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 Speed of Revolutionary Resonance
The current wave of revolutionary insurrections seems to be the fastest in history. Revolutions always come in waves, but insurgent shockwaves that once expanded across continents over years or months are now making states crumble, one after another, in a matter of...
Punk, Law, Resistance … No Future: Punk against the Boredom of the Law (3 of 3)
Boring life What a boring life /How could anyone surviveBoring life.(The Slits, "A Boring Life") Punk spoke not of ideals and dreams but of boredom. For punks, the 1960s hippie dream was dead and the socialist utopias were as boring as the ideologies of the law and...
Punk, Law, Resistance … No Future: Punk against the Boredom of the Law (2 of 3)
My new rose, lets go Hey ho, let's go Hey ho, let's go [...] They're piling in the back seat They're generating steam heat Pulsating to the back beat The Blitzkrieg Bop. (Ramones, “Blitzkrieg Bop”) Even if the lyrics of punk did not always address political issues or...
Punk, Law, Resistance … No Future: Punk against the Boredom of the Law (1 of 3)
Pawn in their game And that's the way they try and run this land How they hold you down and keep you in hand You're just a pawn in their game. (Stiff Little Fingers, "Law and Order") Being nothing other than a pawn in their game – who has not sometimes woken up...
Punk, Law, Resistance … War and Piss
Punk has always been about the real – real voices, real problems, real lives, real people behind the stories. Something different from what various ‘dream factories’ are about. The real is not always comfortable. It is raw, incomprehensible, and it is scary in its...
Punk, Law, Resistance … “I have set my affair on nothing”
1. I, Punk In 1977 I was sixteen. Everything I have to say about punk is coloured by that fact, because sixteen was precisely the right age to be if punk was going to have a decisive impact on you. Because punk was not about your social class, gender or race, it was...
Punk, Law, Resistance … Introduction
Over the coming week there will appear on Critical Legal Thinking a series of posts on the theme "Punk, Law, Resistance". The idea for this series was inspired by some of the highly creative forms of protest that have recently taken place in the UK by, for example,...
The Invisible Wall or Different Ways to Spend your Summer on a Small Island
These hunger strikers are the martyrs of Greece
As the world follows the north African revolutions with bated breath, a less public north African revolt and tragedy is taking place in Athens and Thessaloniki. Three hundred non-documented migrants, mostly from the Maghreb, have entered the 35th day of a hunger...
Zizek on Equity & Trusts… well almost…
Equity is something of a problem. Aside from the blatant patriarchy of the Presumption of Advancement or Common Intention Constructive Trusts, it is often a little difficult to smuggle critical (legal) theory into an Equity and Trusts course. A long time ago now,...
Resonance and the Egyptian Revolution
What has coalesced as a powerful, unstoppable force on the streets of Egypt is resonance: the assertive collective empathy created by multitudes fighting for the control of space. Resonance is an intensely bodily, spatial, political affair, materialized in the masses...
Withdrawing Consent
For the last month, we have been witnessing, in Tunisia and Egypt, the first revolution of the twenty-first century. We are indeed fortunate to live in the presence of such a world-making event, even if we are not in the streets together with those who are making it a...
Messages of Support for the Hunger Strikers in Greece from Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek
The hunger strike in Greece is now on the 25th day. Three hundred sans papiers immigrants are on strike in Athens and Thessaloniki. The majority come from North Africa and have been living and working in Greece for periods of up to 7 years. This is Egypt in Athens and...
A Short Legal History of the Credit Crunch – Part 4 of 4
The suffering spreads Our notional executive’s assumption about how industry would help the banks and the economy out of the Credit Crunch was in one element correct. Borrowers had bailed out the banks, but it was only by means of workers’ redundancies, the stripping...
A Short Legal History of the Credit Crunch – Part 3 of 4
At whatever time our industrial borrower first took on the credit agreement with which it found itself, in 2009, chained and broken before its financial masters, it is likely it only had a vague inkling that anyone beyond its relationship bank was, or was to be,...
A Short Legal History of the Credit Crunch – Part 2 of 4
With the Credit Crunch in the finance sector now causing deleterious effects in the ‘real’ economy (see Part 1), concerned Finance Directors (“FDs”) turned to their relationship banks with a view to agreeing how best to muddle through what appeared to be a temporary...
A Short Legal History of the Credit Crunch – Part 1 of 4
In this series of four articles this week I examine the course of the Credit Crunch from the perspective of the interface between the hyper-financialised world of collateral debt obligations and securitisation, and the more familiar world of industrial corporate...
The People’s Revolution for Freedom and Human Dignity
People who revolt against a hostile, dependent and unjust dominion in Tunisia, Egypt and other parts of the Arab world are establishing a new social contract and values and are unified through an unconditionally prevailing normative-ethical principle. This principle,...
Bearing Justice
The ‘domino effect’ is a remarkably crude mechanical metaphor which once again implicitly informs mainstream characterisations of the revolutions in play in Tunisia, Egypt, and to a lesser...
Anomie: On civil and democratic disobedience
Greek Minister for Public Transport Reppas stated last week that the government will not let ‘Greece exposed to the risk of international disrepute and marginalization, destinations of countries characterized by anomie. The attack on the social acceptability of the...
Slavoj Zizek & Tariq Ramadan on Egypt
KEY CONCEPTS
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SERIES / SYMPOSIA
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