Critique, Ideology, and Aesthetics
Perhaps it is appropriate that critical legal theory—a genre of thought fascinated with contradictions and dedicated to unsettling orthodoxies—is itself in a contradictory and unsettled state today. Some of the …
From Promise to Threat in Language and Law
An art of speaking which does not seize hold of truth, does not exist and never will. –Phaedrus (260e) I feel I have slipped into this Symposium Issue to address …
Critical Legal Thought: The Case for a Jurisprudence of Distribution
Critique is the standard model of legal scholarship. The typical article or book circumscribes an aspect of the legal order, redescribes it as policy, criticizes the policy according to efficiency …
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L x A=W: On the Weight of Legal Norms
The Critical Legal Studies movement and the emerging Law and Political Economy Project both emphasize the way that legal rules and doctrines help both to constitute and to legitimize an …
From the Crisis of Critique to the Critique of Crisis
As I write these words, the East Coast of New South Wales (the most populous State in Australia) is being assailed with torrential rain that is likely to last for …
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Making the Critical Moves: A Top Ten in Progressive Legal Scholarship
Good people say that we must not flee, that to escape is not good, that it isn’t effective, and that one must work for reforms. But the revolutionary knows that …
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Past Prescient
Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.[1] Truth may not convince, knowledge passes in the act.[2] …
The Future of Facts: The Politics of Public Health and Medicine in Abortion Law
While a great deal of public scrutiny has focused on how information circulates through online outlets including Twitter and Facebook, less attention has been devoted to how more traditional institutions …
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Migrant Justice Now
I began drafting this Essay on the eve of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, not knowing its outcome. Some might argue that this is no time for critique, given the …
The Theory of Legal Characters
For decades, we took for granted that jurists just “spoke the law.” This was good news: the law, thanks to the continuous efforts of legal science to systematize it in …