Critical Legal Teaching

Critical Legal

Justice

Justice

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Justice is a fundamental principle of law and political theory, often understood as underpinning the fair distribution of rights, responsibilities, and resources. In classical legal thought, justice remains mainly grounded in a liberal-legalist framework, which conceptualises it through normative ideas such as fairness, equality before the law, and the impartial application of rules (Rawls 1971, 2001). This perspective equates justice mainly with individual responsibility, formal legal...

Emergency

Emergency

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Emergency is a key constitutional concept that is operative across constitutional orders across the world, in various forms ranging from written constitutional provisions especially devised for addressing situations of crisis, to articulated constitutional or purely institutional practices. Traditionally, emergency has been theorised as a matter of international communis opinio as a legal mechanism that is declared when states face a situation of ‘public emergency which threatens the...

An Introduction to Critical Approaches to Human Rights 

An Introduction to Critical Approaches to Human Rights 

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There are a wide variety of different critical responses to human rights, spanning over 250 years, from Olympe de Gouges’ feminist critique of the rights of men and Edmond Burke’s critique of abstract universalism; to the way the Haitian slave revolution shows the racial undertones of rights or Marx’s analysis of human rights as the rights of ‘egoistic man’. Increasingly after WWII, and particularly after the success of anticolonial struggle and US President Jimmy Carter’s new foreign policy,...