Without love there can be law but no justice

Abstract

This special issue of Globalizations builds the case across a diverse group of papers that law is in need of decolonization, especially law systems structuring settler-colonial societies. This is because law's dispossessing character in these contexts is hidden by the prevalence of nomophilia; that is, an uncritical love of law for the neutrality and objectivity it self-proclaims to possess. The collection of papers for this special issue constitute a collective critique of colonial law and crime that does its part in disrupting law's empire of violence by tracking the legalized violence across the axes of class, race, gender, and sexuality. The popular expression of 'fuck the law' captured by Agozino in the leading paper of this issue establishes the context in which we make a call for the necessity of love to enter the realm of law as an urgent decolonizing praxis. Without love there can be law, but no justice.

Performance, Resistance and Refugees

“…And although it is the case that refugee studies are largely organised around legal questions and have been dominated by legal scholarship (Goodwin-Gill 2013;Goodwin-Gill and McAdam 2021;Taylor and Boyd 2020;Taylor 2009;McAdam and Chong 2014;Vogl and Methven 2020), the form that this legal scholarship has taken, while critical and important, has remained largely silent on the role played by settler law in establishing and maintaining colonial ordering. Alongside this and for over two decades, a critical body of work has worked to situate Australian border brutality and the mistreatment of refugee and asylum seekers as inextricable from the violence of Indigenous dispossession and the operations of colonial law (Perera 2002a(Perera , 2002b(Perera , 2006(Perera , 2007a(Perera , 2007b(Perera , 2009(Perera , 2014Pugliese 2002Pugliese , 2004Pugliese , 2005Pugliese , 2007aPugliese , 2007bPugliese , 2009Deathscapes (2016Deathscapes ( -2020; Giannacopoulos 2005Giannacopoulos , 2006Giannacopoulos , 2011Giannacopoulos , 2013Giannacopoulos , 2019Giannacopoulos , 2020. A key challenge for refugee scholars and scholarship is not only to challenge contemporary exclusionary laws that prevent entry and deny human rights to refugees but also to actively foreground as an object of study the coordinates of the legal regimes producing the exclusions for which remedy and justice are being sought.…”

Debtscape: Australia’s Constitutional Nomopoly

“…While the critique is a strong one, the belief in the Constitution itself underwrites and informs the critique. Central to Williams' argument then is nomophilia (Giannacopoulos 2011;Giannacopoulos 2020). His critique exhibits an uncritical love for colonial law since he is confident that if the Constitution had been drafted differently with the interests of Indigenous peoples considered, the result would be less racist.…”

Morris, Julia C. 2023. Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. pp. 318.

“…For example, is it ever possible to work within a harmful legal system whilst also attempting to challenge its very foundations? This is a question that broadly ties into what Giannacopoulos (2020: 1085) describes as an ‘uncritical love of law’.…”