Abstract
Recent iterations in international legal thought of the debate over the transformative potential of law have tended to echo the long-standing assumption that radical movements, when they employ law-based tactics, do so in the same manner as reformist movements: they mobilise the legitimacy of law for short-term goals, only with more radical long-term goals in mind. However, movements such as the 2012 student strike in the Canadian province of Quebec demonstrate more diverse, creative engagements with law that openly mock the legal system in an effort to simultaneously delegitimise the current legal order. This article argues that this movement’s approach is consistent with the notion of an ‘impudent’ use of law as politics (Brabazon 2017b) but also extends it further to include ideas raised by this movement’s theatrical ‘over-compliance’ with law, through which the movement turned law itself into a public spectacle. The article examines instances of the state’s unprecedented mobilisation of the legal system to contain the student strike and the student strikers’ creative and subversive engagements with law in response, illustrating how the ideas thrown up by this movement can advance theoretical discussion in legal scholarship about law’s transformative potential.
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Whilst the focus of this article is on how the strikers’ use of law can inform a specific iteration of the debate about law’s transformative potential, the state’s responses to the student strike could equally be explored through the lens of philosophical conversations about the nature and limits of state violence and about the relationships amongst law, politics, and violence (e.g., Benjamin 1996; Sorel 1914; Derrida 1992).
General secretary, Fédération des associations étudiantes du campus de l’Université de Montréal.
The medieval carnival also lacked distinction between actors and spectators, which distinguished it from a spectacle, according to Bakhtin (1984, p. 7). Whilst the strikers’ tactics sometimes included public participation, they tended to remain public facing, thereby retaining the element of spectacle, understood as an affective public display.
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The author wishes to thank Rob Knox, Max Silverman, Joël Pedneault, Adrian Smith, Alan Sears, Anastasia Tataryn, and Tor Krever.
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Brabazon, H. The Power of Spectacle: The 2012 Quebec Student Strike and the Transformative Potential of Law. Law Critique 33, 1–22 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-021-09304-z
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