CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING

LAW AND THE POLITICAL

CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING

LAW AND THE POLITICAL

Speed Limit: What does it mean to regulate AI?

Speed Limit: What does it mean to regulate AI?

Elena Esposito argues that artificial intelligence is misnamed and that a more accurate descriptor would be ‘artificial communication’.[1]  Here, communication is closely connected to the idea of being informed: a communication is pertinent to the extent that it informs the addressee of something that is novel or not previously known to them.  However, we need to be careful because Esposito, following the work of Luhmann, does not consider communication to involve the conveying of something ‘in the mind’ of the sender into the mind of the addressee.  Rather, the addressee is akin to a system that, we might say, is triggered or irritated by a communication to produce a change of state in its own system.  Such a change is information, closely aligning to Bateson’s definition of information as ‘the difference that makes a difference’.[2] Consequently, if AI produces a change of state in a human addressee then communication has taken...

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ARTICLES

In Memory of Alan Hunt

In Memory of Alan Hunt

in memory of alan hunt I never had the pleasure of meeting Alan Hunt, though I suppose that is hardly a necessary condition to be influenced by someone’s work. Alan’s constitutive theory of law formed and continues to form a cornerstone of how I think about law and...

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A Reminder

A Reminder

Umut Özsu a reminder I was never able to meet Alan Hunt. My relation to him is mediated in a double sense—first, in that my only points of entry into his unique and impressive world are through his many and varied writings; second, in that I happen to teach in the...

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Alan Hunt

Alan Hunt

alan hunt Alan Hunt passed away on Wednesday 8 December 2021. He was at home with his partner Ros in Ottawa, Canada.  Many had complicated relations with Alan, but he was no doubt a towering figure in the Department of Law and Legal Studies and at Carleton, as well as...

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António Guterres’s hour

António Guterres’s hour

There is a clear discomfort among international activists and commentators who follow the United Nations, as well as among former UN senior officials and special rapporteurs, with the organization’s growing irrelevance as the world is faced with increasingly complex...

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The Politics of Erection

The Politics of Erection

“Homo homini lupus” or “a man is a wolf to another man” has historically been one of the most popular dicta used in political philosophy to denote the hypothetical primal condition of human societies and justify their need for submission to a sovereign authority. In...

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A Pagan Christmas

A Pagan Christmas

For early Christians, celebrations of birth were broadly viewed as sinful. With the death and resurrection of Jesus at the center of the early message, and with Jesus expected to return at any moment, early Christians recorded the dates of their deaths but not the...

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On Veitch’s Obligations

On Veitch’s Obligations

We continue our series on contemporary critical (legal) books with a series of responses to Scott Veitch's, Obligations: New Trajectories in Law (Routledge, 2021). We will post four responses to Scott's new work, each picking distinct themes which together testify to...

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Hugging

Hugging

Photo by Anastasia Vityukova on Unsplash At 4.30 p.m. on August 28th, 2021, for the first time after five hundred and twenty-five days spent in isolation, on account of the pandemic, in my small village 30 km from Coimbra, I hugged and was hugged by...

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OVER A DECADE OF ARCHIVES

On Colonial Universality and other Legal Prerogatives: Reflections on Peter Fitzpatrick’s The Mythology of Modern Law

Following the death of Peter Fitzpatrick this month, we are reposting this series on The Mythology of Modern Law (first published on CLT on 3 August 2018) to mark the 25th anniversary of the book.2017 marked the 25th anniversary of Peter Fitzpatrick’s The Mythology of...

Against Agamben: Is a Democratic Biopolitics Possible?

Giorgio Agamben’s recent intervention which characterizes the measures implemented in response to the Covid-19 pandemic as an exercise in the biopolitics of the ‘state of exception’ has sparked an important debate on how to think of biopolitics. The very...

Law, Reading, and Power: The ‘S’ Joke, Why You Find it Funny and Why I Don’t (with Reply)

A guy walks into a bakery known for making fancy cakes. He says, “I’d like to have a cake shaped like the letter S.” The baker says he can do it, but the cake will be expensive. The man confirms that price is no object. The baker tells him to come back after three...

Law is a Fugue

BWV 895 Law is, metaphorically speaking, a fugue.Desmond Manderson has previously deployed the fugue metaphor to describe the mode with which he would present the aesthetic dimensions of law and justice. Here I am intensifying the metaphor in direct relation to...

Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction

Key Concept Img: Annie Vought | annievought.com Deconstruction by its very nature defies institutionalization in an authoritative definition. The concept was first outlined by Derrida in Of Grammatology where he explored the interplay between language and the...

Cupcake Fascism: Gentrification, Infantilisation and Cake

The Cupcake as Object The cupcake is barely a cake. When we think about what “the cake-like” ideal should be, it is something spongy, moist, characterized by excess, collapsing under its own weight of gooey jam, meringue, and cream. It is something sickly and wet that...

White Feminist Fatigue Syndrome

In her recent piece in Comment is Free, "How feminism became capitalism's handmaiden - and how to reclaim it” Nancy Fraser draws on her own work in political theory to argue that feminism at best has been co-opted by neoliberalism and at worst has been a...

Decolonizing the Teaching of Human Rights?

According to the new Bolivian constitution, education is "one of the most important functions and primary financial responsibilities of the State”; it is “unitary, public, universal, democratic, participatory, communitarian, decolonizing and of quality” (art. 78, I);...

#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics

01. INTRODUCTION: On the Conjuncture 1. At the beginning of the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, global civilization faces a new breed of cataclysm. These coming apocalypses ridicule the norms and organisational structures of the politics which were forged...

Coughing out the Law: Perversity and Sociality around an Eating Table

It was lunchtime at Sydney’s David Jones, Australia’s up-market department store chain. So I headed down to the ‘food floor’. Whenever I have to shop at DJs I try to make sure I go there around midday, precisely so I can go down to the food floor and order the...

Palestinian Resistance: The Political, Social and Human Right of Self-Defense

Once again the bombs are falling on the Gaza Strip, a stretch of territory excised from Palestine proper as a result of continuing illegal and illegitimate actions by Israel. In fact, Gaza has become a closed ghetto, first cut off from Palestine in violation of the...

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...

Anonymous & the Discourse of Human Rights

In the last months, we have seen the emergence of ‘Anonymous’. In particular, in the days after the widespread attack on Wikileaks (following their publication of leaked US diplomatic memos) they emerged with a fairly credible threat to take down major global internet...

Power, Violence, Law

Over the last two hundred years, the theory of right, now known as normative jurisprudence, has discovered its vocation in a frantic attempt to legitimise the exercise of power. It carries out this task by declaring that law and power are external to each other...