Law’s Entities: Complexity, Plasticity and Justice

In the early twenty-first century, and looking beyond it, the landscapes of law’s operation are characterised by a growing degree of complexity and pressure. Law is called upon to coordinate relations in a world facing a significant complexities produced by a convergence between bio-technological developments capable of transforming the very conditions of life itself, climate-change pressures and the threat of the collapse of bio-diversity and eco-systems, and intensifying global inter-dependencies deepening vulnerability on a whole set of scales and measures

Three feminist critiques of varying feminist capitulations to crisis-hegemony

The seemingly intractable pull between the Scylla of 'resistance' and the Charybdis of 'compliance' and the agonistic dilemmas presented by the complexity and difficulty of positioning feminism in relation to them both is well-traced in these chapters by Dianne Otto, Julie Mertus and Maria Grahn-Farley. While a range of themes emerges from reflection on these nuanced and thoughtful chapters, at the heart of each, in different ways, the colonisation of certain emancipatory feminist projects and agendas by the crisis-driven post 9/11 international legal discourse emerges as a central concern, along with a set of related sub-themes: The traction (and inequality) of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic thought-worlds and actions; the pernicious effects of decontextualisation (either the transcendence or the 'emptying out' of context (including,worryingly, lived experience of violation)); the fragile potency of ground level viewpoint, action and perspective; the false totality of the securityhegemon; its liquid propagandism, and related concerns circling around co-opted feminist responses

Human rights, property and the search for ‘worlds other’

While some accounts of rights and property paradigms see property as an inherent incident of a colonizing form of human rights law and discourse, others draw out the contradictions between them, suggesting that human rights and property have opposing impulses towards inclusion and exclusion respectively. While not rejecting the insights of either of these positions, the author argues that a fundamental ambivalence lies at the heart of human rights law and discourse demonstrating both oppressive and emancipatory potential. This ambivalence is, the author argues, also internal to the Western property concept – a claim facilitating a renewed emphasis upon property's inclusory potential as an institutional foundation for a more eco-humane and vulnerability-responsive ordering of legal relations

Rights and property paradigms: Challenging the dominant construct hegemony

The interrelationship of (human) rights and property paradigms raises particularly profound questions when played out in respect of environmental claims. It is therefore no surprise that contributions to this edition invoke ontological and epistemological concerns fundamental to the unsettled interface between the mutable richness of living spatial and socio-cultural ecologies and the abrupt reductionisms so often imposed upon them by law. At the same time it speaks of the power and dominance of property paradigms that even the most critical analyses tend to seek reformulation of property’s parameters rather than its abandonment

Human rights and the environment: a tale of ambivalence and hope

This chapter argues that international environmental law and international human rights law—despite the existence of very real separations and tensions between them—show hopeful signs of progress in their relationship. Notwithstanding such hopeful signs, however, both human rights law and environmental law share underlying subject-object relations inimical to their stated aims. This reality, once acknowledged, might, with sufficient imagination, become the departure point for a reconfigured engagement between them and for their transformation

Climate justice involves more than a fair distribution of benefits and burdens: It requires radical, structural change

As part of our series on the Dahrendorf Symposium, Anna Grear writes on the concept of ‘climate justice’. Broadly speaking, climate justice incorporates a view of the effects of climate change as an ethical issue relating to principles such as social and environmental justice. She argues that climate justice is best illustrated by focusing on the nature of ‘climate injustice’, and that rather than simply requiring a fair distribution of the effects of climate change, climate justice will require radical structural change if it is to be realised in practice

Human rights and new horizons? thoughts towards a new juridical ontology

The much-lamented anthropocentrism of human rights is misleading. Human rights anthropocentrism is radically attenuated and reflects persistent patterns of intra- and inter-species injustice and binary subject-object relations inapt for 21st century crises and posthuman complexities. This article explores the possibility of re-imagining the “human” of human rights in the light of anti- and post-Cartesian analyses drawing—in particular—upon Merleau-Ponty and on new materialism. The article also seeks to re-imagine human rights themselves as responsibilized, injustice-sensitive claim-concepts emerging in the ‘midst of’ lively materialities and the uneven global dynamics of 21st century predicaments

“Mind the Gap”: One dilemma concerning the expansion of legal subjectivity in the age of globalisation’

Addressing the important idea of the legal subjectivity of a range of putative new rights-claimants,the author argues that globalisation needs to form the matrix within which debates concerning the rights of various new kinds of claimant is located, and that it is essential not to lose sight of the multitudes of persons, animals and living systems constructed as, in an important sense, 'outsiders' in relation to the globalising power structures of our age. The question of how we now construct a juridical order that is responsive, inclusive and possesses the plasticity to account for new and complex kinds of rights-holders needs to be rendered inseparable from the search for full juridical responsiveness to the visceral realities facing currently (and traditionally) excluded subjectivities

The curate, a cleft palate and ideological closure in the Abortion Act 1967 – time to reconsider the relationship between doctors and the abortion decision

'This article suggests that the recent case of Jepson v The Chief Constable of West Mercia Police Constabulary [2003] EWHC 3318 provides a timely invitation to reflect upon the degree to which the law on abortion inappropriately elevates the role of doctors in the abortion decision. The author argues that there is an identifiable ideological closure operative in abortion law, the roots of which lie in the conceptual foundations of the Abortion Act 1967 itself, particularly viewed through the lens of the 1966 Second Reading Debate when the House of Commons had the opportunity to consider the question most broadly and freely. She suggests that neither women's rights nor potential foetal rights received adequate consideration in the framing of the Abortion Act 1967 and that the over-medicalisation of the issue, evident then and arguably present in the Jepson case, is now ripe for challenge. She suggests the analytical utility of a rights-based analysis of abortion, while advocating the careful contextualisation of that analytical approach within the complex social realities of abortion. She suggests that abortion is an inadequately met challenge for law makers and suggests that the time is now ripe for renewed public debate.

Kathryn McNeilly, Human rights and radical social transformation: futurity, alterity, power [Review]

Kathryn McNeilly’s book, Human Rights and Radical Social Transformation: Futurity, Alterity, Power, offers extended reflection upon the 'not yet' of human rights and its promise for radical politics—a promise, which like the utopian end explored by Douzinas, is a restless, impossible principle of hope. McNeilly constructs an account of human rights emphasizing the persistence and significance of their not yet—a performative, agonistic leaning-forwardness—in which human rights are to be understood as a ceaseless grappling with the political, expressed through ineradicable tensions between power, vulnerability and alterity