Law,Culture and the Humanities

This commentary examines how the figure of Warren Hastings came to personify the contradictions of imperial rule of law under the British East India Company. At once a mercantile corporation and an imperial regime, the Company blurred the boundaries between corporate power and sovereign authority. Hastings, as its most notorious governor-general, became a symbolic figure mediating cultural debates over the legitimacy of Company rule. Constructions of his persona traveled across space and time, from 1780s London to post-revolutionary America and colonial Bengal, and across genres including courtroom rhetoric, political caricatures, novels, and poetry. Through the many cultural afterlives of Hastings’ character, the rule of law emerges as not only an ideal for governance but also an imaginative and affective construction through which moral and political legitimacy are negotiated and redefined.

Recent statements on the rule of law observe its retreat in many jurisdictions, including states such as the United States where the rule of law has been considered by many to be well-established and stable. Beyond analyzing the degree and manner in which government officials have rejected or ignored the rule of law principles, how should we respond to developments that seem to challenge its existence? The most important demands made by the rule of law include the obligations of persons in authority to exercise their power within a constraining framework of established public norms rather than in an arbitrary or discretionary manner based on their own preferences or ideology. Emotions would not only seem not to belong in these principles, but be antithetical. This essay considers the role of emotions in how individuals subject to non-compliant official actions can think about and respond to rule of law failures. The essay argues that rule of law jurisprudence needs a concept that integrates rationality and emotion, and that hope and a secular version of faith have a role to play in sustaining the rule of law.

This commentary on the rule of law is a work of fiction drawing on parallels between current socio-legal-political circumstances, conflicts and contradictions, and those depicted in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Particular attention is directed toward the normative and epistemic frameworks human beings use as they make and purport to explain and justify decisions that affect the lives and well-being of themselves and others. Rule of law, rule by law, and rule-based orders are examined, providing context for a critique of the use of “good intentions” as an excuse or justification for acts that violate human rights.

This commentary examines the 2018 Spanish documentary Idrissa: crónica de una muerte cualquiera (Idrissa: Chronicle of an Ordinary Death), directed by Xavier Artigas and Xapo Ortega, which investigates the circumstances surrounding the death of Idrissa Diallo, a twenty-one-year-old man from Guinea-Conakry who died while in the custody of the Spanish state at the Centro de internamiento de extranjeros (Center of Interment for Foreigners, CIE) in Barcelona on January 6, 2012. Drawing on Ariadna Estévez’s notion of the “rule of law necropower” and James Martel’s work on the power of the unburied body, the commentary argues that the documentary compels us to reflect on the ways in which the CIEs in Spain operate through the rule of law, not as an exception to it. By filming the materiality of the exhumed migrant body, the commentary proposes, the documentary itself becomes a form of resistance to necropolitical violence.

This article argues that the capacity of ratification to generate and ground legal legitimacy is poorly explained by existing modes of analysis such as historiography and political theory, and that it can instead be better explained by assessing ratification as an act of legal poiesis, a formal and poetic making of legitimacy theorized in terms of poetics. To develop this contention, it articulates a poetic model of ratification and considers a series of analogs in existing poems to identify their effects. This mode of analysis helps to explain the legal use of ratification, the specific epistemic qualities of legitimacy that follow from it, and the ways in which the structure of legitimacy might be changing under contemporary conditions.

UK law is currently debating whether companies whose founders have enhanced voting rights, known as a ‘dual class share’ structure, should be allowed to be listed on the premium list of the London Stock Exchange. This article posits that those arguing for dual class shares argue, ultimately, that founders may be benign geniuses who should be freed from market forces. It argues that the television show Succession illustrates that it is not inevitable that a founder be so: the Roy family’s misdeeds echo traditional corporate law warnings about the dangers of managerial excess. Law needs to regulate the Roys as well as any benign genius.

Calls for strengthening the U.S.’s federal ethics systems have proliferated in the popular media, among good governance watchdog groups, and beyond. Framed as an ongoing crisis, the situation has prompted democracy reformers to advocate for more stringent accountability mechanisms, oversight, regulations, and laws. Drawing from new directions in scholarship, this article uses approaches from affect theory to reconsider assumptions about reason, language, and the rule of law within government ethics reform. In so doing, I suggest that perspectives from affect theory expose overlooked areas within current accountability mechanisms and subsequent failures of enforcement, arguing that recent theoretical interventions help us rethink good governance practices by calling into question the ratio-centric, agential framing of government accountability. By mobilizing new theories of crisis and emotion, this article considers how administrative bodies—made up of corporeal bodies—might feel accountable. Building on the work of scholars who link the roles of habits and environments to embodied actions, this article proposes that examining the affective composition of an ethics crisis has wider implications for theorizing moments of institutional reckoning.

M is one of the most celebrated movies by Fritz Lang. Examining the movie as a ‘jurisprudential text’, the present article will explore three interconnected problems: how in modern mass society, the legal gaze works as a device that both traces and tracks the subject within the multitude; how the presence of a radical Other within our midst is troublesome for law and can turn society against itself in autoimmunitary fashion; and, finally, how the legal subject is prevented from speaking precisely by the legal procedures that are supposed to make them vocal, superimposing the legal truth over the truth of the Other.

This paper examines the discursive conditions that make war legal and legitimate. In the Post-World War II period, when countries do not declare war, the gap between legality and legitimacy has widened, and wars are often neither. While other studies of war-declaring typically focus on the relations between states, this paper focuses on relations between citizen and government. In the absence of discursive declarations of war, it is unclear whether citizens are able to consent to war-making decisions. The paper surveys communicative blockages and suggests areas in which improved communication could make war legal and legitimate.

While Herman Melville was writing Billy Bud, Sailor, political elites in his home state of New York were overhauling their state’s death penalty. Their work culminated in the Electrical Execution Act of 1888. In addition to changing the state’s execution method from hanging to electrocution, the legislation introduced new policies and execution procedures aimed at projecting an image of law as majestic and inexorable in its operation. By bringing new discipline and secrecy to executions, reformers hoped that they could exert greater control over the public’s response to them. Through a close reading of Billy Budd and archival documents related to the adoption of the electric chair, I argue that the novella grapples with a fantasy of sovereign power similar to the one that drove execution reform efforts in New York. Efforts to achieve total control over life and death, Melville suggests, are bound to fail because they require a depersonalization of both the agent and the subject of sovereign power that is unjust and, mercifully, unfeasible. Neither Billy’s death by hanging nor the first execution by electricity in New York had the effects on the public’s responses to executions that elites desired. Ironically, though, the failure of efforts to control the meaning of executions may have made capital punishment more palatable to the public than it otherwise would have been.

The law and literature tradition has to date largely focused on texts that directly explore a legal issue or an encounter with a bureaucratic legal institution. Post-apocalyptic texts describing worlds with no central legal institutions have largely been left unexamined even though they often envisage alternate forms and roles for the law. The paper analyses Adrian J. Walker’s The End Of The World Running Club (2014) to explore a possible distribution of resources based on characteristics and actions with which we empathise. Drawing upon Aristotle’s theories of literature, the methods of creation of legal communities in general is considered.