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 article discusses the complicated legal issue of declaring dead a person who is absent or missing. In England, a decree of presumption of death allowed for the dissolution of marriage following the continual absence of a spouse for a period of seven years. Marriage, property, and inheritance laws were additionally affected by the absent; in essence, modern common law was troubled by the untraceable body. Following the examination of this complicated case history, including scandalous cases of bigamous marriages and their newspaper coverage, the article uses sensation writer Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) as its case study. The larger aim is to demonstrate how Victorian novelists manipulated presumption of death laws to demonstrate their arbitrary and sensational foundation.

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 explores Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court as a case of judicial impostoring—where an institution lacking constitutional legitimacy claims epistemic authority over the legal order. Created by executive decree, the FSCI entrenched itself as a de facto constitutional arbiter cloaked in the aesthetics of legality. Drawing on critical legal theory, postcolonial thought, and the concept of epistemicide , the article examines how judicial performance masks the destruction of alternative constitutional knowledge. Through case analysis and theoretical framing, it contributes to debates on law, legitimacy, and epistemic violence in postcolonial and post-authoritarian legal contexts.

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 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.

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.

This article explores the conflict between private property rights and environmentalism through Kate Holden’s true-crime narrative The Winter Road , which recounts the murder of environmental officer Glen Turner by farmer Ian Turnbull. Framing this tragedy within Australia’s colonial history of land ownership and conservation, the article examines how Lockean narratives of land as absolute private property continue to shape tensions over native vegetation laws. It argues that these clashes reveal deeper tensions within Australian settler culture: between entrenched beliefs in property rights and environmentalism on one hand, and the persistent marginalisation of First Nations systems of land stewardship and native vegetation on the other. The murder case is read against global patterns of settler-colonial property regimes, where dispossession and the ordering of land through settler environmental ideals remain structuring forces.

This essay argues that the unfolding constitutional crisis in the United States is best understood as being marked by both constitutional disintegration and constitutional counter-revolution. In response, many liberals have cultivated a nostalgia for a pre-crisis constitutional consensus. However, looking at the political reaction to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health , we can see that nostalgia is itself a condition of the crisis as it forecloses the formulation of a constitutional politics that can adequately address the political situation. Turning to feminist legal theory archives, the essay concludes by offering a non-nostalgic vision to counter the authoritarianism and neofascism that animate the crisis.