CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
What we are reading… 2026
Many years ago when this blog began, we used to run a series called “what we are reading…”. The idea was simply to share some initial thoughts on texts that we were finding helpful or interesting. We hoped share a certain joy of texts, and to take pleasure in the unexpected. In the neoliberal university, even the most pleasant parts of teaching, thinking, reading and writing are commodified. All too often they become filled with the anxieties and the flatness of alienation. In the context of further neoliberal retrenchment (and the blistering heat of the northern summer) we thought to come back to the question of “What we are reading…”. We have asked some friends of the blog to make suggestions. Writing a short note of contemporary or forgotten texts that people might read in libraries, offices or on the beach, cafe or other space of escape. We hope you enjoy these short suggestions. And if you have suggestions please write a short comment and we can collect them at the end of...
ARTICLES
Legal Education in Palestine
Earlier this year, the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context and the International State Crime Initiative, based in the School of Law, partnered with Birzeit University’s Institute of Law in Palestine. The partnership was inaugurated on 28 November with an...
Struggle as Co-Labouring, Con-Versing, and Con-Spiring
At the core of Struggles for the Human lies the struggle for human rights. Lara Montesinos Coleman dares ask the question that many a jaded critic has already relinquished: Does a radical potential remain in human rights, a system that has been widely...
The Rupture of the New: Struggles for the Human
Human rights rise to geopolitical significance in the 1980s and 90s, and since then we have seen important waves of Marxist, poststructuralist, postcolonial and feminist critiques. At particular moments we see fresh texts setting new agendas, creating new...
“We found love in a hopeless place”
I agree with Ntina Tzouvala when she says that the book “resists easy categorisation” and, thus, an “easy review process.” Perhaps one reason for this difficulty both of us encountered was because the book, “was never meant to be” (p. xxxi). As Oishik points, this was...
Reification and Tilt in the Critique of Trusts
Extract from Roger Cotterrell’s ‘Afterword: Trust and Critique after Three Decades’ in Critical Trusts Law: Reading Roger Cotterrell, eds Nick Piška and Hayley Gibson, available fair access from COUNTERPRESS. 'Power, Property and the Law of Trusts: A Partial...
South Asian Constitutionalisms and Ethical Scholarship: Commentary on Oishik Sircar’s Violent Modernities
It was a pleasure reading Oishik Sircar’s “Violent Modernities”, which is an excellent and essential read for anyone interested in a broader understanding of constitution, law, rights, citizenship and the postcolonial state. Although the focus of the book is on India,...
The desire to escape that is not escapism
The Stage When Hegel wrote the Phenomenology of Spirit (2004) in 1807, he had one thing in mind. He wanted to provide an accurate philosophical and scientific process through which the mind comes to acquire knowledge of oneself and the world. Hegel, like Kant and...
New Directions for Critical Legal Studies in India: Oishik Sircar’s Violent Modernities
In reading Oishik Sircar’s Violent Modernities I found something akin to a fortune cookie: wrapped in the wafer is a gift in the form of an implicit message. The medium of this message is Oishik’s style, citational practice, acknowledgments, footnotes of gratitude;...
Law and the Inhuman: Concluding remarks
Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014) Every moment in Relation to another. Every Earth a broken ground. Kathryn Yusoff, ‘a geologic dirge’, in Geologic Life The Law and the Inhuman roundtable discussions compiled in this CLT forum opened on the morning...
The Inhuman as Refusal
Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014) The fourth roundtable of the Law and the Inhuman workshop was entitled ‘The Inhuman as Refusal’, and was curated and chaired by Marie Petersmann. The two speakers were Juliana M. Streva and Sarah Riley Case.[1]...
The Inhuman as Capital
Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014) The third roundtable of the Law and the Inhuman workshop was entitled ‘The Inhuman as Capital’, and was curated and chaired by Julia Dehm. The two speakers were Angela Last and Adam Bobbette. It explored how the...
The Inhuman as the Human
Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014) The second roundtable of the Law and the Inhuman workshop was entitled ‘The Inhuman as the Human’, and was curated and chaired by Afshin Akhtar-Khavari. The two speakers were Matilda Arvidsson and Connal Parsley....
The Inhuman in the Human
Image by Sarah Riley Case, ‘In/human presence’ (2014) The first roundtable of the Law and the Inhuman workshop was entitled ‘The Inhuman in the Human’, and was curated and chaired by Kathleen Birrell. The two speakers were Daniel Matthews and Scott Veitch. Kathleen...
Law and the Inhuman: Introductory remarks
On 8 April 2024, the workshop ‘Law and the Inhuman’ took place at Tilburg Law School (TLS), in the Netherlands, convened by Marie Petersmann, Julia Dehm, Kathleen Birrell and Afshin Akhtar-Khavari. The workshop gathered ten speakers from different disciplines, who...
Kerstin Anér, Pioneering Thinker of Data Power – Towards A Critical Reimagining the History of Data Law and Policy
Questions of data, law, feminism and the environment are not new, and contrary to popular perceptions, were not discovered as a field of critical thought by contemporary scholars. These debates were already taking place in national and international fora in the 1960s...
Live and let live: the mythological projection of police in the killing of Chris Kaba
Continuing our responses to A Philosophical History of Police Killing, today we bring you Carson Arthur's response to the book. In the UK, we are seeing the attempted rewriting of ‘police accountability.’ This in response to the prosecution and in preparation for the...
Are the Police Anarchic?
Following the publication of Melayna Lamb's superb book A Philosophical History of Police Power, we have asked James Martel and Carson Arthur to respond to the book. Today we bring you James' response. Melayna Lamb’s A Philosophical History of Police Power makes the...
The Colonial Breach and the Colonial Bind
Reposted from Interregnum. Whatever the contentions on the term we use to express the scale and method of killing we are witnessing in Gaza, the description at the International Court of Justice as a 'live-streamed genocide' is both apt and particular to our age. For...
Robert Michels’ Lessons for the Left
Tim Christiaens In the early 2010s, many people on the left proclaimed the death of state-based socialism, the political party, and any kind of organizational authority. From Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring, the 2011 revolts put their faith in horizontalist...
Gaza Genocide: An Introductory Critical Legal Reading List
https://twitter.com/UNRWA/status/1758156390684557777 We asked Jessica Whyte, Goldie Osuri and Marina Velickovic to put together a resource pack of the most important critical (legal) work on the on-going Gaza Genocide. We hope this will be of use in teaching,...
Questioning our Need for Punishment
Henrique Carvalho & Anastasia Chamberlen "Cage Head" by SanguineSeas The philosophy of punishment finds itself at a crossroads. On the one hand, it remains a very prolific and popular field of study, with countless works being regularly produced and revisited. On...
