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The Role of the Law in Critical Theory: An Engagement with Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth Law and Critique Pub Date : 2024-04-16 Mikhaïl Xifaras
This paper discusses the role of Law and Legal Thinking in Critical Theory with specific reference to the arguments that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri offer in their book Commonwealth. The core idea is that Critical Theory is no less radical, but much more concrete, when it is performing not only an external, but also an internal critique of the Law. It shows that the role of the law in critical
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Nachleben der Antike, Time, and Restitution: Notes for a Nocturnal Jurisprudence of the Image Law and Critique Pub Date : 2024-03-09 Igor Stramignoni
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No Such Thing as Free Speech? Performativity, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in the UK Law and Critique Pub Date : 2024-01-17 Jana Bacevic
The relationship between academic freedom and freedom of speech features prominently in public and political discussions concerning the role of universities in Western liberal democracies. Recently, these debates have attracted increased attention, owing in part to media framing of a ‘free speech crisis’, especially in UK and US universities. One type of response is to regulate academic expression
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Reconfiguring Sovereignties Through the Law: Indigenous Patrimonialization in the Americas Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Patricio Espinosa
Since the last third of the twentieth century, the indigenous peoples of the Americas have claimed their sovereignty. There, it is possible to distinguish representations, in the form of marks of indigenous sovereignty, which go further than the modern concepts of state sovereignty and law, and compete with them. From then onwards, the liberal state has responded by creating ethnic administration policies
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Legal Survivals and the Resilience of Juridical Form Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Rafał Mańko
Legal institutions are created at a certain point in time, intended to be applied to ‘life’ as it is perceived at the specific moment when they are elaborated and cast into legal form. As a result, legal institutions always already refer, in their original design, to a certain normality, but between the moment of creation of a legal institution and its application to future situations there is always
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For I Do Not Know How to Act: Tadeusz Kantor and the Reality of Theatre Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-11-04 Thanos Zartaloudis
This paper presents a discussion, in honour of the late Ari Hirvonen, of the reality of theatre, the space of the tragic and the ethical condition. It engages critically with Hirvonen’s work, as he would demand it, and in doing so it considers the distinctive thinking about theatrical reality in the work of the great Polish artist and theatre director Tadeusz Kantor.
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Ethics: An Impossible Politics—Perversion, Law and Racial Difference Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Andreja Zevnik
This paper takes the removal of the Colston statue in Bristol in the summer of 2020 and the accompanying Black Lives Matter protest as a political setting which can help us explore the radical political potential of Ari Hirvonen’s work. In this intervention I return to some of the themes that his work continuously engages with (such as the question of the limits, transgressions of law, and ethical
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Communications Infrastructure, Technological Solutionism and the International Legal Imagination Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-10-21 Daniel Joyce
This article considers the role played by communications infrastructure within the international legal imagination. It engages with contemporary debates regarding the power of corporate digital platforms and their model of information capitalism. An international legal historical perspective is adopted in order to contextualise international law’s present infrastructural turn and connect current debates
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Legal Tech, the Law Firm and the Imagination of the Right Legal Answer Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Amin Parsa, Gregor Noll, Leila Brännström, Markus Gunneflo
Legal tech is growing, and its growth provokes anxieties about the future of the legal profession as such. In this article, we examine the impact of legal tech on the central role of lawyers at law firms in crafting an imagined ‘right legal answer’ by drawing on Duncan Kennedy’s suggestion that a claim to the rightness of one’s legal propositions is a central characteristic of the legal profession
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Civic Action Against Son Preference in Tirupati, India: Critical International Law Put into Practice? Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Filip Strandberg Hassellind
In this paper based on original fieldwork, I seek to contribute to critical scholarship in international law by providing an investigation into the engagement with international law by actors in civil society working against son preference primarily in Tirupati, India. I suggest that the turn to the international legal order by civic actors should be theorized as something else than as merely coming
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Habermas, Popular Sovereignty, and the Legitimacy of Law Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-10-04 George Duke
Habermas’ theory of popular sovereignty has received comparatively little sustained critical attention in the Anglo-American literature since initial responses to Between Facts and Norms. In light of subsequent work on group agency, this paper argues that Habermas’ reconstruction of popular sovereignty—in its denial of the normative force of collective citizen action—is best understood as a renunciation
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Digital Humanitarian Mapping and the Limits of Imagination in International Law Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Fleur Johns
Humanitarian maps assembled using digital technology are indicative of transformations underway in how the world is made knowable, sensible, and actionable, including for international legal purposes. These transformations are exemplified by the Missing Maps Project (MMP), an initiative of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, a U.S.-registered non-profit, and three other non-governmental organisations
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The Robot and Human Futures: Visualising Autonomy in Law and Science Fiction Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Vincent Goding, Kieran Tranter
This article argues that legal discourses about robots are framed within a limiting ‘human paradigm.’ While this is not a specific failure of lawyers, it has significant consequences for law in a digital future. This visualising of robots has its origins in mainstream twentieth-century science fictional tropes of artificial beings. This article begins by identifying the predominant science fiction
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Regulating Communicative Risk: Online Harms and Subjective Rights Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-09-15 Bernard Keenan
States are in the process of creating controversial legislation aimed at subjecting ‘harmful’ online communication on social media and search engines to new regulatory regimes. Critics argue that these measures are serious threats to the right to freedom of expression and freedom from surveillance. This article first draws on elements of systems theory to reframe the right to freedom of expression
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Human Rights Penality and Violence Against Women: The Coloniality of Disembodied Justice Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Silvana Tapia Tapia
Despite the persistence of violence inside and around prisons, and the dubious adequacy of criminal law to respond to victim–survivors, international human rights (IHR) discourse increasingly promotes the mobilisation of the state’s penal apparatus to respond to human rights violations, including violence against women (VAW). Using an anticolonial feminist approach, this article scrutinises the ontological
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The Two Forms of Legal Time: Pierre Legendre’s “La Durée Poignardée”: Remarques sur la Structure et le Temps Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-08-29 Andreas Rahmatian
In his Leçons VII (Le désir politique de dieu) Pierre Legendre applies the idea or expression of ‘instituting time’ (‘instituer le temps’), that is, working with time as a malleable material, but at the same time conceptualising time as dogmatic time, especially in the interpretation of law. As an example of this concept he refers to the English Common Law, a ‘style’ of ‘governing by solving cases’
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Lost in Transduction: From Law and Code’s Intra-actions to the Right to Explanation in the European Data Protection Regulations Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-08-27 Miriam Tedeschi, Mika Viljanen
Recent algorithmic technologies have challenged law’s anthropocentric assumptions. In this article, we develop a set of theoretical tools drawn from new materialisms and the philosophy of information to unravel the complex intra-actions between law and computer code. Accordingly, we first propose a framework for understanding the enmeshing of law and code based on a diffractive reading of Barad’s agential
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The Boundaries of Legal Personhood: Disability, Gender and the Cyborg Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-07-18 Flora Renz
By considering the death of the disability activist Engracia Figueroa as the consequence of her wheelchair being damaged by an airline, this article asks whether law could accommodate a definition of legal personhood that encompasses the possibility of bodies augmented by prosthetics, technology, and mobility aids. The use of mobility aids by disabled people and the role of prosthetic penises in so-called
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How the Welfare State Tries to Protect Itself Against the law: Luhmann and new Forms of Social Immune Mechanism Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen, Paul Stenner
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Own Yourself! Reflexive Possession and Its Discontents in Beloved (1987) Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-06-10 Lindsay O’Connor Stern
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Manhandling the Goddess: The Thuggee Archive as a Sum of (Male) Parts Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Adimaya Keni
Every archive holds many stories; this paper analyses the treatment and socio-political role of the Indian goddess icon, Kali, in the early nineteenth century, considering the story of legal subjectivity through her changing depiction and worship. Kali was reimagined as a monster-like figure of hate and fear, of depravity and unchecked female sexuality, and the anti-thesis of morality, by the East
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A Call for Rethinking International Arbitration: A TWAIL Perspective on Transnationality and Epistemic Community Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-05-18 Mansour Vesali Mahmoud, Hosna Sheikhattar
Despite the increasingly diversified discourses in international commercial arbitration, this device of socio-legal regulation remains a relatively under-theorized subject. In particular, far too little attention has been paid to analyzing international commercial arbitration through critical approaches such as Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). TWAIL is broadly understood as a methodological
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Kierkegaardian Ethics and the Rule of Law Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-05-12 Joshua Neoh
We approach law with deep ambivalence. On the one hand, we take immense pride in living under the rule of law. On the other hand, we often catch ourselves lamenting the existence of law. When we lament the existence of law, we are not just saying that there is too much of it. We are not just complaining about the amount of law. Rather, our complaint goes to the very nature of law itself. We complain
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How to Be Indigenous in India? Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati
Although international law grants a distinct juristic personality to indigenous peoples, this subjecthood is premised on a hierarchical reading of ethnicity and indigeneity. Through illustrations of Adivasi experiences in India, this article interrogates the prejudices of the global juridical discourse that are reproduced by the domestic jurisdiction, exposing the voyeuristic performance of legality
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Exteriority as Law: Revisiting the Masochean turn within Levinas Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-02-01 Reuben Carias
Adopting Kantor’s Masochean turn within Levinas, this article challenges the anthropocentrically limited purview of Levinas’s ethical relation. Incorporating Kantor’s legalistic reading of Levinas, informed through his literary analysis of Sacher-Masoch’s ‘Venus in Furs’, the article details the inescapable, legalistic plight that is to be the Levinasian ethical subject. Extending upon Kantor’s introductory
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Translating Dark into Bright: Diary of a Post-Critical Year Law and Critique Pub Date : 2023-02-01 André Dao, Danish Sheikh
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International Law for a Time of Monsters: ‘White Genocide’, The Limits of Liberal Legalism, and the Reclamation of Utopia Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-12-30 Eric Loefflad
For critical legal scholars, the ongoing far-right assault upon the liberal status quo poses a distinct dilemma. On the one hand, the desire to condemn the far-right is overwhelming. On the other hand, such condemnations are susceptible to being appropriated as a validation of the very liberalism that critical theorists have long questioned. In seeking to transcend this dilemma, my focus is on the
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Racial Capitalism and the Dialectics of Development: Exposing the Limits and Lies of International Economic Law Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-11-26 Mohsen al Attar, Claire Smith
International economic law is peculiar. It claims universal character, yet eschews engagement with many, if not all, the racialised features of the global political economy. Its scholars mostly ignore imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism; they exclude slavery, predation, and racism altogether. In the following article, we draw upon Walter Rodney’s dialectics of development to offer a racial capitalist
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How Not to Talk About Environmental Personhood: Thinking Transitional Concepts Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-11-15 Russell J. Duvernoy
This paper studies “environmental personhood” legislation as a transitional concept. A transitional concept is one whose originating context sets parameters for its pragmatic functioning even as the eventual coherence of this functioning entails deep change in this originating context. By more explicitly thematizing environmental personhood as a transitional concept, we can acknowledge worries about
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Judith Butler, the Bakhtin Circle and Free Speech: State Hegemony, Race and Grievability in R.A.V. v. St Paul Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-11-15 John Michael Roberts
In June 21, 1990, the Joneses, an African-American family living in the mainly white and working-class neighbourhood of St. Paul in Minnesota, saw a small white cross burning in their yard. By placing the burning cross on the yard, the Minnesota Supreme Court argued that one of the accused, Robert A Viktora, had engaged in ‘fighting words’. However, the US Supreme Court reversed this decision, arguing
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Environmental Law and the Unsustainability of Sustainable Development: A Tale of Disenchantment and of Hope Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-09-08 Louis J. Kotzé, Sam Adelman
In this article we argue that sustainable development is not a socio-ecologically friendly principle. The principle, which is deeply embedded in environmental law, policymaking and governance, drives environmentally destructive neoliberal economic growth that exploits and degrades the vulnerable living order. Despite seemingly well-meaning intentions behind the emergence of sustainable development
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State Changes: Prototypical Governance Figured and Prefigured Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Fleur Johns
My 2019 article ‘From Planning to Prototypes: New Ways of Seeing Like a State’ (P2P) drew attention to some shortcomings of the kinds of critical, reformist impulses fostered in law and development work. I sought to show that persistent preoccupations with the destructive hubris of ‘top-down’ planning—especially state planning—bypassed the tendency for great power to be deployed in other stylistic
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Tech-based Prototypes in Climate Governance: On Scalability, Replicability, and Representation Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-07-31 Andrea Leiter, Marie Petersmann
‘[T]he “mainstream” of global governance has changed course’ and in so doing, might well have ‘outrun the standard tools of critical, progressive, and reform-minded international lawyers’, Fleur Johns wrote in Johns, The Modern Law Review 82:833–863, 2019. It is especially the critical tools of ‘appeals to history, context, language [and] the grassroots’ in response to universalist planning that Johns
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Style Management: Images of Global Counter-Terrorism at the United Nations Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-07-31 Isobel Roele
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From Mock-Up to Module: Development Practice between Planning and Prototype Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-07-30 Deval Desai, Andrew Lang
In her article from 2019, Fleur Johns describes a change: from a style of development work marked by a propensity for ‘planning’, to one marked by a propensity for ‘prototyping’. Our project in this paper is to propose a modest shift in perspective. Where Johns traces a transition from old to new styles, we emphasise the enduring links between planning and prototyping, such that both styles are best
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Down and Dirty in the Field of Play: Startup Societies, Cryptostatecraft, and Critical Complicity Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-07-19 Daniela Gandorfer
Climate change and fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technologies are massively shifting the material and social conditions of existence on Earth and contribute to a state of indeterminacy and increased political experimentation. While various models for what might become the ‘next iteration of governance’ are currently emerging, this essay turns to specific contemporary political experiments which
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Critique and the Coloniality of Being: Rethinking Development Discourses of Encounter Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-07-18 David Chandler
Fleur Johns argues that the contraposition of a ‘bottom-up’ approach of politics of prototypical technique rather than the ‘top-down’ politics of the master plan or normative principle no longer seems as straightforwardly radical as it appeared when James C Scott posited the value of local knowledge or métis against grand plans of high modernization, just over 20 years ago. This paper seeks to follow
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Our Legal Borders: Interrelated Constructions of Individual and Political Bodies Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-07-17 Stephen M Young
In liberal democracies that were British colonies, law constructs the linkages and distinctions between individual and political bodies. Legality re-iterates the form of an ancient construct called the King’s Two Bodies. The legal construction of these bodies ensures that their borders are continuously and perpetually contested and transgressed, and different modalities of power have arisen to take
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Scarcity, Property Rights, Irresponsibility: How Intellectual Property Deals with Neglected Tropical Diseases Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-06-25 Daniel Pinheiro Astone
The article addresses the role of scarcity in negotiating the relationship between intellectual property, particularly from a legal-economic perspective, and property rights, as understood by transaction cost economics, to shed light on the deadlock faced by those suffering from neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). The consistency of the law and economics fundamentals that support the trade on knowledge
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Robert Cover as a Radical Democrat Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-04-16 Maxim van Asseldonk
The political philosophy of radical democracy has made innumerable invaluable contributions to theories of democracy. However, while radical democrats tend to focus on the political, a cogent and comprehensive framework of law appropriate to radical democracy has only recently been begun to be developed. Interpreting the vast tradition of radical democracy to be based at least on the fundamental tenets
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Cesare Beccaria and the Aesthetic Knowledge of On Crimes and Punishments Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-03-03 Prashan Ranasinghe
Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments has had a profound impact on, and made significant contributions to, among others, the study of law, justice, crime, and punishment. Unsurprisingly, there is a voluminous literature on this text. This article subjects Beccaria’s treatise to an exegetical reading and focuses on the aesthetic inquiry at heart of the text. Beccaria professes to undertake a rigorous
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Law and Geology for the Anthropocene: Toward an Ethics of Encounter Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-02-23 Alexander Damianos
The Anthropocene has been observed as an opportunity to generate new legal imaginaries capable of revising incumbent assumptions of legal and political thought. What opportunities do such ambitions afford for communication between geological and legal thought? Responding to Birrell & Matthews attempt to ‘re-story a law for, rather than of, the Anthropocene,’ I wish to describe some ways in which the
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Jurisgenerative Tissues: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Legal Secretions of 3D Bioprinting Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-02-11 Joshua D. M. Shaw, Roxanne Mykitiuk
Three-dimensional ‘bioprinting’ is under development, which may produce living human organs and tissues to be surgically implanted in patients. Like tissue engineering and regenerative medicine generally, the process of bioprinting potentially disrupts experience of the human body by redefining understandings of, and becoming actualised in new practices and regimes in relation to, the body. The authors
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Technicity and the Power of Institution Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-01-27 Pierre Musso
Our question is whether technicality can institute, and thus create a new power, or even legitimize and maintain institutions. It claims to do so, all haloed by sacredness or religiosity with the development of computers, networks and the Internet. But this would presuppose that technology could symbolize, i.e. embody an instance of Truth, an irrational core of beliefs or myths that would answer the
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Blockchain Technology and the Endangered Species Called Humans Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-01-12 Jean Lassègue
The following lines aim at two goals: firstly, connecting the three blind spots (language, territory and the body) that Katrin Becker's article has identified in the analysis of society promoted by advocates of blockchain technology; secondly, reflecting on the possible hybridization between classical and digital forms of legal procedures. What we are witnessing is a transfer of legality from a spatial
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Blockchain Matters—Lex Cryptographia and the Displacement of Legal Symbolics and Imaginaries Law and Critique Pub Date : 2022-01-06 Becker, Katrin
This article focusses on the social and legal implications that blockchain technology brings about, not only due to its ideological framework, but also, and especially, due to the concept of law it inaugurates. Thus, this article claims, that, by interlocking technological and legal structures, blockchain technology initiates a profound displacement of legal symbolics and imaginaries. It shows how
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The Courtroom as an Arena of Ideological and Political Confrontation: The Chicago Eight Conspiracy Trial Law and Critique Pub Date : 2021-12-04 Allo, Awol
Normative theories of law conceive the courtroom as a geometrically delineated, politically neutral, and linguistically transparent space designed for a fair and orderly administration of justice. The trial, the most legalistic of all legal acts, is widely regarded as a site of truth and justice elevated above and beyond the expediency of ideology and politics. These conceptions are further underpinned
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A Farewell to Homo Sacer? Sovereign Power and Bare Life in Agamben’s Coronavirus Commentary Law and Critique Pub Date : 2021-11-26 Prozorov, Sergei
The article addresses Giorgio Agamben’s critical commentary on the global governance of the Covid-19 pandemic as a paradigm of his political thought. While Agamben’s comments have been criticized as exaggerated and conspiratorial, they arise from the conceptual constellation that he has developed starting from the first volume of his Homo Sacer series. At the centre of this constellation is the relation
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Decolonising the Curriculum in International Law: Entrapments in Praxis and Critical Thought Law and Critique Pub Date : 2021-11-18 al Attar, Mohsen, Abdelkarim, Shaimaa
Calls to decolonise the curriculum gain traction across the academe. To a great extent, the movement echoes demands of the decolonisation era itself, a period from which academics draw both impetus and legitimacy. In this article, we examine the movement’s purchase when applied to the teaching of international law. We argue that the movement reinvigorates debates about the origins of international
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A Deconstructive and Psychoanalytic Investigation of (Corporeal) Law Enforcement Law and Critique Pub Date : 2021-09-20 Barton, Jason
In this paper, I elaborate a Derridean deconstruction of law through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Derrida only focuses on jurisprudential law enforcement in his famous ‘Force of Law’ lecture, leaving corporeal law enforcement untouched. In turn, I explore the irresolvable conceptual tensions within corporeal law enforcement from the standpoints of (a) individuals rationalizing their obedience
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The Power of Spectacle: The 2012 Quebec Student Strike and the Transformative Potential of Law Law and Critique Pub Date : 2021-08-28 Brabazon, Honor
Recent iterations in international legal thought of the debate over the transformative potential of law have tended to echo the long-standing assumption that radical movements, when they employ law-based tactics, do so in the same manner as reformist movements: they mobilise the legitimacy of law for short-term goals, only with more radical long-term goals in mind. However, movements such as the 2012
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Theft in Broad Daylight: Racism and Neoliberal Legality Law and Critique Pub Date : 2021-08-20 Bhandar, Brenna
In this article the author examines Fitzpatrick’s foundational critique of liberal legality and racism, a theme which remained central to his decades-long excavation of modern law’s self-identity. After considering Fitzpatrick’s ‘separation thesis’, the author then turns to consider the ways in which neoliberal legality is parasitic upon liberal legal racial formations while at the same time, obscuring
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The Restlessness of Resistance: Community, Myth, and Negativity in Law Law and Critique Pub Date : 2021-08-05 Faust, J. Reese
Peter Fitzpatrick’s intellectual relationship with Jean-Luc Nancy centred on the related problems of myth and community. In this article, I will explicate the ‘restlessness of the negative’ that Nancy describes in Hegel, in order to further develop Fitzpatrick’s notion of ‘law as resistance’. Set against the backdrop of myth and community, law can be understood as a community’s fragmentary attempt
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Convivial Mythologies: The Poiesis of Modern Law Law and Critique Pub Date : 2021-07-29 Birrell, Kathleen
In a tribute to the intellectual legacy of Peter Fitzpatrick, this article explores the poiesis of modern law, as a constitutive ambivalence distilled in the affinity between law and literature. Reading with Fitzpatrick, the resolution of the contradictions of this law in myth depends, paradoxically, upon its fundamental irresolution. Reflecting upon the profound significance of his revelation of the
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‘Authorizing the Peril’: Mythologies of (Settler) Law at the End of Time Law and Critique Pub Date : 2021-07-27 Sahar Shah
The promised paradises of colonial capitalism and neoliberalism are set in a perpetually elusive future (Fitzpatrick 1992). This future is not a set destination, but an endless linear journey set to the thrum of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. This paper considers, in the context of recent cases relating to development in the Athabasca tar sands region, what the law of the Canadian settler state does
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Before the and of the World(s): Peter Fitzpatrick and the (Inter)national Supplement Law and Critique Pub Date : 2021-07-26 Roberto Vilchez Yamato
In this article, I argue that Peter Fitzpatrick provides a unique contribution to international studies, most especially to contemporary interdisciplinary studies of International Law (IL) and International Relations (IR). Peter provides a significant theoretical contribution to the interdisciplinary study of IL and IR not only as a critical thinker of modern law, but also as a critical thinker of
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Introduction: Reflection on/as Supplement Law and Critique Pub Date : 2021-07-22 Ben Golder,Sara Ramshaw