CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CfP: 3rd International Congress on Colonial and Post-colonial Landscapes: Architecture, Colonialism and Labour
Although a common topic in colonial historiography, the influence of large-scale labor on the creation of built environments—including the design, construction, and maintenance of infrastructure, buildings and landscapes—has not been fully explored in the context of colonial architecture. The topic has significant implications not only for the description of past societies, but especially for the comprehension and support of present-day communities with colonial pasts and their relationship to the production of space. Connecting architecture and labor in these contexts offers a promising avenue for addressing some of the challenges encountered by postcolonial societies. These include the relationship with "Western" construction technologies and materials, scarcity of traditional building systems and their undervalued insights on climate adaptation and sustainable solutions, and persistent racial and gender inequalities in public works labor environments. This congress welcomes...
ARTICLES
CfP: 3rd International Congress on Colonial and Post-colonial Landscapes: Architecture, Colonialism and Labour
Although a common topic in colonial historiography, the influence of large-scale labor on the creation of built environments—including the design, construction, and maintenance of infrastructure, buildings and landscapes—has not been fully explored in the context of...
CfP: Argumentation 2025 – Games of Law
The Argumentation 2025 conference continues the project of creating space for alternative perspectives on law, fostering the emergence of critical jurisprudences that challenge legal orthodoxy. This year’s theme is Games of Law, an invitation to explore...
“Man is the only real enemy we have”: Feminist reflections on staging Animal Farm in the fall of 2024
In February of this year, a new feminist blog called The Morrigan launched in Ireland as part of the Doing Feminist Legal Work Network. It features a mixture of Irish and international feminist legal thinking. This piece is a cross-posting from The Morrigan. No set of...
To Reclaim or Resist: Can Digital Sovereignty Ever Be Feminist?
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven / AMVK; Bloem van Smarten (1990-1991) On 30 and 31 January 2025, a group of researchers participated in a workshop examining digital sovereignty through a feminist lens (see below for full list of contributors).[1] Digital or technological...
Ontology and Politics of Liberation: Two Paths to Decrypt Power
This analysis introduces two solid critical arguments—one ontological, the other historical—that illuminate the unique features of the theory of encryption of power, what sets it apart from other theoretical endeavors. The results are deeply intertwined, highlighting...
Tyranny at Europe’s Borders….
On Wednesday 10th April 2024, the bodies of three girls were recovered off the Greek island of Chios.[1] They drowned after a boat carrying migrants from Turkey to the EU ran into rocks. Another, fourteen people, including eight more children, were...
Transnational Disruption: On the meaning of J.D. Vance’s Munich Speech
In the speech he gave to the 2025 Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance apparently missed the point (video, transcript). According to immediate criticism, the format should be a platform for security policy exchange in...
Sleeping While Poor: The Use and Abuse of Criminal Law
On June 28, 2024, the United States Supreme Court upheld state and city-level bans on sleeping in public spaces—effectively, laws against homelessness. In his majority opinion for Grants Pass v. Johnson, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the local ordinance in Grants...
This could have been a Tweet, or: On the politics of signing things
In the wake of the Iraq war, a group of international lawyers published an open letter in the Guardian, framing their opposition to the invasion in legal terms. Months later, in a piece that has reached somewhat of a cult-status in the discipline, some of the...
Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights From Colombia to Palestine:
A Response to the Symposium on Struggles for the Human On the anniversary of publication of Struggles for the Human: Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights (Duke University Press, 2024), it is a pleasure to respond to the contributors to...
Arendt, Gaza and Personal Responsibility Under Genocide
In an essay crafted in 1964, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” Hannah Arendt reflects on a set of moral issues concerning our capacity to judge.[1] The difficult questions she raises in this essay remain pertinent in our own genocidal times unfolding...
Bridging the Infinite Distance Between Us
While Kantian’s are concerned with duties, Aristotelians with human flourishing and consequentialists with aggregating value, Simone Weil’s central concern is the distance that separates us. Naturally, she has much to say about duties and human flourishing, but these...
The Miracle of Friendship
"Yes, and here’s to the few Who forgive what you do And the fewer who don’t even care" Leonard Cohen, Night Comes On When a human being is attached to another by a bond of affection which contains any degree of necessity, it is impossible that he should wish autonomy...
The Labour of Reading
Two mothers read a letter. One knows how to read and the other doesn’t. The mother who knows how to read reads and then faints. ‘Until the day she dies her eyes, her mouth, and her movements will never again be the same.’[1] The words ‘strik[e] her mind,...
Attention to the Silence
Heaps of ruining textiles lie in a clothing graveyard (Figure 1). The items, made through significant effort and environmental cost and then abandoned, imply a decadence to c21 consumer capitalism. Codes, diligence plans and disclosures by the...
What Matters?
Yet always there is another life, A life beyond this present knowing, A life lighter than this present splendor - Wallace Stevens, ‘The Sail of Ulysses’ It is the condition of the critical theorist to be constantly attuned to unnecessary suffering and injustice...
Between Alienation and Ecstasy: Simone Weil’s degrees of attention
L’attention humaine exerce seule légitimement la fonction judiciaire Simone Weil. Among the many inventions that the learned world owes to ancient Greece, the philosophical banquet is not the least valuable. The Greek word symposion has been retained to...
Friendship, Labour, Attention: Thinking with Simone Weil
In his beautiful and powerful book, The Redress of Law: Globalisation, Constitutionalism and Market Capture (2021), our friend, Emilios Christodoulidis, reads one of his – and our – favourite thinkers, Simone Weil, and says of her ‘precious...
The Vigilante and the ‘Great Criminal’: On Law, Violence, and Assassination
In December 2024, two events occurred which can help us to understand the relation between violence and law in line with the critique outlined over a century ago by Walter Benjamin. Let’s begin with the more recent event, which emerged in two parts. First,...
Radical Hope and/as Insurgent Humanism
I first met Lara Montesinos-Coleman at a workshop in 2016. I recall a discussion on Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment with respect to everyday resistance and it being necessarily cruddy and mundane. We soon got to talking about our personal lives, and I remember...
Scenes of Violence: Between Ultraobjective and Ultrasubjective Forms of Violence
In the context of the 'claims adjuster' assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Jason Read suggested that readers might return to this piece from 2017, saying: "Obsession with the ultrasubjective violence of assassinations and terrorism is often coupled...
