ABOUT US

The blog is run by an editorial collective. Over the years, the make-up of this group has changed and shifted. At the moment there are eleven of us who commission, review and manage the blog.

Aviah Day

Aviah is a lecturer at Birkbeck College. Her research is informed by work and activism on domestic violence. Before academic life she held a number of front-line domestic violence service roles. She is a member of Sisters Uncut, and the London Renters Union.

Stephen Connelly

Stephen is an Associate Professor at the Warwick Law School. He works on normativity and theories of power. He is author of Leibniz: A Contribution to the Archaeology of Power, and Spinoza, Right and Absolute Freedom.

Hayley Gibson

Hayley is a Lecturer at the Law School of the University of Kent. She works on philosophical archaeology and the philosophical problematisation of concept of the ‘archive’ in its relationship to law. She is editor of Critical Trusts Law.

Kojo Koram

Kojo is a Lecturer in Birkbeck College, University of London. He works on questions of imperialism, international law and political economy. He is editor of The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line and can often be found on the Guardian, Novara Media and Politics Theory Other.

Gilbert Leung

Gilbert Leung LLB, LLM, DEA, PhD (Birkbeck) is a director of Counterpress and online editor of Max Planck Law. His research focuses on legal philosophy and theory, as well as intersections with music theory.

Angus McDonald

Angus lectured at Staffordshire University until 2015, at which time he was Associate Professor of Constitution, Culture and Critique; the focus of his research remains in the intersection of these three fields, informed by an anarchist perspective. He remains active in the Critical Legal Conference and is also on the Editorial Committee of Law & Critique.

 

Daniel Matthews

Dan is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong Law School. He works on theories of sovereignty in the context of climatic change and the onset of the Anthropocene epoch. He is the author of Earthbound: The Aesthetics of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene.

Tara Mulqueen

Tara is an Assistant Professor at the Warwick Law School. Her current research is focused on two main areas, co-operatives and alternative economies; and public legal education. She runs the Warwick Law in the Community strategic litigation and casework clinic.

Swastee Ranjan

Swastee is a doctoral candidate at the School of Law University of Sussex. Her work explores the role of law in describing the affective and the aesthetic experience of living in the city. Inspired by recent scholarship on new materialism and speculative realism, she engages with questions of environmental aesthetics, affect theory, protest aesthetics and art in public spaces.

Danish Sheikh

Danish is a PhD Candidate at the Melbourne Law School. His research is located at the intersections of law, literature, and performance, drawing upon his work as an activist lawyer and theatre practitioner. Contempt, his theatrical response to the criminalization of homosexuality in India, was published by Oberon Books in 2018. 

Illan rua Wall

Illan is a Reader at the Warwick Law School. He works on ways of understanding sovereignty, protest and revolt through their affective and atmospheric dynamics. He is author of Law and Disorder: Sovereignty, Protest, Atmosphere and Human Rights and Constituent Power.

Orignal Statement of Intent (2009)

Feeling that they were symbolic, we set up this website in the week of the 2009 G20 meeting and the protests that welcomed it to London. For us, that marked the beginning of a critical (legal) fight-back. Neoliberalism is not just a pernicious economic model but an integrated worldview. It became the way we live, the institutional framework of our society, how we understand and imagine our relations with others and the world. Neoliberal capitalism formed the real, its institutions the symbolic and its ideology the imaginary orders of our societies in the last 40 years. A deeper affinity, an alliance, brought together greedy economic policies, political and legal moralisation and biopolitical governance.

Law, a privileged but not exclusive area for our intervention, is no longer the form or the instrument, the tool or restraint of power. Law has started becoming the very operation, the substance of power. Legal form is squeezed and undermined by the privatization of public areas of activity and the simultaneous publicisation of domains of private action. Legal content, on the other hand, becomes co-extensive with the operations of power. The global biopolitical turn and the new humanitarianism mean that the main normative claims of modern law, typically human rights, have now become an integral part of power relations, that they precede, accompany and legitimise the penetration of all parts of the world by the new order. Law acts as an empty signifier that attaches to everything from pavement walking, the ever-present CCTV cameras (surveillance being the new vis anglais), to Iraqi liberation. It is auto-poetically reproduced in a loop of endless validity but is devoid of sense or signification.

But the signs from Athens and France, from Iceland and the G20 protests are positive. Over the last few years, this model of capitalism, deregulated, free-market, greedy, based on financial gambling, cheap credit and disregard for any value other than profit has come to crisis. Bail outs, nationalisation, regulation aim at saving capitalism from its self-generated implosion. At the same time, they have delivered a huge blow to free market idolatry. The crisis of the economic model, something accepted as the indispensable benevolent background of life, gives us a unique opportunity to examine the totality of the settlement of the last 40 years. The best time to demystify ideology is when it enters into crisis. At this point, its taken for granted, natural, invisible premises come to the surface become de-naturalised, objectified and can be understood for that first time for what they are, ideological constructs. The aim of critical (legal) thinking is precisely to start this process and to examine recent institutional strategies as the indispensable companion of neo-liberalism.

This is our time, the time of protest, of change, the welcoming of the event. Critical (legal) theory must be re-linked with emancipatory and radical politics. We need to imagine or dream a law or society in which people are no longer despised or degraded, oppressed or dominated and from that impossible but necessary standpoint to judge the here and now.  (Legal) critique is the companion and guide of radical change.

CLT, 2009.

The role of the one who speaks is therefore not the role of the legislator or the philosopher, between camps, the figure of peace and of armistice, in that position of which already Solon had dreamt and also Kant. To establish oneself between adversaries, at the centre and above them, to impose a general law on each and to found an order that reconciles: this is not at all what is at issue. At issue, rather, is the positing of a right marked by dissymmetry, the founding of a truth linked to a relation of force, a weapon-truth and a singular right. The subject that speaks is a warring – I won’t even say a polemical – subject.

 

— Michel Foucault