CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
How to Reanimate Rotting Brains in the Age of AI
As artificial intelligence (AI) seeps into our daily lives, its impact on our thinking capacities is becoming increasingly clear. AI is replacing our jobs, increasing government and corporate surveillance, and luring vulnerable internet users into rabbit holes of loneliness and psychosis. In particular, large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have rapidly become part of our daily routines. A lot of workers use LLMs every day to write e-mails, summarise reports or brainstorm ideas. More and more people are forming opinions on all kinds of topics by discussing them with an LLM. Many use ChatGPT and its equivalents as personal assistants to coordinate their calendars, as secretaries to write their emails or student essays, or even as 24/7 therapists when access to mental health care is becoming scarcer and more expensive. Meanwhile, the impact of LLMs on our cognitive skills is also becoming increasingly clear: the more people outsource argumentation and critical thinking to...
ARTICLES
The Arab Minotaur: A People Deferred
A deluge of articles, statements and comments on the peoples’ protests across a region defined in imperial geopolitical and cultural discourses as the Middle-East or the Arab World have so far been driven by two main questions: ‘how it happened?’ and ‘what will happen...
Greece’s Doomed Generation
A year after the International Monetary Fund and the European Union imposed their now infamous austerity memorandum on Greece, life here has changed radically. If you are between 18 and 24 years old, the chances are that you are unemployed, like 40% of your...
Bin Laden, Targeted Killing & The Elimination of Danger
As the euphoria surrounding the announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death wears off, and the initial stories of ‘gunfights’ and ‘human shields’ are radically revised, serious doubts are emerging as to the legality of the entire operation. Legal experts have criticised...
Capitalism & Legal Subjectivity in the Age of Globalisation
A Prelude: Terra’s Predicament Once upon a time there was a planet – perfect green and egg-shell blue. It hung, fragile and ancient, in the yawning firmament of space-time. On the planet-surface – a thin crust riding a molten sea –one species outreached all others,...
Some Indonesian Recollections on Critical Legal Pluralism
I recently returned from a three month fellowship in the kaleidoscopic nation that is Indonesia. I undertook research with non-governmental organisation ICRAF (World Agroforestry Centre), analysing their ‘rewards’ (Payments for Environmental Services or ‘PES’) schemes...
The Fallibility of the Immune: Metchnikoff’s lie
On May 1st 2011 news was broadcast that the leader of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, had been killed following a ‘targeted operation’ executed by United States forces, in a northern town of Pakistan. Shortly afterwards, it was confirmed by US officials that bin Laden’s...
Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost! (Pina Bausch, 1940-2009)
The release of Wim Wender’s film Pina presents us with an occasion to consider what dance, as an art form and practice, can offer us by way of imagining new ways of being in the world. Unlike other art forms, such as literature or painting, dance as a medium through...
Seeds of Justice
Today Al Weiwei’s installation at Tate Modern comes to an end. Unfortunately, the Chinese artist is currently in the limelight due to more pressing reasons, since his arrest earlier this month, followed by the usual array of ‘solid’ evidences provided by the Chinese...
Violence on the Body: A Manual for French Police Escorting Illegal Immigrants
The last decade has seen Europe experience a very important wave of xenophobia that is modifying our institutions in their very essence. As two current examples, Hungary is modifying its constitution in order to declare Christians “normal citizens” and Italy and...
Trespassers Will and the Removal of the Other
It seems as though a unique space within UK law is soon to be removed, or at least being discussed as so. Whilst the recent bout of occupations, and the display of revolt against the violent education cuts, reached their climax, I was away in another country. I...
Revolutionary Possibility Today
I am proudly part of a generation whose life was framed by a revolutionary commitment to socialist alternatives to capitalism, which for me always included struggles against racial and sexist oppression. Many of my generation—I was a teenager during the...
The People Cometh: From Popular Existentialism to Anarchy
Abstract The undertaking of this article is to assemble an ethical and political meaning of the people as necessary to any legal order that reputes itself democratic. The challenge is then set to think difference and multiplicity not from legal orders but from the...
Who’s Breaching Whose Peace?
On 14 April 2011, the High Court of England and Wales ruled, in R (on the application of Joshua Moos and Hannah McClure) v The Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis, that the police had acted unlawfully in “containing” (aka kettling) certain G20 protestors on 1...
What Kind of Law is This?
Many aspects of the Libyan situation remain unclear: the scope of the mandate given to UN member states by Security Council Resolution 1973, the broader aims of the intervention, how many civilians have been killed and by whom, and who the rebels represent. One thing,...
Law and Infinite Debt
In his critique of free will, Spinoza’s first argument against his opponents, named (Heereboord) and unnamed (Descartes, Aquinas, Burgersdijk) is that the intellect is not only the same as the will, but that in no way can the will be said to exceed the...
The End of Sovereignty, in North Africa, in the World
Spare a thought for Alain Badiou. He must be busy tending to the sensitive instruments of his evento-graph. As with the seismographs of late – all ‘revolutionary event’ detectors have had a busy time. The anticipation must also be difficult to bear. Syria is...
War, Apparatus, Witness
Jean-Luc Nancy’s Philosophical Chronicles, published in 2004, and originally broadcast over eleven months on France Culture radio with the intention to connect ‘philosophy with several nodes of contemporary life’ (xi). One of these chronicles (‘28 March 2003’) was...
Imperial Velocities & Counter-Revolution
Just when the state velocities of the Gaddafi regime were outpacing, outmaneuvering, and routing the Libyan insurgency, they were hit hard and slowed down by the much faster and more powerful air velocities of the imperial military machine. The waves of jets taking...
Excitable Speech: Shell to Sea & Joking About Rape
Give me your name and address and I’ll rape you. [All laugh] --- Unidentified Garda Sergeant Shell to Sea is an organisation operating in the west of Ireland which was formed to take direct action in protest against the Corrib Gas Project. It is widely known and...
Return of Revolutions?
From Iran, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, and Syria to the countries of North Africa, such as Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the anger, the desire to change the unbearable reality, the mass movement, and the process of reorganization of the political space are all present. What...
Philosophers at War
In times of confrontations between explicitly material interests, and in the absence of any real public debate involving the Italian Government (busy protecting the orgy of power), what could be better than a proper exchange between internationally-renowned...
KEY CONCEPTS
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SERIES / SYMPOSIA
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