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Today, the US pursues the global capture of data (understood as a significant engine of growth) by way of bi- and plurilateral trade agreements. However, the project of securing the global free flow of data has been pursued ever since the dawn of digital telecommunication in the 1960s and the US has made significant legal efforts to institutionalise it. These efforts have two phases: In the first 1970s and 80s “freedom of information” phase, the legal justification (and contestation) of the global free flow of data hinged on imagining data as information, and its exchange as a practice of liberty. The second phase began in the late 1990s and continues today. In this phase, the free flow of data is aligned with a free-trade agenda in the context of first e-commerce and, starting in the 2000s, through attempts at creating a global public domain of personal data for the platform economy. The global free flow of data is an intrinsic aspect of informational capitalism. Assuming a constitutive, but not commanding role for law in informational capitalism, we conclude that the US attempt at ensuring free flow for its informational corporations is neither an entirely contingent nor a necessary outcome. It is a product of legal imagination. © 2023, The Author(s)., Open access funding provided by University of Gothenburg.

This essay takes its point of departure in a letter written by Ayatollah Khomeini suggesting that sovereign authority is a matter of “absolute divine guardianship” and that the state “may suspend any matter – be it devotional or non-devotional – when it contravenes the best interests of Islam for the duration that it is so”. Khomeini insistence that the Islamic state headed by a Guardian Jurist is authorized to suspend normally valid law if need be, brings to mind Carl Schmitt’s (in)famous proposition that the sovereign is authorized to suspend the normally valid legal order in the state of exception. This essay will explore to what extent this evocation might be indicative of a more general affinity between Schmitt’s juridico-political thinking and Khomeini’s interventions and innovations during his years as the Guardian Jurist of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The essay ends with reflections on what juxtaposing Khomeini and Schmitt might yield and bring into view.

This article initially accounts for the discussions concerning the notions ‘ethnic origin’ and ‘race’ that have taken place in the Swedish legislative context and places these within a wider European context. Next follows a mapping of the ways in which Swedish courts, in cases of alleged ethnic discrimination, read the notion of ‘ethnic affiliation’ – defined as ‘national or ethnic origin, skin colour, or other similar circumstance’ – and decide whether a statement or an act is related to it. The purpose, to borrow Michel Foucault’s words, is to ‘make visible precisely what is visible’. By bringing together, arranging and connecting what the courts have said about ‘ethnic affiliation’, the conclusions they have reached and the circumstances that they have ignored, three observations are made: (a) ethnic affiliation is treated as an authentic and stable personal individual attribute, (b) ethnic affiliation is seen as a question about body types and bloodlines solely and (c) discriminatory acts are connected to ‘ethnic affiliation’ only if related to visual appearance or accompanied by ‘incriminating words’. The article discusses and analyzes the significance and implications of these observations in engagement with theorists such as Barnor Hesse and David Theo Goldberg.

Texten belyser genom några nedslag i den författningspolitiska utvecklingen hur politiken förskjutits mot juridik och förrätts­ligats i Sverige under de senaste decennierna – något som fram­för allt är en följd av att svensk rätt underställts en transnation­ell konstitution som höjer marknadsaktörers rättigheter samt mänskliga rättigheter över de politiska instansernas besluts­befogenheter. Med de EU­-rättsliga statsstödsreglernas inverkan på bostadspolitiken som exempel illustrerar hon sedan dels vad politikens förrättsligande innebär, dels hur EU­ rätten är struk­turellt partisk till gagn för marknadsaktörernas intressen och till förfång för det allmänna.I kölvattnet av politikens förrättsligande har juridiska nätverk och organisationer tillkommit som inte bara bistår särskilt behö­vande eller allmänheten i stort med juridisk hjälp, utan ofta också sysslar med rättspolitisk opinionsbildning och/eller juridisk folk­bildning. Efter att ha riktat uppmärksamheten mot att aktörer med vitt skilda ideologiska inriktningar och politiska agendor approprierar rättigheternas språk i sin juridiska aktivism, före­språkar Brännström ett förhållningssätt som synliggör och fram­håller den politiska vision som underbygger ett särskilt sätt att tolka en rättighets innebörd och att rangordna den i förhållande till andra rättighetsanspråk. Avslutningsvis efterlyser hon en kritisk inställning till rättigheter som kartlägger vad rättigheter de facto gör i olika sammanhang så att det blir möjligt att se vad som står på spel i rättighetsstrider och hur arbetet för att forma och förändra rättighetsuppfattningar bör bedrivas.

Reading Political Theology in light of the later developed concrete-order thinking, this essay draws attention to the understanding of law, which allows Schmitt to present the sovereign as simultaneously standing inside and outside the legal order. In addition, the particular way of ordering the political community, which Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty advances, is also explored. The essay suggests that the truly problematic feature of Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty, is not its purported a-, extra-, or illegality, but the hierarchical structure of authority presupposed by it, the function of which is to control who can speak in the name of the people and negotiate the character of the socio-legal order.

This article investigates the historical development and transformation of Swedish integration policy, including its predecessor immigrant policy, as a “biopolitics of the population”. “Biopolitics of the population” refers in this article to all governmental interventions targeting the population, or parts of it, with a view to producing a collective body of a particular quality and identity. Swedish integration policy is thus analyzed in order to answer questions such as: how has the population been embodied over time? How has the Swedish grammar of multiplicity and fragmentation changed? Which groups within the population have been considered to be in need of incorporation? Why has the attachment of these groups to the collective body been seen as precarious and/or questionable?

Our Gardens of Justice special themed issue of the Australian Feminist Law Journal grew out of the 2012 Critical Legal Conference in Stockholm and its theme of Gardens of Justice, a conference organised by Matilda Arvidsson, Merima Bruncevic, Leila Brannstrom and Leif Dahlberg. We issued a Call for Papers early in 2013 in which several conference theme questions were repeated. We called for papers devoted to thinking about law and justice as a physical as well as a social environment. The theme suggested a plurality of justice gardens that may function together but at times also may be at odds with each other. We invited authors to think freely and critically about both the concrete and the metaphorical garden, and invited articles that addressed questions of law and justice as spatial and spatializing structures, as social topography and geography, as political cartography on a global scale, as places where symbolic orders and disorders become visible and may be acted out, as mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, as masculine and feminine and as social utopia. Later in 2013 we re-issued the Call for Papers emphasizing the metaphorical and the juridical linking of gardens and justice: Gardens and Justice have been joined as figurae, genres and topoi in the classical writings of Virgil, in the Old Testament text of Genesis and the Garden of Eden, in Milton's epic of Paradise Lost, in Blackstone in Commentaries on the Laws of England, and not the last, in Neil Young's lyrics 'After the Garden', in his 2006 album Living with War. These and numerous other texts are peopled by figures who live at home, and others who depart from home. Together, and apart, they invite us to continue their genre of living and writing in a world of imperfection, suffering and violence, while maintaining other possibilities and other beginnings. The AFLJ invited articles which investigated the use of garden narratives, whether in jurisprudential writings, in film, in literary works, QC 20230221

Is what is taken for critique today genuinely self-questioning or merely the confirmation of the moral consensus? In the neoliberal culture of the audit, has critique been deprived of its role as check on ideology? And does preference for impact-oriented research produce political compliance rather than independent critical thought?, First published in Fronesis 36−37 (2011) (Swedish version); Eurozine (English version)