CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
On the relationship between trans politics and disability
In the aftermath of the decision in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers [2025] USCK 16, many disabled people sought to give practical solidarity to trans people. Disabled activists offered to share their RADAR keys with trans friends. Articles were published exploring the links between disabled and trans experience. “Being Trans is Disabling,” on the Disability Rights UK website described some of the commonalities, “One thing Disabled and Trans communities have in common is our creative solutions to medical survival outside the confines of a state that seems hell-bent on our suffering.” Also in spring 2024, the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly ran a special issue on trans-crip theory, an approach characterised by J. Logan Smilges and Slava Greenberg as “a dynamic framework designed to illuminate the fundamental entanglement of transness and disability across ontological and phenomenological registers”. The metaphor of...
ARTICLES
Capitalist Rioters Don’t Wear Hoodies
Author: Gaston Gordillo (Space and Politics) The global media has been nervously covering two simultaneous forms of destruction: the obliteration of wealth in the financial markets and the destruction of property in the United Kingdom. This destruction involves...
Riots and Ineloquence
In Nicholas Ray’s 1955 Rebel without a cause we...
Tottenham: Neoliberal Riots and the Possibility of Politics
We are delighted to say that this post has been translated into Portuguese, Turkish, Russian and Croatian. One of the many things that we hear repeated ad nauseam in the context of the present rioting in London is that the rioters are ‘feral’, ‘yobs’, ‘thugs’ or more...
Violence at the Edge: Tottenham, Athens, Paris
Few are willing to make comparisons between this past year’s radical political activity – from the student protests to the major TUC demonstration – and the Tottenham riots. The reasons for this are fairly obvious: there is no unifying political goal of these...
I’ve Always Supported Tottenham
If you're tempted to listen to BBC5 this morning for some coverage of the London riots, don't. I made that mistake and was barraged by racist callers spouting off false facts and being moderated by a patronising school ma'am announcer who consistently referred to...
Good Morning AA+merica
Some quick thoughts on Standard & Poors' downgrading of the U.S.'s credit rating from the previously bullet-proof AAA to AA+. We can moan about S&P's miscalculation that led to a US$2tn error, and rigtly note with Paul...
GFC2?
The inevitability with which global markets would fall off their to-date unrealistic levels did nothing to mollify the depth and panic of the spasms. It has become a truism that nothing in the structure of international finance has changed, save that the losses of...
So You Think You’re A Radical?
I’ve always quite liked those essays and pamphlets that have from time to time been put out to confront politically active people with their own behaviour patterns. They tend to have a provocative edge and slightly supercilious note that I will attempt to emulate in...
Common Rights: Humans as Nature, Nature as Human
Humans as Nature: geological forces In an article published in Nature in 2002, Nobel winner chemist Paul J. Crutzen had argued that, given the unprecedented effects of human activities on the global environment, the planet has entered into a new geological era, which...
Slaves and slavery: The Economy of the Magdalene Laundry and The Industrial School
I have been thinking about the present scandals enveloping the Catholic Church in Ireland. People say, ‘How could they do it, men and women of God?’, or ‘How could they believe in the Gospel’, etc. The bafflement is understandable since the Church has always...
Constitutional Politics & Capital
Colombia's 1991 constitution is seen by many as the threshold of an intense political process that has arrived at a set of revolutions in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and now, maybe, Peru. Furthermore, in the midst of a horrible conflict, Mexico is looking to a...
A note on power and responsibility
A short piece to mark just one example of the continuing intellectual hegemony of the banking/Thatcherism/Murdoch triad that infests British politics. Listening to the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, give an interview this morning to Evan Davis of the BBC, we heard...
Crises of Multiculturalism (pt 2)
This is the second part of an extract from Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley’s new book, The Crises of Multiculturalism in Europe: Racism in a Neoliberal Age, published in July 2011 by Zed Books. The Les mots sont importants collective points out that opposing the 2004...
Crises of Multiculturalism (pt 1)
This is an extract from Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley’s new book, The Crises of Multiculturalism in Europe: Racism in a Neoliberal Age, published in July 2011 by Zed Books. The extract is taken from chapter 3, ‘Free like me: the polyphony of liberal post-racialism.’...
The pillars of ignorance
Deleuze told us that for something to constitute an event, it must go all the way down. The death of the News of the World (soon to be resurrected as the undead Sun on Sunday) is not an event of itself, though it does constitute the sign of an event. This event,...
Malaysian Governance 101: How to Deal with an Impending Street Demonstration for Electoral Reform
In memory of the late Peter Falk, this article shall loosely mimic the format of the detective TV series Columbo. The answer is revealed from the beginning, and the issue to be dealt with is how do we get from not knowing much at all to knowing enough to come to a...
Whats this Liberal Doing in my Head – the problem of ‘illegitimate’ protestors
In the wake of recent protests, and through the pre-emptive arrests for the royal wedding, the government and police have made it clear recently that only ‘legitimate’ protesters are protected by our ‘right’ to protest. I would expect them to make this distinction but...
The Fetus Fetish & the Erosion of Reproductive Rights in the USA
Rennie Gibbs, a 15 year old girl from Missisippi, has been charged with murder for the following reasons: her baby was born dead, and she apparently took cocaine during pregnancy. A direct causal link between the drug use and the stillbirth was not established. In...
Strike for the Present, Perhaps This Is All There Is
José Saramago’s Death at Intervals (2008) tells the story of Death going on Strike. In Saramago’s imagined country ‘since the beginning of the new year, or more precisely since zero hours of the first day of January’ that there is ‘no record of anyone dying’ (2008:3)....
Anger and Indignation in Ireland, Greece & Tunisia
Politics is back on the streets of Europe, that much is clear. The PIGS are striking back. Portugal, Ireland Greece and Spain. Except that’s not quite right. I will address the failure of Irish radicalism and contrast that with Greece and Tunisia, in order to begin to...
Our Society is Bigger than Yours: Squatting and the Wider Political Rumblings
Despite the attempts of Tory backbenchers to delegitimize squatting, and divide it from the issue of homelessness, the two remain inextricably linked: un-met housing needs, a supply of empty property, and squatting, go hand in hand in hand. But that’s about as far as...
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