ABSTRACT

New Critical Legal Thinking articulates the emergence of a stream of critical legal theory which is directly concerned with the relation between law and the political. The early critical legal studies claim that all law is politics is displaced with a different and more nuanced theoretical arsenal. Combining grand theory with a concern for grounded political interventions, the various contributors to this book draw on political theorists and continental philosophers in order to engage with current legal problematics, such as the recent global economic crisis, the Arab spring and the emergence of biopolitics. The contributions instantiate the claim that a new and radical political legal scholarship has come into being: one which critically interrogates and intervenes in the contemporary relationship between law and power.

chapter |7 pages

Introduction

Law, politics and the political

part |80 pages

Resistance, dissensus and the subject

chapter |21 pages

Human rights: confronting governments?

Michel Foucault and the right to intervene

chapter |14 pages

Stasis Syntagma

The names and types of resistance

chapter |21 pages

A different constituent power

Agamben and Tunisia

chapter |22 pages

Para-protest

Reading a parody of police gesture as political protest with Giorgio Agamben

part |89 pages

The state, violence and biopolitics

chapter |21 pages

The distribution of death

Notes towards a bio-political theory of criminal law

chapter |16 pages

Disassembling legal form

Ownership and the racial body

chapter |17 pages

Being, nothing, becoming

Hegel and the legal order

chapter |22 pages

Faith and resignation

A journey through international law

chapter |11 pages

Economy or law?

part |62 pages

Futures of critical legal thinking