Introduction
Legal critique in the age of neoliberalism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 14970781 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Connal Parsley (Kent Law School, Canterbury, UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 385-392 |
| Publication date | 2018-10-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Griffith Law Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1038-3441 • E-ISSN: 1839-4205 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10383441.2018.1795988 |
| OpenAlex | W3047199856 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 15 |
The papers gathered in this special issue began their lives as plenary presentations at the 2016 UK Critical Legal Conference, hosted at Kent Law School by the editors of the special issue and a committee of Kent Law School colleagues.This conference was arguably the 30 th anniversary of the first CLC, also held at Kent, in 1986.The theme of the 2016 conference, 'Turning Points', was designed to provoke and accommodate a plurality of critical (legal) reflections on the specificity of the contemporary political situation.If the conference theme may now seem slightly prescient-having been decided well before June's Brexit referendum and November's US presidential election-it is worth remembering that an air of change, upheaval and crisis already prevailed.The European migrant crisis was at its peak. 2 The worsening impacts of the Global Financial Crisis and Eurozone Crisis continued to be felt.Debt, social and economic precarity, polarised public discourse and the transformative effects of new technologies were already inescapable facts.Being located in Kent, at 'the UK's European University', the 'centrality' of Europe and its legal, political and intellectual traditions-and their constitutive relations with their 'others'-were already at the front of our minds.Far from being prescient, the conference committee was as surprised as anyone by the results of that year's fateful referenda, and the 'turning points' they will forever be taken to mark.If anything, the coincidence of conference theme and political events speaks less to the novelty of 2016's referenda, and more to the continuities that they made visible: deeper questions about the political and cultural imaginaries of both the UK and USA as nations (or empires).Their familiar clusters of social, economic, political and legal problems (immigration, (ethno)nationalism, and sovereignty, to name just one) were perhaps merely given new faces in the form of post-2016 populisms, echoes of fascism, and the effects of new media technologies.For critical legal scholarly traditions, these recent events have offered new spurs to consider the interaction of legality and legal rules with the operation of political, governmental and economic power.The nature of that interaction has always been a matter of fundamental significance for the liberal legal project, as well as its critics-from the earliest Marxist approaches, right through to today's cresting (or breaking?)neoliberal wave.Our interest was not at all in determining the new truth of the relation between law and the political, but rather in reflecting on how the present moment affects the pursuit of something like a critical legal project.Contemporary conditions are never separable from the critical impulse and the shape of its enterprise: in each moment, they provoke it, and give it its object, whilst also conditioning and constraining it, and suggesting the form it might need to take in order to react well to shifting configurations and uses of law.As understood through the Critical Legal Conference-and the so-called 'BritCrit' critical legal movement more generally-that impulse even at the best of times has been marked by a distinct lack of instructions about how to proceed; no determinate disciplinary statute or scholarly methodology.Its communities are inoperative or unavowable, its knowledges devalued in relation to the discourses they address.Critical legal work is a 'minor' enterprise (to borrow a note recently re-struck by Chris Tomlins, through Peter Goodrich and Panu Minkkinen); located partially within and partially without (or beyond) law and legal discourse, dependent upon but counter to the institutions that give it its privileged location and identity, its objects, and a large part of its conceptual vocabulary
Law and economics · Legal service · Neoliberalism (international relations · Political science · Project commissioning · Publishing · Sociology · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Law · Law in Society and Culture
The Politics of Legality in a Neoliberal Age
The Limits of Neoliberalism
Are We Out of Time? Thinking about Neoliberalism and Fascism in an Age of Radical Transition
Forms of Authority Beyond the Neoliberal State
A Short History of the British Critical Legal Conference or, the Responsibility of the Critic
The new neoliberal subjects? Young/er academics’ constructions of professional identity
The limits of neo-liberalism. Authority, sovereignty and the logic of competition
Neoliberalism, the public sphere, and a public good
Brief History of Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism as discourse
Younger academics' constructions of 'authenticity', 'success' and professional identity
Divine Management
Undoing the Demos
Neoliberalism in Action
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |