Critical Legal Thinking

The abuse of UK anti-terror laws to proscribe direct action protest: The case of Palestine Action

Victor Kattan — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:13:41 +0000

The 13 February 2026 decision of the High Court inHuda Ammori v Secretary of State for the Home Department that the Home Secretary’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action was unlawful, provides a fascinating insight into the abuse of UK counterterrorism laws by public authorities to stifle legitimate dissent in the longstanding struggle to end international crimes in Palestine. […]

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Defending Animal Rescue as a Moral Injury to a Relational Self

Brianne Donaldson — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 08:20:12 +0000

As individuals participating in the open rescue of animals increasingly adopt strategies of civil disobedience and “voluntary prosecution,” courts are pressed to adjudicate the definition of intent itself within an anthropocentric legal structure that excludes animals from moral and juridical standing. These cases reveal the limits of existing legal categories including an animal’s right not […]

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Learning to be Surprised (Symposium)

Tarik Kochi — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 06:23:00 +0000

Val was a proper old-school scholar, interested in ideas for their own sake and driven to understand and respond to the injustices of the world. As a serious intellectual she was not interested in academic trends or popularity, but in working through a set of questions and problems – often with cigarette in hand. As […]

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The Wrong of Law and Marx’s Second Secret (Symposium)

Iaan Reynolds — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 06:20:00 +0000

I feel honored to have been invited to comment on Valerie Kerruish’s The Wrong of Law, a book bringing a great range of methodological approaches to bear on a problematic of great interest to me. The book’s focal point is the self-seriousness of legal discourse. It is a constitutive feature of law that it ‘thinks itself […]

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Surprising Law (Symposium)

Bert van Roermund — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 07:17:00 +0000

In one of the moving tributes to Valerie Kerruish posted on Critical Legal Thinking[1] shortly after her passing away, Emilios Christidoulidis wrote that “(h)er magnum opus The Wrong of Law, which she spent the last two decades of her life writing, remains devastatingly unfinished.” Its publication[2], with so much love and care besorgt by Uwe Petersen, will not change this, except […]

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The Foundational Wrong of Law (Symposium)

Editor S — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:33:00 +0000

Stephen Connelly There is an implicit assumption in jurisprudential reasoning that this reason, as form, is without inconsistency. Error is procedural: it results either from misrecognition of the ‘true’ law, from ignorance of the true facts, or from misapplication of the law to the facts. The practical syllogism is itself unassailable; what is wrong in the law […]

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The Vertigo of Self-Grounding (Symposium)

Esther Edelmann — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 07:14:00 +0000

There is an image by M.C. Escher in which a staircase rises in perfect geometrical order, each step aligned, each angle exact — yet the ascent loops back upon itself. The movement is continuous, coherent, even rigorous; what unsettles is not disorder but correspondence. One climbs, and finds oneself where one began. In The Wrong of […]

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Symposium on Kerruish’s magnum opus: The Wrong of Law

Stewart Motha — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:03:14 +0000

When Valerie Kerruish died in 2022, Critical Legal Thinking hosted a series of reflections from her former colleagues, friends, and collaborators. As recounted there, Valerie spent decades from the mid-1960s teaching law in Australia with an abiding concern for the dispossession of indigenous Australians and the unremitting violence they face. She then moved to Hamburg and founded, […]

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CfP: Decolonial comparative law and the informal/formal economy

Admin — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:49:22 +0000

The Decolonial Comparative Law project (DeCoLa) at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, in partnership with the Fondation Afric’Avenir, is inviting submissions that seek to rethink the divide between the formal and informal economy through a decolonial comparative legal approach for its upcoming conference workshop in May 2027. The DeCoLa programme […]

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Teaching as a revolutionary activity

Marina Veličković — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:52:04 +0000

Neoliberal universities as a place where radical thoughts come to wither away. We are living in bad times (admittedly, I struggle to remember the good times, but the current bad times do seem quite bad). And in bad times there is an impulse amongst decent people to try and find meaningful ways of resisting the badness around […]

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