This essay considers recent debates about an alleged anti-Africa bias at the International Criminal Court and the announced withdrawal of several African states. It looks at international lawyers' responses to these d... more abstractThis essay considers recent debates about an alleged anti-Africa bias at the International Criminal Court and the announced withdrawal of several African states. It looks at international lawyers' responses to these developments, considering some of the common defences against charges of bias, before suggesting that the African-bias debate in fact distracts from more fundamental problems with the ICC.

Criminal Law, International Law, International Criminal Law, International Security, Africa, and 8 more

Publication Name: Critical Legal Thinking

This article considers the origins and evolution of the International Criminal Court, examining the context of the court's establishment, the motives of the states that set it up and the record of its operations to da... more abstractThis article considers the origins and evolution of the International Criminal Court, examining the context of the court's establishment, the motives of the states that set it up and the record of its operations to date. Tracing the ICC's geopolitical tacking through a decade of imperial warfare, it argues that the court's selective and highly politicized interventions have operated to reproduce one-sided narratives of complex conflicts, demonizing some perpetrators while shielding, and legitimating, imperial powers: less a tool of international justice than the judicial concomitant to Western intervention.

Law, Criminal Law, International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies, Human Rights Law, and 15 more

Journal Name: New Left Review, No. 85 (Jan/Feb 2014)

The article engages in an ideology critique of international criminal law texts and discourse, drawing on a theoretical framework developed by critical legal studies scholars in order to interrogate, in a different ju... more abstractThe article engages in an ideology critique of international criminal law texts and discourse, drawing on a theoretical framework developed by critical legal studies scholars in order to interrogate, in a different jurisprudential context, the assumptions undergirding contemporary international criminal law (ICL) scholarship. It argues that the triumphalism surrounding ICL and its adequacy to deal with conflict and violence ignores the factors and forces—including specific international legal interventions in countries’ political- economies—that shape or even help establish the environment from which such conflict and violence emanates. In uncritically celebrating ICL and equating it with a pacific international rule of law, ICL scholarship risks shaping passive acquiescence in the status quo and discouraging more through-going efforts to address the systemic forces underlying instances of violence, including political-economic forces shaped by international legal institutions.

Criminology, Law, Criminal Law, Criminal Justice, International Relations, and 25 more

More Info: Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2261148

Journal Name: Leiden Journal of International Law, Vol. 26(3), 2013

A review of Amedeo Policante’s 'The Pirate Myth: Genealogies of an Imperial Concept', a book that ‘rescues the pirate from the marginalia of international relations, throwing a light on his role as empire’s constituti... more abstractA review of Amedeo Policante’s 'The Pirate Myth: Genealogies of an Imperial Concept', a book that ‘rescues the pirate from the marginalia of international relations, throwing a light on his role as empire’s constitutive antagonist. While his juridical identity may have changed, the pirate has nonetheless remained a constant lodestar in a fluid seascape of imperial violence.’

International Relations, International Law, Maritime History, International Criminal Law, International Security, and 21 more

Publication Name: Radical Philosophy, No 195, pp.61-63 (2016)

An extended interview with Duncan Kennedy about his intellectual and political formation, contributions to legal theory, the history of Critical Legal Studies, and further topics including Marxism, legal indeterminacy... more abstractAn extended interview with Duncan Kennedy about his intellectual and political formation, contributions to legal theory, the history of Critical Legal Studies, and further topics including Marxism, legal indeterminacy, and the globalisation of legal thought.

Critical Theory, Intellectual History, Law, Jurisprudence, Comparative Law, and 19 more

Journal Name: Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, Vol. 10, 2015

Development thinking in the past two decades has explicitly embraced law as an engine of development. This legal turn has been accompanied by a dramatic expansion of efforts to measure and quantify legal systems. Agai... more abstractDevelopment thinking in the past two decades has explicitly embraced law as an engine of development. This legal turn has been accompanied by a dramatic expansion of efforts to measure and quantify legal systems. Against claims that legal indicators are neutral, technical descriptions of the legal world, this article argues that legal indicators do not merely reflect legal reality; their construction and deployment are central to the continuing diffusion of neo-liberalism as development common sense. The article considers the two most prominent projects to quantify law in the service of economic development—the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators and Doing Business indicators— and argues that these indicators reproduce a narrow neo- liberal conception of law as a platform for private business and entrepreneurial activity and institutional support for a system of laissez faire markets.

Law, Comparative Law, Development Economics, Political Economy, Development Studies, and 12 more

Journal Name: Third World Quarterly, Vol 34 (2013)

Long cherished by liberal political philosophers, today the rule of law is increasingly viewed as a necessary requirement, or even silver bullet, for economic development. The past decade has seen the rise of a verita... more abstractLong cherished by liberal political philosophers, today the rule of law is increasingly viewed as a necessary requirement, or even silver bullet, for economic development. The past decade has seen the rise of a veritable industry—multilateral development banks, government development agencies, and nongovernmental aid organizations—committed to promoting the rule of law through legal and judicial reform in developing countries. This Article considers the emergence of a new rule of law orthodoxy within contemporary devel- opment theory and, in particular, the World Bank’s development model. It asks how and why the Bank has embraced the rule of law discourse, and offers a brief genealogy of the rule of law within the Bank’s theorizing. It argues that the Bank’s interest in law was primarily a response to the critique and failure of its neoliberal policies and identifies the new discourse’s affinities with the rise of New Institutional Economics and “good governance” in the 1990s. Under the Bank’s view, the law’s value for economic development lies in its ability to provide a stable investment environment and the predictability necessary for markets to operate. The role of law is reduced to the facilitation of utility maximizing exchange and optimal market allocation, a view that informs many of the Bank’s specific law reform projects. More a rhetorical shift than a fundamental break in development theorizing, the Bank’s turn to law actually undergirds many continued neoliberal assumptions and masks a continuation of neoliberalism’s core tenets. The new discourse is attractive precisely because it provides strong ideological support for the neoliberal agenda.

Law, Political Economy, Development Studies, and Heterodox Economics

Journal Name: Harvard International Law Journal, Vol. 52, No. 1, pp. 287-319 (2011)

This paper reflects on the first ten years of Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, considering how that journal's project has taken shape and taking stock of the journal’s strengths, as well as its failures and... more abstractThis paper reflects on the first ten years of Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, considering how that journal's project has taken shape and taking stock of the journal’s strengths, as well as its failures and shortcomings.

Law, Legal Education, Marxism, Critical Legal Theory, Legal Theory, and 1 more

Journal Name: Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, Vol. 9(1), 2015

This chapter considers debates about politics in the context of international criminal trials. Commentators tend to locate politics in the instrumentalisation of criminal justice or in deformed process and procedure. ... more abstractThis chapter considers debates about politics in the context of international criminal trials. Commentators tend to locate politics in the instrumentalisation of criminal justice or in deformed process and procedure. Both positions, the chapter argues, share a faith that ICL and international criminal trials can and should be free of politics. Such discourses reproduce the image of the trial as an apolitical, neutral institution, masking, and placing beyond scrutiny, the ways in which even the supposedly neutral trial operates politically. These discourses, the chapter shows, function as ideological manoeuvres through which the deeper political meaning of the trial is obfuscated.

Law, Criminal Law, Criminal Justice, Peace and Conflict Studies, Violence, and 16 more

More Info: Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2405389

Publication Name: Christine Schwöbel (ed.), Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law – An Introduction (Routledge 2014)

Law, Criminal Law, Criminal Justice, Peace and Conflict Studies, Violence, and 13 more

Publication Date: 2015

Publication Name: Ugo Mattei & John D. Haskell (eds), Research Handbook on Political Economy and Law (Edward Elgar, 2015)

The conference organisers invite paper proposals for a transdisciplinary conference marking the 50th anniversary of the 1966 Tricontinental Conference. The conference aims to reflect on the Tricontinental’s enduring p... more abstractThe conference organisers invite paper proposals for a transdisciplinary conference marking the 50th anniversary of the 1966 Tricontinental Conference. The conference aims to reflect on the Tricontinental’s enduring political, legal and economic importance, while also bringing together academics and activists to reflect on broader issues of imperialism and anti-­imperial resistance.

History, Marxism, International Law, Postcolonial Studies, Revolutions, and 23 more