeatedly mobilise aesthetic categories—such as decorum, decency, and ugliness—to judge who belongs in public spaces and who should be…
The Critique of Trump’s Lawlessness Misses the Point
The Trump administration has felt like a nonstop emergency: bigoted attacks on trans people, immigrants, and civil rights in the name of a war on so-called wokeness; the rollback of environmental and public health monitoring; attacks on public employees and the labor…
Native Title and the Juridical Field: Bourdieu in Australia
The 1992 Mabo v Queensland (No 2) decision marked a watershed in Australian legal history, as the High Court formally rejected the doctrine of terra nullius and acknowledged the existence of native title. But legal revolutions are rarely what they seem. This article…
The Politics of Vision, Targeting, and Palestine
‘The whole history of Palestinian struggle has to do with the desire to be visible.’ Edward Said. On the evening of March 3rd, 1991, Rodney King, a 25-year-old Black American, was pulled over by LAPD officers after a high-speed chase. What followed was recorded by…
Tony Blair Will Not Save Us from Climate Hysteria
During the climate summits In the sterile corridors of climate summits, numbers drift like ghostly apparitions. Worrying numbers. Disturbing numbers. 1.5°C, 2°C, 3°C. 36.8 gigatonnes of CO2 released annually. 4 million human deaths since 2000 – a significant…
Some Points about Contemporary Fascism
We are delighted to repost Brian Massumi's latest essay, first published on his new Substack. The maturation of the modern nation-state coincided with a progressive becoming-immanent of power to the social field. Concepts such as disciplinary power, governmentality…
Project 2025 and Manifestos for Undemocracy
A manifesto was instrumental in the formation of the constitutional democracy that was the United States of America, and we are currently witnessing its (re)inception as an undemocracy through the work of another manifesto. The Declaration of Independence – akin to…
The Law and Political Economy of 21st-Century Authoritarianism
Democratic self-government and freedoms are under attack around the world. From the consolidation of an increasingly authoritarian and erratic administration in the USA to the Turkish Government’s open persecution of the political opposition, from Israel’s systematic…
The Pulse of Resistance: Beating Beneath Black Veils
Hey, you who sit on the shore, merry and bright! A soul in the water surrenders to night. One there is, flailing with desperate hand, On this fierce, dark, and weighty sea, as you apprehend.…Tell me, at what moment should I say? A soul in the water throws life away.…
CfP: Critical Legal Conference, 2025 – University of Exeter
The Call for Papers is now live. Please read the full description of the streams here. If you would like to participate - send short abstract of your proposed paper to the stream organisers (as mentioned under their stream heading). Graduate students who seek a fee…
![Parody Alternative Judgment: For Women Scotland [2025]](https://i0.wp.com/criticallegalthinking.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/bri-tucker-wK5lmJ_tDoc-unsplash-scaled.jpg?resize=400%2C250&ssl=1)
Parody Alternative Judgment: For Women Scotland [2025]
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in the For Women case last week, colleagues thought it would help to have a case summary for use in making sense of the judgment. Accordingly, I have produced a summary sticking precisely to the Court’s language from the…
Mandate 2.0
The word Mandate here refers to the arrangement by which the fate of the people in Palestine was handed to European colonial powers a century ago. A rereading of the Mandate at this time becomes a necessary act. Towards that, I distinguish between a Mandate 1.0 and a…
Shouting ‘what makes a real woman’ as the earth is on fire!*
Every border implies the violence of its maintenance. It’s just that the border guards differ. Borders come in many kinds. The borders this statement brings to mind could be geographical, international. Perhaps they are otherwise spatial, or temporal. This is a post…
The Age of Lawiness
As the bold “TED” logo dissolves into a flurry of red dots, a slightly nasal voice asks us to examine a picture and consider the puzzle it presents. ‘These African students are doing their homework under streetlights at the airport in the capital city because they…
Swallowing the Snake’s Tail: Responding to Žižek’s Critique of my “Many Worlds Interpretation”
In his book Freedom a Disease Without Cure, (2023), Slavoj Žižek draws a lengthy critique of my article “Many Worlds Interpretation, Critical Theory and the (Immanent) Paradox of Power.” The critique stands on a tripod (we will develop below). 1. Difference…
German Staatsräson means deportation?
Germany has joined other nation-states – such as the US and Greece – in the repression via deportation of political action against their respective governments’ ongoing material and ideological facilitation of Israel’s genocide in Palestine. The specificity of the…
Forming the Legal Humanities Association
In late 2021, a small group of legal scholars began a discussion about possibly setting up a new academic association for law and humanities research which would be registered in the UK, but open to people around Europe and the world. This led to a small, reflective…
Key Concept: Securitization (Copenhagen School)
The concept of “securitization” was developed by the Copenhagen School to analyze the process whereby powerful actors such as governments identify a particular phenomenon as an existential threat and legitimize the use of extraordinary measures to combat it. The…
