CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The abuse of UK anti-terror laws to proscribe direct action protest: The case of Palestine Action
The 13 February 2026 decision of the High Court inHuda Ammori v Secretary of State for the Home Department that the Home Secretary’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action was unlawful, provides a fascinating insight into the abuse of UK counterterrorism laws by public authorities to stifle legitimate dissent in the longstanding struggle to end international crimes in Palestine. The disclosure of documents in the judgment also furthers our understanding of government thinking on counter terrorism matters and how the Home Secretary came to her decision to proscribe Palestine Action. If the aim of proscription was to break the back of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, then it has spectacularly backfired. The government has appealed the decision, and hearings have been scheduled. In the meantime, Palestine Action remains proscribed in the UK, as pending the appeal, the High Court made an order on 25 February staying its decision to quash the...
ARTICLES
The Canon as Method, or, the Strange Joy of Footnotes
Footnotes are routinely associated with boredom and annoyance—even dread, if the matching of a journal’s style requirements adds dozens of footnotes to retool to our already overfilled plates. Sure, we are aware of the importance of rigorous citation, its necessity...
Please Mind the Gap: A Venn Diagram Story of Method in International Law
Working in international law as government lawyers for many years, method was not a day-to-day concern for us. Although we dealt daily in the ‘sources’ of international law, the question of ‘method’ was not part of the picture. The day-to-day job of a government...
In which I posit you as a legal methodology agony aunt
This is a cry for help! Specifically, it is a cry for legal methodological help. So if you are good on this stuff please read on and maybe get in touch. In order to explain my problem, I need to fill you in on some background. I came to legal scholarship...
Dance Me to the End of Law: Art, Justice, Improvisation
https://player.vimeo.com/video/446988530?h=e59ce0d8f2" At its core, improvisation demands an ongoing interaction with shifting tight places, whether created by power relations, social norms, aesthetic traditions, or physical technique. Improvised dance literally...
Art as Legal Method
Initially, our project was an experiment. What would happen if an artist created a visual response to a piece of legal scholarship that criticised how law regulates public spaces? What insights into art, law and justice might be generated? What started as an art...
Orienting oneself in the archive
"Let us then make up our minds to go forward untrammelled by the narrow and transient interests of nationalism in civil aviation towards the wider and more lasting goal of international welfare. If this Assembly achieves no more than to inculcate a lasting devotion to...
How to Stop A University: The Case for Indefinite Strike Action
Zara Dinnen and James Eastwood, Co-Chairs of the Queen Mary UCU Branch, contribute to the discussion within the union about possible next steps. Their views are expressed in a personal capacity. You might be reading this with a range of emotions. You have recently...
Staying in Shape: Writing, Questions, Method
The way one asks a question affects the way one is able to respond. This seems to be a truism. It also means that the way one shapes a question to turn it into the magical scholarly formula – a research question – is something that both enables and constrains...
In Praise of Flowers and Pebbles, or Why We Push Back Against Methodology
Views From a PhD Student Imagine for a moment that you are planning a walk through a well-known, popular forest. It has clear trails marked by those who went before. You could, perhaps, rigidly plan out in advance which trails you will follow. Or you could approach...
Collaging and Frottage as Legal Methodology
Stolk/Vos, Sag der Welt dass kein Krieg mehr ist, 2022, mixed paper materials, 50 x 70 cm Collaging as methodology of legal research entails co-constructed research through collective, multisensory practices of data collection. This methodology is anchored in the...
PURE VIBES
I write this blog as a Global South student and practitioner of international law. My education in the subjects of Legal Methods and International Law began at an Indian law school, amidst an ocean of monotony. Understandably, neither subject stirred any enthusiasm....
The Story of Your Nose or Why (International) Law and Linguistics is Fun
By now, the professor was shaking his head so hard I started to fear it might fall off. I was at an important international law conference in 2014, co-presenting our international law and linguistics research for the first time with my co-author from linguistics. As...
The (Dis)Entanglement of Method, Methodology and Epistemology
Sandra Harding (1987) did not believe feminists should focus too much of their discussion on methodology, but instead focus on the ‘good’ research that was being done. Harding’s position does not stem from any coyness towards the methodological ‘achievements’ made by...
The ‘Joy’ of Methodology
The soul-crushing mind-numbing gut-wrenching heart-breaking “joy” of methodology. I was never taught me-tho-do-lo-gy. Whatever that is. Isn’t the method just 1. Idea, 2. Struggle, 3. Word vomit? That’s how I do it. I wonder, what if? What if I want to be inspired by...
The Joy of Methodology: A Blog Carnival
For many researchers, methodology and joy don’t belong in the same sentence. Legal researchers in particular often seem to place methods-talk somewhere between irritating impediment and unbridgeable chasm. Some of these anxieties are well founded: law school legal...
Brazil: Warning to Democratic Navigation
On the 8th of this month, a week after the inauguration of President Lula da Silva, an event took place in Brasília that only took by surprise those who did not want to know, or had no way of knowing, about its widely disseminated preparation on social networks. The...
Open letter to President Lula da Silva
Dear President Lula da Silva, When I visited you in prison on August 30, 2018, in the brief time that the visit lasted I experienced a whirlwind of ideas and emotions that remain as vivid today as they were then. A short time before, we had been together at the World...
The Revolutionary Potential of Transnational Social Security Law: Lessons from Rosa Luxemburg
‘It cannot be denied that the direct cause leading the popular masses into the socialist movement is precisely the “unjust” mode of distribution characteristic of capitalism’ (Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution) ‘While they're standing in the welfare...
The Luxemburgian Trial of Rupture
‘Militarismus auf der Anklagebank’ © akg-images ‘Darling, imagine, how wonderful! Charges have been brought against me by the war minister von Falkenhayn… Imagine, what kinds of evidence one can bring forward, and make reparations for what the donkeys in the Reichstag...
‘Pushed into the Burning Desert’: German ‘Reparations’ to the Herero Through a Luxemburgian Lens
It is a sign of Rosa Luxemburg’s prescience and far-sightedness as a scholar and intellectual that a genocide that was ignored by most of the world, the German genocide of 80% of the Herero population of South-West Africa (now Namibia) of the early 20th century, did...
Rosa Luxemburg’s Self-Determination & Feminist Legal Thought
"As such so long as imperialistic world policies determine and regulate the inner and other outer life of the nation, there can be no ‘national self-determination’ either in war or peace. "(Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social Democracy (1915)) Rosa...
