The aftermath of gross human rights violations remains a challenge for international legal mechanisms. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from legal studies, historiography and international relations, this article examines how transitional justice mechanisms – particularly international trials and the institutionalisation of sites of memory – can contribute to the construction of inclusive identities grounded in alterity rather than fear and violence. The analysis highlights how memory work, when embedded in legal and cultural frameworks, can prevent forgetting and support the recognition of victims. Using the case of Valongo Wharf, the article illustrates how symbolic and legal recognition of past atrocities can foster reconciliation and restore dignity. Ultimately, it argues that the integration of memory into international legal processes contributes to transforming difference into a foundation for alterity and nurturing the promise of a more just and inclusive future.

Taking as its starting point the current upending of the post-World War II international legal order and the Transatlantic partnership that has been its backbone, this essay asks whether the changes we are witnessing constitute ‘systems change’? Are we witnessing shifts in our political, governance and legal systems that have the potential of altering the fundamental ideas on which these ‘systems’ are based? To explore this question, we examine three contemporary examples of change: the current US Administration’s attempts to sideline some of its international legal commitments and undermine the multilateral world order; the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, and the destruction of habitable territories in the Pacific due to climate catastrophes. We use these examples to explore the notion of ‘systems change’ and to discuss how scholars can approach systemic changes that challenge current normative consensus and the rule of law. Our aims in this commentary are to identify where further research is needed by focusing on breaking points in international normative frameworks; consider the consequences of the decline of universalism, and examine the nexus between the climate emergency already faced by Small Island Developing States and fragile and conflict-affected states. The disparate sites and examples are deliberate – a modest effort to de-centre the tendency of the North Atlantic to absorb scholarly attention.

Radical democratic theory has often presented democracy as the break with policing. I explore a different way of thinking together policing and democracy, not as always oppositional forms of politics but as an impure combination. Policing is the shadow of American democracy that continues to haunt it even when supposedly legitimated by democratic decisions or banished outside the sphere of democratic contestation. By reading Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida on the specters of policing alongside Saidiya Hartman’s “wayward” as the criminalized specters of both police and democracy, I argue that challenging policing means not the public actions of radical democracy but the secretive and conspiratorial politics of rogues who have no desire to belong to democracy at all.

Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) presents a haunting vision of a legal system that operates autonomously, detached from human will or moral considerations. This article examines Kafka’s portrayal of law as a performative and self-sustaining process rather than a human-centered institution. Drawing on J. L. Austin’s speech act theory and Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, the paper explores how law in The Trial functions through ritualized actions that sustain its authority irrespective of substantive justice. Additionally, using Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy and contemporary discussions on algorithmic governance, the paper argues that Kafka anticipates modern concerns about automated justice, AI-driven legal decision-making, and predictive policing. The dehumanization of Joseph K. in the novel mirrors contemporary legal realities where individuals become mere data points in bureaucratic and computational legal frameworks. Case studies include AI sentencing systems, automated visa refusals, and predictive policing, all of which reinforce Kafka’s critique of law as an impersonal, inescapable process. The paper further examines the paradox of legal authority in the digital age, where algorithms increasingly mediate justice, often without transparency or accountability. By linking Kafka’s critique of legal performativity to contemporary debates on machine learning in law, bureaucratic statelessness, and predictive surveillance, this paper highlights The Trial ’s continued relevance in an era of algorithmic governance and non-human legal actors.

Eleven years after he completed his one-term presidency, John Adams argued the slave trade case Amistad (1841) before the U.S. Supreme Court. A variety of historical judgments have been rendered on his speech, none of which has engaged with the argument’s interface with his dedication to nation-making and the Union. Capitalizing on a cache of diplomatic correspondence related to the case, advisory letters, and analysis of the supreme court argument, this article contends Adams’ speech before the court is more appropriately understood in the context of nation-building rather than as a natural law argument about the liberty rights of black slaves or a plea for the abolition of slavery, as has been commonly inferred. Taking this position allows us to reframe Adams’ argument in his postpresidential years in the House of Representatives when he became invested in the slavery question in a way he had largely avoided as a secretary of state and as president. That is, Adams appears in his later years to have separated from the founding generation’s adherence to preserving the Union as a nation and dedicated himself to the threat sectionalism and slavery posed to the Union. But in the Amistad case, he had not yet transitioned to that position, despite what many historians and popular accounts have contended. Adams’ pragmatism in foreign affairs as secretary of state and in his national improvements as president can best be described as politically pragmatic unionist nation-building. Slavery had not yet emerged in his self-presentation as the singularly most destructive threat to the fabric of the Union. Only in his later years did he incorporate concerns raised by territorial expansion and humanitarian views of human freedom into a more assertive willingness to engage with slavery in a more militant way and to merge it with his earlier pragmatism.

Constitutional scholars have long observed that the term “constitutional crisis” is overused. Pundits and scholars routinely use it to describe constitutional developments that they view as normatively undesirable. But doing so may hurt our ability to recognize them. We use a comparative and historical perspective to call attention to the worst-case scenario of constitutional breakdown. This scenario, which we will refer to as a “constitutional crisis of authority,” is defined by the presence of competing claims to legitimate political or legal authority in a single office—such as the existence of two presidents or two apex courts. Despite their gravity, such episodes of competing authority are not generally the focus of the U.S. literature on constitutional crises, presumably because the federal constitutional system has rarely experienced them. In addition, many of the scenarios that US scholars do describe as crises turn out, upon comparative and/or historical analysis, to be relatively common, both abroad and within the United States. These so-called “constitutional crises” include violations of constitutional rules and norms, the failure of poorly designed provisions to settle legal disputes, and even the failure of constitutional systems to address large problems. All of these are, we argue, less threatening to the survival of a constitutional system than crises of authority.

The “crisis of critique” reveals tensions between ideological critique and postcritical methods in the humanities. This article argues that postcritique is not a distinct movement but a political reorientation within critique itself. By examining this shift through the lens of Slavoj Žižek’s ideological analysis, it demonstrates how critique and postcritique can coexist to renew Critical Legal Studies (CLS). This approach addresses CLS’s concerns about law’s complicity in power and inequality, offering a reimagined framework that bridges theoretical divides and emphasizes critique’s relevance in contemporary legal and humanities scholarship.

After a long period of being constructed as anonymous administration complexes, first instance courts are once again being built as emblematic elements of the city, designed by renowned architects and rising on central plots adjacent to train stations, headquarters buildings and exclusive residential areas. This is happening at a time of centralisation, upsizing and property privatisation, and where European courthouses have radically decreased in number. The paper focuses on the changing relationship between the courthouse and the city as it has developed in the last decades, using Sweden as a case. Examining and comparing the fourteen new Swedish district courthouses built between 2000 and 2024, and the changes in their locations, we show how the territorial threshold between the court and the public space of the city is expressed and negotiated on different scales. Discussing aspects such as regional and local accessibility and visibility, as well as permeability and connectivity, we argue that the courthouse is gradually taking on a new role, where accessibility is increasingly monitored and specialised, and where the lawcourt as an object also has developed into a segregated territorial landscape, albeit often situated in a privileged location in the city.

This commentary offers ethnographic reflections on the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Trump v. United States , the July 2024 ruling that gave then-former President Trump and all future presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for certain categories of official conduct. Taken together, the text and context of the opinion provide an extended case study in the contemporary meanings of constitutional crisis. The Introduction discusses the concept of crisis, arguing for a comparative approach that, in this instance, juxtaposes the financial crisis of 2008 and current concerns with constitutional crisis. In both settings, investment and risk feature prominently in narratives addressing the knowledge demands of crisis. I develop the concept of constitutional economy to highlight the court’s public legitimacy as an asset that can be invested, traded, gained, or lost, depending on circumstances. The rest of the commentary is in four parts. Part I summarizes the opinion as presented by the majority and dissenting justices. Part II turns to the financial crisis, focusing particularly on the failure of the derivatives market. Part III then draws the two scenarios together, exploring their shared horizons of ritualized discourse, unsecured risk, and uncertain liquidity. The Conclusion asks where fresh liquidity would come from if the constitutional economy goes into default. Overall, the commentary is in dialogue with crisis scholarship along a fold between hope and dread—the tension between these becoming a throughline in its contemplation of unknowable futures.

In recent decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has increasingly privileged religious beliefs in determining the applicability of U.S. laws. To sustain these claims, the Court has turned to the distant past. This paper explores a medieval parallel to the Texas “future dangerousness” standard which requires jurors to predict whether a capital defendant will pose a future threat to society. Framed as a secular issue, the standard’s religious overtones were made manifest with the conversion of death-row inmate, Karla Faye Tucker. Certain Texas officials justified denying her clemency petition by asserting that judgments about the soul are reserved for divine authority. Medieval Christian sources provide support for this belief, but operate to constrain state power—especially where the potential punishment is death. Juxtaposing the medieval reasoning against the Supreme Court’s recent use of historical and religious sources raises some provocative questions.