STREAMS
The confinement of the legal discipline
What exactly is at stake when considering the arguments against and for the auto- nomy of law? Does the issue of “interdisciplinarity” in law merely boil down to the idea of American legal imperialism? One of the underlying questions is also related to the way legal disciplines should be taught and the role of institutions in the (re)production of discourses.
The legal discipline and its inner boundaries
The legal discourse is shaped by a number of divides: public/private, international/ domestic, universalism/pluralism. These distinctions were challenged in many ways by critical legal scholars, feminist studies, social science etc. Is the time ripe for a reconstructive endeavor using new alternative descriptive and analytical tools, which would move beyond the (ritual and sometimes sterile) discussions of the unsustaina- bility of the current dichotomous way of thinking? (Continued)
The Southampton Centre for Law, Ethics and Globalization has two great speakers coming up this semester – Angus MacDonald and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos.
Angus MacDonald – Thinking Against Constituted Law; A Response to Oren Ben-Dor (15/02/2012, Law Building Rm 2055)
Oren Ben-Dor has argued that “Critical legal scholarship seemed to be capable of being both against the law … but at the same time still anticipating legal language.” He soon after characterises the critical position as, “Going ‘out’ was merely a way of staying in.” But critical legal thinking about constitutional law which overcomes this worry about whether one is against the law, beyond the law, for the law, complicit with the law, in love with the law (as Goodrich alleged) or in whatever relation to the law when one makes critique of the law is possible. For anticipation in relation to legal language is something more than capitulation to legal language. Anticipation is as Ernst Bloch puts it, “expectation, hope, intention to still unbecome possibility”; as Tarik Kochi glosses this, “an anticipatory consciousness … perceives the unrealised emancipatory potential of the past, latencies and tendencies of the present, and realisable hopes of the future.” Applied to Constitutional Law, what can be anticipated in its legal language of sovereignty, of constituting and constituted power, of constitutionality, of rule of law, of separation of powers, of public sphere, of law? Answering this question justifies a practice of critical legal theorising. (Continued)
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Translated by Richard (Cunning Hired Knaves), Original available in Spanish
Spain has been the theatre of a prolonged speculative wave that ended abruptly in 2007, having been one of the world leaders in the cycle of real estate-financial accumulation. Spanish capitalism took advantage of an intensive use of the territory that guaranteed strong profit rates, with the support of large masses of capital acquired on global financial markets. The characteristics of this model are well known: unprecedented volumes of house building and transport infrastructures, a proliferation of rapturous macroevents and megaprojects and levels of real estate revaluation that seemed to distribute wealth to anyone who was the owner of a house, or at least, “owner” of debt.
Underneath this financial-real estate mirage, a process of plundering of the commons was always at work, bringing about a very heavy concentration of social wealth in the hands of a few. This process can be traced in the commodification of fundamental goods such as housing, the irrational consumption of non-renewable resources, the irreparable damage to areas of highly ecological value, or to people’s health.
Now, once the expansive phase has closed, we find ourselves, moreover, with a landscape of fantasmagorical settings, full of empty motorways, ports and airports, of unoccupied buildings that coexist with the increase in evictions. In parallel, the levels of family indebtedness, in a context of intensification of unemployment and precariousness, are strangling households. (Continued)
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Author: Jodi Dean
Occupy Wall Street, for all its talk of horizontality, autonomy, and decentralized process, is recentering the economy, engaging in class warfare without naming the working class as one of two great hostile forces but instead by presenting capitalism as a wrong against the people. It’s putting capitalism back at center of left politics—no wonder, then, that it has opened up a new sense of possibility for so many of us: it has reignited political will. In a way, it’s returning to the left its missing core or soul, what has been displaced or denied since we turned our back on the communist horizon. It’s reactivating the Marxist insight that class struggle is a political struggle. As I mentioned before, a new Pew poll finds a nineteen percentage point increase since 2009 of the number of Americans who believe there are strong or very strong conflicts between the rich and poor. Two thirds perceive this conflict—and perceive it as more intense than divisions of race and immigration status (African Americans see class conflict as more significant than white people do).
My claim, then, is that when occupy wall street speaks the language of capitalism and the “no left,” when it disavows representation, exclusion, dogmatism, and utopianism, it’s at its weakest; it’s no different from the left we’ve had from the last thirty years or from its larger setting in communicative capitalism. But, when it re-centers the economy and class struggle, when it focuses on capitalism—Wall Street—on opposition, on collectivism, and on walking new paths, creating new practices, opening up new common modes of producing and distributing, that’s its heart, that’s what brings it to life. (Continued)
Author: Elena Loizidou*
Yet it is precisely the disenchantment of beauty in the experience of nudity, this sublime but also miserable exhibition of appearance beyond all mystery and all meaning, that can somehow defuse the theological apparatus and allow us to see, beyond the prestige of grace and the chimeras of corrupt nature, a simple, inapparent human body. (Agamben 2011:90)
The hetaera or courtesan, Phryne, who lived in Athens during the 4th century BC, was known for her beauty, wit and intelligence. In classical Greece, courtesans were women who used to be slaves and who had managed to escape their serfdom. They became women with independent means and were the equals of the men who courted them.
According to the comic poets, prior to becoming a hetaera, Phryne used to support herself by collecting capers (McClure 2006: 357). She was a companion to a lot of influential men, including the sculptor Praxiteles, who is rumoured to have sculpted his Cnidean Aphrodite in her image. Phryne became one of the wealthiest Greek women of her time.
(Continued)
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Author: Basak Ertür
Protest outside the court, placards proclaim "For Hrant, For Justice"
Five years ago today, Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was shot dead in broad daylight on the sidewalk of a busy Istanbul street, outside the offices of his newspaper, Agos. This Tuesday, 17 January, the murder trial finally came to a close, with one of the 19 defendants receiving a life sentence on an incitement conviction, and two sentenced to twelve and a half years for assisting murder. Aside from a couple of other convictions, all minor, the decision was predominated by acquittals. Most significantly, all defendants were acquitted on charges of belonging to an armed organisation, since, the court ruled, there was no criminal organisation to speak of. The gunman, who was seventeen at the time of the crime, had been sentenced to 22 years imprisonment by a juvenile court last year.
Hrant Dink’s murder was the culminating point of a persecution campaign that can be traced back to February 2004, when he published claims to the effect that Sabiha Gökçen, the adopted daughter of Atatürk and the first woman war pilot of the Turkish Republic, was of Armenian descent. Dink’s claim provoked a public statement from the Chief of Staff, the highest echelon of the Turkish army. A few days later he was summoned to the Istanbul Governor’s Office and “warned” by two people who were introduced to him as “friends” of the then Deputy Governor. Three and a half years after the assassination, the Intelligence Service admitted that these two people were its operatives. (Continued)
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
You are warmly invited to the first Kings College, London, Law and Political Thought seminar of the next term, which will take place at 5.30pm on Thursday 19 January in the new year. Dr Illan Rua Wall (Oxford Brookes) will be giving a paper entitled ”Unworking Sovereign Consensus – Tunisia & the Critical Legal Theory of Dissensus”.
Dr Wall is a senior lecturer at Oxford Brookes University. He is a critical legal theorist, author of the recently-published Human Rights and Constituent Power and co-editor of the forthcoming collection New Critical Legal Thinking. The seminar will be held in Room S3.05 of the Strand Building, King’s College London.
Please contact Hayley Gibson (hayley DOT gibson AT kcl DOT ac DOT uk)
On March 10 and 11, the Kent Critical Law Society will host its first annual conference, ‘Equality – Are We There Yet?’ at Keynes College, at the University of Kent at Canterbury. The conference is student-led and will attract practitioners, law students, academics and interested members of the public from all over the UK. In line with Kent Law School’s tradition of critical legal education, the purpose of the conference is to explore current issues in equalities law and to place them in their social and economic context. The conference will feature plenaries on race, gender and the economic crisis. Plenary speakers will include advocates of alternatives to the economics of austerity such as James Meadway of the New Economics Foundation and Karen Chouhan of Equanomics, as well as lawyers who have been involved in recent important protests such as Matthew Varnham of Occupy LSX and Keith Lomax, solicitor for the residents of Dale Farm. Other speakers include Hicham Yezza, now of Ceasefire magazine, Mark Stephens (lawyer for Julian Assange), Karon Monaghan QC of Matrix Chambers, Corinna Ferguson of Liberty, Pragna Patel of Southall Black Sisters, Ann Furedi of BPAS and Lord Navnit Dholakia. The conference promises two days of debate, topical discussion and a great KLS welcome.
Tickets are £7 for students and £15 for professionals. 33 subsidised accommodation places have been reserved for student delegates. For further details, and to book a ticket or a bed, email conference@kentcls.org.
The call for papers is open until February 1. Proposals for papers (200 word abstracts) and panels should be sent to conference@kentcls.org.
The picture is of the actor Edwin Forrest in the costume of Jack Cade, leader of the Kentish Revolt.He appears in Shakespeare’s Henry VI (Part 2), responding to Dick the Butcher’s “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” with “Nay, that I mean to do”.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Author: Pablo Bustinduy (Translated on Cunning Hired Knaves, Original in Spanish here)
The elections came, that far off dance, and some voices are wondering what that whole commotion in the squares was about. they look for concrete facts, transformed realities, immediate horizons to get one’s bearings in the economic and social state of exception that is on the way. What they find is not enough for them, and it is practically impossible to get rid of the suspicion that, once again, all has been for nothing or almost nothing. But there are many reasons for silencing this fear and for giving things their proper perspective. Firstly: one always thinks better amid the shadows, in the dark landscapes and the time-outs.
The days in May were something beyond measure. There was no cause to explain the effect, nor story capable of interpreting its meaning once and for all. On the inside, this indefiniteness was lived with euphoria, as a diffuse place in which one could reposition, give a new name to problems, and to go back to thinking things anew. From the outside it was lived with anguish. Sol placed a mirror in front of a society and a State that have lost the capacity to imagine their own future and which concentrate on covering the leaks so that the boat stays afloat without having the slightest idea about what direction to take, about where they want to go. This is why those who did not understand what was happening repeated the same questions like automatons, who are they, what do they want, what are they proposing: these were not questions, but ways of confessing that there are no answers. In a similar way, the voices that now try to measure 15-M based on its results (what has been achieved, what has been changed) run the risk of reproducing this same logic. They look at the finger instead of the empty space that surrounds it. (Continued)
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Author: José Guillermo Fouce (Translated on Cunning Hired Knaves, original in Spanish here)
The German writer Nemeitz published, in 1718, a book about Paris with “faithful instructions for travellers of standing”. One of his pieces of advice is as follows: “I do not advise anyone to walk through the city amid the dark night. Because, although the round or the guard on horseback might patrol the whole of Paris to prevent disorder, there are many things that it does not see.. the Seine, which crosses the city, must carry with it a multitude of dead bodies, which it washes up downstream. As such, it is better not to spend too much time in any one place and withdraw to one’s home at a good hour”. Our fears, our nightmares, always bear a historical and contextual load and they have always been a political weapon of the first order.
Fear and its political uses can help us understand many of the things that happen in this world we inhabit, fear has power to change the world, as does hope. Fear is a highly powerful weapon that neoliberalism (which is undoubtedly much more than an economic theory) has been promoting and wielding for a long time, as one of the key frames of interpretation for understanding reality and defining it (Lakoff)
The present fear is, however, a liquid fear, diffuse, in the expression of Zygmunt Bauman, and it transmits to us that it is best to hide away without any plan for a clear response since we are unsure of the threats. Let us take up the reins, they advise us, because it is difficult to combat against fears that are scarcely tangible.
(Continued)
STREAMS
