Critical Legal Thinking

Seven Theses on Human Rights: (3) Neoliberal Capitalism & Voluntary Imperialism

Costas Douzinas — Thu, 23 May 2013 08:39:14 +0000

Why and how did this combination of neoliberal capitalism and humanitarianism emerge? Capitalism has always moralized the economy and applied a gloss of righteousness to profit-making and unregulated competition precisely because it is so hard to believe. From Adam Smith’s ‘hidden hand’ to the assertion that unrestrained egotism promotes the common good or that beneficial effects ‘trickle down’ if the rich get even bigger tax breaks, capitalism has consistently tried to claim the moral high ground.1 Similarly, human rights and their dissemination are not simply the result of the liberal or charitable disposition of the West. The predominantly negative meaning of freedom as the absence of external constraints — a euphemism for keeping state regulation of the economy at a minimum – has dominated the Western conception of human rights and turned them into the perfect companion of neoliberalism. Global moral and civic rules are the necessary companion of the globalization of economic production and consumption, of the completion of world capitalism that follows neoliberal dogmas. Over the last 30 years, we have witnessed, without much comment, the creation of global legal rules regulating the world capitalist economy, including rules on investment, trade, aid, and intellectual property. Robert Cooper has [...]

‘Adjunct’ Faculty in the Neoliberal University

Ivan Evans — Wed, 22 May 2013 04:30:46 +0000

Chris from Remaking the University writes to introduce a post by Ivan Evans, professor of sociology at UC San Diego. Tarak Barkawi’s opinion piece, “The Neoliberal Assault on Academia,” produced a long discussion on several lists because of its claim that faculty have played a central role in shifting their universities towards revenue metrics and managerial assessments of intellectual value. His example is the arrival of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the UK, which has molted into the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Though pushed by the Thatcher government, the RAE was accepted and applied by the UK professoriat. Its successor, the five-yearly REF, Prof. Barkawi writes, “completely dominates UK academic life. It determines hiring patterns, career progression, and status and duties within departments. It organises the research projects of individual scholars so as to meet arbitrary deadlines. It has created space for a whole class of paid consultants who rank scholarship and assist in putting together REF returns. UK academics regularly talk about each other’s work in terms of whether this or that book or article is ‘three star’ or ‘four star’.” Prof. Barkawi argues that UK universities are now run by managers who see their jobs not as furnishing [...]

Seven Theses on Human Rights: (2) Power, Morality & Structural Exclusion

Costas Douzinas — Tue, 21 May 2013 05:00:01 +0000

We will explore the strong internal connection between these superficially antagonistic principles, at the point of their emergence in the late 18th century here and in the post-1989 order in the next part. The religious grounding of humanity was undermined by the liberal political philosophies of early modernity. The foundation of humanity was transferred from God to (human) nature. Human nature has been interpreted as an empirical fact, a normative value, or both. Science has driven the first approach. The mark of humanity has been variously sought in language, reason or evolution. Man as species existence emerged as a result of legal and political innovations. The idea of humanity is the creation of humanism, with legal humanism at the forefront. Indeed the great 18th century revolutions and declarations paradigmatically manifest and helped construct modern universalism. And yet, at the heart of humanism, humanity remained a strategy of division and classification. We can follow briefly this contradictory process, which both proclaims the universal and excludes the local in the text of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the manifesto of modernity. Article 1, the progenitor of normative universalism, states that ‘men are born and remain free and [...]

The Reactionary ‘Freeman-on-the-land’ and a Political Fracture

Richard McAleavey — Mon, 20 May 2013 05:57:18 +0000

The Irish Times reports over 100 ‘Freeman’-style arguments used in the Irish courts this year, citing the Law Society Gazette [for the traditional legal response see here and here]. Last Tuesday, Francis Cullen (36) was sentenced to another three months in Mountjoy Prison for refusing to recognise the court’s jurisdiction. He claimed, according to the Irish Times report, that he was ‘a private, sovereign person’. The Law Society of Ireland ‘advises anyone in financial difficulty to get advice from someone who is trained in and knowledgeable about the law as set down in the Constitution and by the Oireachtas and the courts’, according to the Irish Times, which also cites a barrister pointing out the harmful and abusive dimension to providing vulnerable people with legal advice that is false. 100 court cases over the last 12 months seems like a big number to me. It would also be interesting to know how many people planning on using such arguments eventually thought better of doing so, before their case came before the courts. I don’t think it’s too hard to imagine the appeal of a freeman-style argument. Someone living in a situation of paralysing indebtedness can feel their life is falling apart. [...]

Seven Theses on Human Rights: (1) The Idea of Humanity

Costas Douzinas — Thu, 16 May 2013 09:27:16 +0000

Thesis 1: The idea of ‘humanity’ has no fixed meaning and cannot act as the source of moral or legal rules. Historically, the idea has been used to classify people into the fully human, the lesser human, and the inhuman. Let me have a brief look at its history. Pre-modern societies did not develop a comprehensive idea of the human species. Free men were Athenians or Spartans, Romans or Carthaginians, but not members of humanity; they were Greeks or barbarians, but not humans. According to classical philosophy, a teleologically determined human nature distributes people across social hierarchies and roles and endows them with differentiated characteristics. The word humanitas appeared for the first time in the Roman Republic as a translation of the Greek word paideia. It was defined as eruditio et institutio in bonas artes (the closest modern equivalent is the German Bildung). The Romans inherited the concept from Stoicism and used it to distinguish between the homo humanus, the educated Roman who was conversant with Greek culture and philosophy and was subjected to the jus civile, and the homines barbari, who included the majority of the uneducated non-Roman inhabitants of the Empire. Humanity enters the western lexicon as an attribute and predicate of homo, as a term of separation and distinction.

#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics

Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:28:32 +0000

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 in the birth of the nation-state, the rise of capitalism, and a Twentieth Century of unprecedented wars. Most significant is the breakdown of the planetary climatic system. In time, this threatens the continued existence of the present global human population. Though this is the most critical of the threats which face humanity, a series of lesser but potentially equally destabilising problems exist alongside and intersect with it. Terminal resource depletion, especially in water and energy reserves, offers the prospect of mass starvation, collapsing economic paradigms, and new hot and cold wars. Continued financial crisis has led governments to embrace the paralyzing death spiral policies of austerity, privatisation of social welfare services, mass unemployment, and stagnating wages. Increasing automation in production processes including ‘intellectual labour’ is evidence of the secular crisis of capitalism, soon to render it incapable of maintaining current standards of living for even the former middle classes of the global north.

Homegrown Terror: The Boston Marathon’s Media Coverage

Laurie Rodrigues — Wed, 08 May 2013 09:47:32 +0000

In the wake of the Boston Marathon explosions (15 April 2013), the Obama Department of Justice’s treatment of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—American citizen and primary terror suspect—gained significant attention from liberal media. Dzhokhar will be charged as a civilian for using weapons of mass destruction; he was provided legal representation and Mirandized at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital. Reportedly, he refuses to cooperate with questioning. He has been moved from Beth Israel in Boston to Devens Federal Medical Center (operated by the DOJ’s Federal Bureau of Prisons), which specializes in treating inmates who require long-term medical and/ or psychiatric care. Since his move to Devens, there have been suggestions that negotiations are currently taking place, potentially eliminating the death penalty as one of Dzhokhar’s potential sentences (if he is found or pleads guilty). However, it is unclear whether this offer was made by investigators, in hopes of gaining intelligence from Dzhokhar, or if the bargain was offered by Dzhokhar’s lawyers. Indeed, there have been some astute questions posed in the press, particularly by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian, concerning whether or not the above story is entirely true. Greenwald’s concern refers to whether federal officials, who questioned Dzhokhar prior to his being [...]

CfP: Precariat — Abstracts 20 May, Full Articles 18 Aug 2013

Admin — Tue, 07 May 2013 15:10:15 +0000

In his recent work, Guy Standing has identified a new class which has emerged from neo-liberal restructuring with, he argues, the revolutionary potential to change the world: the precariat. This is ‘a class-in-the-making, internally divided into angry and bitter factions’ consisting of ‘a multitude of insecure people, living bits-and-pieces lives, in and out of short-term jobs, without a narrative of occupational development, including millions of frustrated educated youth who do not like what they see before them, millions of women abused in oppressive labour, growing numbers of criminalised tagged for life, millions being categorised as “disabled” and migrants in their hundreds of millions around the world. They are denizens; they have a more restricted range of social, cultural, political and economic rights than citizens around them’. In this issue, we wish to explore the nature, shape and context of precariat, evaluating the internal consistency and applications of the concept. Among others, we welcome submissions examining the following topics in relation to precariat: — changes in the sociology of social classes — the relationship between precariat and multitude — means by which precariat might become a ‘class for itself’ — cultural diversity and conflict (including through engagement with Samuel Huntington and Dieter Senghaas) [...]

CfP: Understanding Neoliberal Legality, Oxford University, 21 June 2013

Honor Brabazon — Tue, 07 May 2013 07:28:41 +0000

Whilst neoliberal institutional and economic reforms have attracted substantial scholarly attention in recent decades, the role of law in the neoliberal story has been relatively neglected. Yet law, broadly understood, features in various prominent aspects of the content, form, and mode of the neoliberal project and of efforts to resist it. This day-long workshop at the University of Oxford will draw together established and emerging scholars researching various aspects of the role of law in the construction and contestation of neoliberalism.The questions and dilemmas to be interrogated in the workshop’s discussions include the following: • In what ways has neoliberal restructuring shaped and been shaped by established legislative, judicial, and penal processes? • How is law engaged by the neoliberal state in its relations with dissent? • To what extent have the sites at which social change can be pursued been altered by neoliberal policy and ideology, or remained the same? • What are the possibilities and challenges facing political groups or movements that choose to engage the law in neoliberal times? What about those that choose to break the law? • How has the neoliberal period clarified or complicated our understanding of the nature of law and of liberal legality? The range of scholarship addressing aspects of these important questions at the nexus of neoliberalism [...]

The Lacanian Trials

HW — Mon, 06 May 2013 05:30:44 +0000

The 30th anniversary of Lacan’s death in September 2011 was marked by an “intellectual dispute,” one which was not settled in the sphere of ideas or public academic debate, but in a defamation trial in the French criminal courts. While a still on-going war of petitions and lawsuits is partly informed by individual rivalries, the juridical scope of the Lacanians’ feuds provides interesting reading with Lacan’s life, his teaching and his thought. In the initial trial of January 11th 2012, the “plaintiffs” were Judith Miller, Lacan’s daughter from his second marriage with Sylvia Bataille, and Jacques-Alain Miller, also known as JAM, Lacan’s son-in-law and legal “executor” of his (intellectual) property. The defendants: Elisabeth Roudinesco, also known as Lacan’s biographer, and Seuil, publisher of Lacan’s work since 1966. Both the biographer and the publisher were found guilty. JAM reproached the Seuil’s senior editor Olivier Bétourné with intentionally excluding him from publicity events on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Lacan’s death.