CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Architecture of Inequality: What Apartheid Teaches About Qualified Immunity
Oppression does not arrive wearing a hood; it arrives stamped, filed, and countersigned. What looks like order—forms, doctrines, jurisdiction—can be a choreography of domination. Fanon taught that colonial violence is not only the blow of the baton but the quiet grammar that makes the blow seem natural. In South Africa and in the United States, different histories enlist the same craft: turning harm into procedure, and procedure into permission. Apartheid’s statutes and America’s qualified immunity are not equivalents. But they rhyme. They show how a legal order can speak of rights while building exits for power. Consider the shared architecture. First, classification: decide who counts, and under what name. Second, space: draw lines, decide who may cross. Third, force: immunize the hands that keep the lines intact. Finally, memory: write rules that make yesterday’s injuries disappear in today’s paperwork. These are not metaphors. Apartheid’s Population Registration Act catalogued...
ARTICLES
Indignants at Syntagma – Greece
Following the Spanish los Indignados protests, a number of days ago a facebook page suggested a similar protest in Syntagma Square in Athens on the 25th of May, at 6pm. Similar events are occuring in Thessaloniki, Patras and Heraklion. The live feed (click the...
Class and Gender in Super-Injunctions
For the past three weeks, the media has been swamped with tales of superinjunctions. The press claim superinjunctions curtail freedom of speech, while celebrities and their lawyers argue that they are necessary to protect individual privacy. In my view, the claim to...
Ghost Manifesto – Spain’s Real Democracy Now
Items of agreement for the plural manifesto prepared during the morning of the 18th of May in Puerta del Sol. Those assembled in Puerta del Sol, aware that this is an action in progress and of resistance, have agreed to declare the following: After many years of...
Debtocracy
For the first time in Greece a documentary produced by the audience. “Debtocracy” seeks the causes of the debt crisis and proposes solutions, hidden by the government and the dominant media. www.debtocracy.gr
In Athens, austerity puts revolution back on the menu
What were the finance ministers of Germany, France and Greece thinking when they met each other at a Luxembourg castle for ‘top-secret’ dinner talks on the resurging Greek debt crisis last weekend? As their five-star banquet was being served, did they discuss the...
The Queen’s Irish Visit
The British Queen is visiting the Republic of Ireland, one hundred years since the last British monarch set foot on the shores. In this context, our friends at Irish Left Review have posted James Connolly's letter to the Irish Workers' movement, which is well worth...
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...
KEY CONCEPTS
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SERIES / SYMPOSIA
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