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Arizona Attorney's Creative Arts Competition--For Attorneys!

Posted: 06 Dec 2011 03:44 PM PST

Arizona Attorney has announced its Arts Competition for 2012. More here from the magazine.

Critical Autopoiesis: Law and the Environment

Posted: 06 Dec 2011 10:56 AM PST

Andreas Philippopoulous-Mihalopoulos, University of Westminster, the Westminster International Law and Theory Centre, has published Critical Autopoiesis: The Environment of the Law, in Law's Environment: Critical Legal Perspectives (Bald de Vries and Lyana Francot eds.; The Hague, Eleven International Publishing, 2011). Here is the abstract.

Law and Environment enter a connection of disrupted continuum. The recent 'turns' in law towards materiality, spatiality, corporeality, disconnect the usual distance between law and its environment and enhance the visibility of materiality continuum between the two. Law is no longer abstract but spatially emplaced, corporeally felt, materially present. The environment, be it in the form of human/non-human bodies, technology, weather phenomena, and the wider, open ecology of material presence, destabilises the system, rendering it more precarious and more distant from its usual self-description.

Building on Luhmann's theory of autopoiesis, I present my reading of what I call Critical Autopoiesis, namely the autopoietics of materiality, spatiality and corporeality as they emerge from contemporary legal theory. I am employing Deleuze and Guattari in connection to Luhmann in order to multiply and indeed fractally explode the Luhmannian boundaries between law and its environment.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.