CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Antinomies of Government by Chaos: Trump and the Pilgrims of Nothingness
In Greek mythology, Chaos is that primordial state which precedes the appearance of the Gods. A gaping void, a primordial non-time prior to the blossoming of light, which is necessary for the appearance of life. To evoke the origin of the gods, one must refer to Chaos (as Hesiod's Theogony does, 8th century BC). Chaos precedes Gaia (the Earth) and the principal elements, the Sky, Darkness, Night, Day, Light… It is formless, inert mass, perhaps an abyss. In Carl Schmitt’s political theology, the modern government of the living profanely transposes this origin story. The Hobbesian state of nature is the Greek Chaos; the Sovereign is the heir to the gods who prevents a relapse into civil war. Government (rather than reign) consists first and foremost in the production of an order that is always singular in form, but whose premise is the revocation of chaos. In modern societies, Foucault’s disciplines and rationalities order forms of life. Chaos remains that which perpetually threatens...
ARTICLES
Tyranny at Europe’s Borders….
On Wednesday 10th April 2024, the bodies of three girls were recovered off the Greek island of Chios.[1] They drowned after a boat carrying migrants from Turkey to the EU ran into rocks. Another, fourteen people, including eight more children, were...
Transnational Disruption: On the meaning of J.D. Vance’s Munich Speech
In the speech he gave to the 2025 Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance apparently missed the point (video, transcript). According to immediate criticism, the format should be a platform for security policy exchange in...
Sleeping While Poor: The Use and Abuse of Criminal Law
On June 28, 2024, the United States Supreme Court upheld state and city-level bans on sleeping in public spaces—effectively, laws against homelessness. In his majority opinion for Grants Pass v. Johnson, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the local ordinance in Grants...
This could have been a Tweet, or: On the politics of signing things
In the wake of the Iraq war, a group of international lawyers published an open letter in the Guardian, framing their opposition to the invasion in legal terms. Months later, in a piece that has reached somewhat of a cult-status in the discipline, some of the...
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...
