CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL

CONOR GEARTY
With greatness sadness we heard of the untimely and sudden death of Conor Gearty at the age of 67. Conor was the professor of human rights law at the LSE. He was born in Ireland and this led to his lifelong interest in terrorism, state crimes, violations of human rights and social justice. He was a leading scholarly voice on the abuses of anti-terrorism law, publishing Liberty and Security (2013) and Homeland Insecurity: The Rise and Rise of Anti-Terrorism Law (2024). Conor was a towering intellect and a wonderful human being. Open, kind, full of Gaelic joie de vivre, he was liked by everyone who met him. His many students speak of his kindness and generosity, he was a model academic and scholar. I was lucky to have a long, close and productive relationship with Conor. Conor was a prolific and elegant author. His books include among many others Can Human Rights Survive? (2006); Principles of Human Rights Adjudication (2004); and On Fantasy Island. Britain, Europe, and Human Rights...
ARTICLES
The Dis-enclosure of Constituent Power: Tunisia, Agamben & Nancy
In much of the conventional analysis, constituent power is used to signify an opening of constitutionalism to its other. It is framed as an alterity that legitimates and facilitates the constitution. As such, the constituent moment has an intensely temporal quality....
Constitutionalism & the Time of the Political
In his book The Idea of Public Law Martin Loughlin outlines three ‘orders of the political’ that underpin and orient public law. The first order begins with Carl Schmitt’s famous formulation of the distinction between friend and enemy. Loughlin contends that it is...
The Heart of the World – Sovereignty & its Ground
This text appears as part of the exhibition For Inclusion in the Syllabi curated by Five Story Projects at the Pigeon Wing gallery in London (Sept 15th - 30th). The exhibition also features work by: Am Nuden Da, Ana Balona de Oliveira, Thomas Bush, Angus Cameron,...
The Hyper-Hermeneutic Gesture of a Subtle RevolutionR
Drawing upon the thought of Giorgio Agamben, this paper focuses upon the potential of a single act to change a political order. Agamben’s writings on the exception and the figure of whatever-being retain the possibility for a paradigmatic gesture that opens up a space...
Human Dignity and the Incomplete Arab Spring
The political power of a protest movement can be seen by looking at the protest group’s awareness of its own position and the balance of power in which the group finds itself. Another factor is the group’s ability to resist its own integration into the hegemonic...
Heartwarming Tales: The Story of a Fundamentally Decent Nation
It is not often I quote Richard Littlejohn, but today it will help kick off the story of how Britain became a Fundamentally Decent Nation. That sensitive and gentle man wrote this in a column in response to the earthquake in Japan: "Anyone who has visited or worked in...
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,...
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