My contribution to Legal Form’s state debate series focuses on catastrophic climate change. A preview: The constitutional obduracy of capitalist states renders them inappropriate vehicles, at best, for ecosocial transformation. Moreover, the mutual presupposition of the capitalist state and the capitalist economy (so that it is inappropriate to speak of the one and not the other) means that new forms of resource management, labour relations, and production coordination cannot simply be legislated into existence. The role of law in the constitution of capitalist society cannot be ignored in collective struggle for the transformation of social relations. This holds true for all anti-capitalist struggles, including those aimed at ensuring minimally decent lives for human beings inhabiting an overheated and biodiversity-depleted planet. It may seem as though we can neither escape the legal dimensions of capitalism nor transform them while engaging and contesting them. But struggles to do both will necessarily feature in the coming collective responses to catastrophic climate change. Critical theorists of law and the state cannot predict the shape or course of those struggles, but they should expect to see them and be prepared to understand them. ...

A longer version of this essay was posted on Legal Form on October 9, 2018. Contradiction is the recurring motif in the current Supreme Court nomination battle. Nowhere is this clearer than in the simultaneous magnification and diminution of the trauma of sexual violence. With their insistence that accusers’ accounts must be examined closely for any possible defect, and that the accused must never not have our sympathy, conservatives manage both to obsess over sexual assault and to trivialize it. We have been reminded forcefully of patriarchy’s enduring demands. It obliges impossible performances of unimpeachable victimhood from survivors who often themselves seem to be in the dock, all while insisting on the hermeneutics of charity and solicitousness for the accused. ...

Fredric Jameson on the U.S. Constitution in An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army: [W]hoever interrogates political possibility in the United States must necessarily confront the unique problems posed by that counterrevolutionary document… Donald Trump on the U.S. Constitution, as quoted in the Guardian: “It’s a very rough system,” he said. “It’s an archaic system … It’s really a bad thing for the country.”

Many elite liberals and Democratic operatives are embracing the bogus narrative that Hillary Clinton’s defeat resulted from a failure to pursue a median voter who is imagined to be an economically distressed white worker (and is believed to be drawn to Trump’s racism and xenophobia). There are several useful critiques of this line of thought out there – the most potent being this LARB squib by Katherine Franke. What I want to consider briefly in this post (and hopefully more thoroughly in a later post) is what the emergence of this line says about how prominent Democratic politicians and their epigones think about politics. ...

It was revealed today that Senate Republicans have enough party discipline to refuse to hold confirmation hearings for any nominee put forward by President Obama to fill the current vacancy on the Supreme Court. It will be objected that McConnell’s blanket refusal is a challenge to Obama’s constitutional legitimacy and authority – and so it is. Indeed, that is rather the point. The Republicans not only wish to portray Obama as a lame duck; they are asserting that any nominee put forward by Obama will be substantively illegitimate, no matter the fact that Obama is formally authorized by the constitutional text to nominate a justice. ...