Call For Papers: 2019 Critical Legal Studies Conference, September 12-14, 2019

From the emailbox:

The University of Perugia invites streams and papers for the 2019 Critical Legal Conference. The event will take place between September 12 and 14, 2019. The deadline for submission of abstracts is July 15th.

The theme of this year's conference is Alienation. More here from the conference website. 

Bhargavi on Manjula Padmanabhan's "Lights Out" @magnolialotus

Vasishta Bhargavi, RGM College of Engineering & Technology, has published The Marxist Analysis of Manjula Padmanabhan's 'Lights Out'. Here is the abstract.

The societal rules have been largely shaped by the male-dominated legislators and forces where there is a limited right to exist for a woman. The woman though married or unmarried or a prostitute the way the society looks at her is not changing though we are globalized. Indian women, in some ways, have also made some strides. Millions of women have joined the workforce. Leaders like the Prathibha Singh Patel, Sushma Swaraj, Anandiben are role models who show that women can rise to great heights. But one of the greatest tragedies in our country is that women are on their own when it comes to their safety. According to many studies, it’s understood that most of the rape cases of rape are never reported because of the stigma surrounding gang rape. Considering this wide scenario, this article touches on Indian women’s vulnerability with a Marxist approach. I have applied the Marxist approach to analyse literary text, Lights Out by Manjula Padmanabhan in Indian English Theatre. In her work, the author proposes the urgent need to address women’s subordinated position as they are subjected to different forms of discrimination. In this article, I have focused on difference issues such as gender discrimination, injustice, and fear of the law, police and judicial apathy. I conclude by suggesting recommendations for the improvement of women’s situation in India..

The full text is not available for download from SSRN.

Marxism and Normative Theory

Brian Leiter, University of Chicago, is publishing Why Marxism Still Does Not Need Normative Theory in Analyse und Kritik (2015). Here is the abstract.

Marx did not have a normative theory, that is, a theory that purported to justify, discursively and systematically, his normative opinions, to show them to be rationally obligatory or objectively valid. In this regard, Marx was obviously not alone: almost everyone, including those who lead what are widely regarded as exemplary “moral” lives, decide and act on the basis of normative intuitions and inclinations that fall far short of a theory. Yet self-proclaimed Marxists like G.A. Cohen and Jurgen Habermas have reintroduced a kind of normative theory into the Marxian tradition that Marx himself would have ridiculed. This essay defends Marx’s position and tries to explain the collapse of Western Marxism into bourgeois practical philosophy, i.e., philosophizing about what ought to be done that is unthreatening to capitalist relations of production (more precisely, practical philosophy that is addressed to individuals, that is primarily concerned with what to believe, and that is obsessed with moral trivialities). Part I argues that the Marxian account of revolution under capitalism presupposes only that the agents are instrumentally rational (and thus Marx is, for all important purposes, a Humean). Part II offers a kind of intellectual genealogy of the rise of bourgeois practical philosophy in America, England, and Europe, focusing, in particular, on Cohen and Habermas, but also Peter Singer. Various forms of intuitionism (Moore, Rawls) are central to the story in the Anglophone world, while the crucial event in the European context was the merely philosophical challenge to instrumental rationality launched by Horkheimer and brought to Kantian fruition by Habermas. Part III concludes with some speculative structural hypotheses about why Marxism should have collapsed into irrelevant normative theory over the last half-century, noting the political and legal purge of Marxists in both American and Germany, as well as the massive expansion of the university system and the premium placed on an appearance of a “method.”

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Link Between CLS and Marxism

Akbar Rasulov, University of Glasgow School of Law, is publishing CLS and Marxism: A History of an Affair in volume 5 of Transnational Legal Theory (2014). Here is the abstract.

This essay explores the relationship between the Critical Legal Studies movement and the Marxist tradition. What role did Marxism play in the formation of CLS’s ideological and theoretical horizons? What part was it assigned in the movement’s symbolic economy of discursive projects and practices? What sorts of critical challenges did CLS scholars mount against the Marxist legal-theoretic tradition and what kind of broader lessons can the Marxist tradition extract today from those criticisms? The essay starts by summarising the standard account of the relationship between CLS and Marxism that has historically developed within the CLS’s own internal discourse. It problematises a number of basic assumptions underlying this account before turning its attention to the examination of CLS’s (potential) contribution to the development of a new wave of the Marxist legal-theoretic enterprise.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A New Book On Justice and Injustice

New from Routledge



The Concept of Injustice
By Eric Heinze
Published October 24th 2012 by Routledge--218 pages

The Concept of Injustice challenges traditional Western justice theory. Thinkers from Plato and Aristotle through to Kant, Hegel, Marx and Rawls have subordinated the idea of injustice to the idea of justice. Misled by the word’s etymology, political theorists have assumed injustice to be the sheer, logical opposite of justice. Heinze summons ancient and early modern texts, philosophical and literary, with special attention to Shakespeare, to argue that injustice is not primarily the negation, failure or absence of justice. It is the constant product of regimes and norms of justice. Justice is not always the cure for injustice, and is often its cause.

Looking For Like-ness

Bernard E. Harcourt, University of Chicago Law School, is publising Radical Thought from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, Through Foucault, to the Present: Comments on Steven Lukes’ ‘In Defense of False Consciousness’ in the University of Chicago Legal Forum. Here is the abstract.

In his essay “In Defense of ‘False Consciousness’” and book, Power: A Radical View, Steven Lukes mounts a forceful defense of the idea of false consciousness; however, Lukes presents false consciousness and the notion of truth regimes as mutually exclusive. In this essay, I suggest that there are important family resemblances between the theory of ideology in the Marxian tradition, especially as developed by the Frankfurt School, and the critique of truth regimes rooted in the Nietzschean tradition of genealogy, especially as developed by Foucault – family resemblances that make it counter-productive to argue that one theory would make us reject the other. The task is not to defend one theory at the expense of the other, but to explore the intricate relationship between the two in order to sharpen our own critical interventions. That is the goal of this essay, drawing on the radical thought of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Foucault. In addition, I go further and call for resistance, not simply to this or that way of being governed, but resistance to truth. The task, as I see it, is to unmask and enlighten, but then to shed the tools we have used before those very beliefs become oppressive themselves.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.