This article primarily focuses on the survival or revival of the French concept of state of siege (état de siege) within the Belgian legal sphere. According to the reasoning of the drafters of the Belgian Constitution, this legal entity should have been abolished at the founding of the Belgian State. In practice, however, this proved not to be the case. Both jurisprudence and practical application show that the state of siege, with the army acting as enforcer of public order, remained a customary response to social unrest. Based on this observation, the article seeks to examine how the state of siege survived. The central argument is that the state of siege was never formally repealed and survived as a pragmatic and ad hoc instrument, repeatedly invoked in times of crisis. Its continued use can be explained by three interconnected factors: (1) the fragmented nature of Belgian (military) legislation, (2) a culture of pragmatic (legal) continuity, and (3) a perception of social unrest as an existential threat to the political and social order. To support this argument, several case studies were analyzed in which the state of siege was used to manage social unrest, covering the period from 1831 to 1886. The research draws on a broad range of primary sources: case-law, military doctrine, and archival materials, alongside extensive literature on military intervention in public order during the nineteenth century.

The phenomenon of “evidence fetishism” in forensic science is defined as treating physical traces as having inherent meaning, separate from necessary interpretation. Drawing on Marxist, semiotic, Freudian, and Ginzburgian theories, the analysis explains how forensic traces gain authority in science and law. The discussion illustrates how evidence becomes its own testimony in court, arguing that this is a structural issue within forensic institutions, not individual error. This “forensic fetish” removes uncertainty by making the trace seem to “speak.” The analysis calls for a focus on interpretation in forensic science to achieve more epistemically responsible approaches that acknowledge uncertainty while maintaining rigor.

Over the past several decades, immigration authorities in Germany have framed ‘unclarified identity’ as a problem, calling for increasingly complicated methodologies to make migrant bodies legible to state deportation efforts. These efforts include technical devices and information infrastructures, such as fingerprint scanners or databases, but also specific administrative logics, such as the in-between status of the Duldung Light ‘for persons without a clarified identity’, a suspended deportation status that pressures individuals to attend embassy hearings or reveal their identity documents by imposing sanctions such as a ban from employment and a severe reduction of social benefits. This article traces the emergence of the Duldung Light and explores the political function of connected forms of state sanctioning, some aimed at controlling larger movements by discouraging migration, others aimed at pressuring individuals to perform nationality. The findings additionally point to at times contradictory logics within state efforts to produce and manage deportability.

The article argues that constitutionalism and populism are fundamentally antithetical, contending that conflict-driven populism offers greater potential for egalitarian politics than consensus-oriented constitutionalism. Through an examination of early English and British radical movements—the Levellers and the Chartists—as well as of the establishment of the notion of public opinion from the eighteenth century onwards, the article demonstrates how reliance on the constitution, as idiom and strategic horizon, constrained political imagination, normalized conflict, and ultimately limited demands for social transformation. Drawing on Tom Nairn’s and other progressive historians’ work, the article suggests that constitutional frameworks suppress class antagonism, whereas progressive populism can revitalize political agency. It concludes that a more openly conflictual, populist orientation may have advanced working-class interests more effectively than entrenched constitutional discourse.

Drawing on Zadie Smith’s suggestion in her novel, The Fraud (2023), that we share Victorians’ interest in fraudulent figures, this essay argues that we have much in common with Victorians when it comes to anxieties around personation and fraud. Beginning with a discussion of the Tichborne case, the Cleveland Street Scandal, and W. T. Stead’s “Maiden Tribute,” this essay theorizes the ways that anxieties around personation and new forms of reporting operated in a circuit of sensationalized response. In a post-internet iteration of Victorian experience, such circuits are used by multiple actors not necessarily to reveal personation, fraud, and crime, but to distract from and even create it.

Originalists urge courts to exercise judicial restraint over activism when deciding cases. Despite judicial restraint’s association with conservative philosophy, the Supreme Court majority rejected long-established precedent in the Dobbs decision, overturning Roe v. Wade . In this essay, I argue that the Court rationalized its rejection of stare decisis using a rhetoric of originalist mythic rationalization , a technique allowing conservative justices to redefine the law by rationalizing their radical action as judicial modesty.

The Trial furnishes a diagnostic lens—opacity (epistemic), arbitrariness (normative), alienation (experiential)—for assessing AI-mediated governance in law and administration. Using literary hermeneutics, critical legal theory, and normative jurisprudence, the article maps this grid onto three emblematic systems—COMPAS (US), Chinook (Canada), and China’s social credit—showing how “black-box” procedures displace judgment, entrench structural bias, and erode due process. It evaluates partial remedies in the EU AI Act, GDPR, and UNESCO’s AI Ethics Recommendation, and specifies safeguards centered on transparency, contestability, accountability, and dignity (TCAD). The article concludes by flagging risks from large language models—fabricated citations, provenance-free drafting, and bias propagation—and by outlining TCAD-aligned controls to preserve agency and legal recognition in the age of algorithmic justice.

Contemporary borders are constituted by various forms of knowledge, including legal, technological, geographical, and military, among others. This contribution is based on the exploration of one of those specific sets of knowledge: the medical and clinical one. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork on the island of Lampedusa, in the middle of the deadly Central Mediterranean route, this analysis examines its medical apparatus and its ambiguous role as a political and legal tool in border management. In particular, the article focuses on a limited yet crucial space: the military pier of Lampedusa reserved for the disembarkation of arriving migrants and their medical inspection.