[This is the first in a series of posts comprising a symposium on Christine Schwöbel-Patel‘s recently published book,Marketing Global Justice: The Political Economy of International Criminal Law (2021).] In an important 1990 article on the international legal academy in Nazi Germany, Detlev Vagts noted how a survival mechanism amongst scholars fearful…

The twentieth century began with all of the world’s most powerful states jointly invading and occupying northern China in the name of economic, legal, and civilisational ‘order’.1 In 1899, rural peasants and others at the margins of the increasingly-Western dominated Qing polity rose up to expel foreigners, with sporadic episodes of violence…

Reviewed: Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2019), 432 pp. I. According to the Marxian critique of the social-contractual tradition, the latter is ahistorical. Whether through recourse to a ‘state of nature’ or to an ‘original…

Reviewed: Laure Guirguis (ed) Arab Lefts: Histories and Legacies, 1950s–1970s. Edinburgh University Press, 2020, 312 pp. There has been renewed interest in the long 1960s over the last few years, not least spurred by the anniversary, in 2018, of the 1968 global uprisings.1 What is remarkable about this interest is not simply the attempt to re-visit…

At midnight on the first of January, it hit the news that President Erdoğan had appointed a new rector of Boğaziçi University, one of Turkey’s most prestigious universities. It soon emerged that the newly appointed rector, Melih Bulu, had intimate ties to the ruling AKP government and had campaigned unsuccessfully to be an AKP nominee for member…

The most instructive fact about 6 January 2021 is not the mini-rebellion inside the Capitol. Rather, it is that only 30 000 to 40 000 of the 74 million who voted for Donald Trump on 3 November, traveled to Washington to attend a peaceful rally to demonstrate their continuing support for him—a city that had seen countless progressive demonstrations…

[This post appears concurrently at Marx & Philosophy Review of Books. For Legal Form’s symposium on Igor Shoikhedbrod’s recently published book, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality and Rights (2019), including posts by Mai Taha, Dom Taylor, Amy Bartholomew, and Christine Sypnowich as well as a response by…

Otto Kirchheimer’s complete works have recently been assembled in a multi-volume series. The fourth volume, Politische Justiz und Wandel der Rechtsstaatlichkeit [Political Justice and Change in the Rule of Law], will be of special interest to readers of Legal Form. Rob Hunter interviewed two of the volume’s editors—Lisa Klingsporn and Christiane…

Otto Kirchheimer’s complete works have recently been assembled in a multi-volume series. The fourth volume, Politische Justiz und Wandel der Rechtsstaatlichkeit [Political Justice and Change in the Rule of Law], will be of special interest to readers of Legal Form. Rob Hunter interviewed two of the volume’s editors—Lisa Klingsporn and Christiane…

In the early 1990s, the “end of history” and the “victory of democracy” constituted a certainty of mainstream scientific thought. The progress of democracy was measured numerically. “So many democracies, despite their imperfections, have taken the place of authoritarian regimes”, mainstream views argued. [1] On the one hand, the “dictatorial…

On 11 February 2021, in the midst of intense contestation and mass demonstrations, Act 4777/2021 was enacted by the Greek Parliament, with 166 votes being cast in favour (the MPs voting in favour belong to the centre-right neoliberal ruling party New Democracy and the far-right racist party “Greek Solution”) and 132 against. The new law on universities…

[This post reviews Zoe Adams’ recently published Labour and the Wage: A Critical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).] Exploring the turbulent journey of the legal concept of the wage, as well as the practices associated with it, Zoe Adams’ Labour and the Wage: A Critical Perspective introduces, at long last, the question of legal…

In what sense is it possible to speak of a revolutionary tradition? And from where do such traditions derive, since revolution is – at least by certain lights – quintessentially a moment of rupture? The apparent novelty of revolution is, of course, belied by the word’s etymology, which should put one in mind of the turning of history’s (or fortune’s)…

Reviewed: Christopher Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History. Princeton University Press, 2020. The last year has witnessed an extensive public conversation, from the 1619 Project in the New York Times to protests in the streets, about American historical memory. What stories do we tell about the past—especially when it comes…