In Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons” (1960), Sir Thomas More’s portrayal is a paradigmatic narrative illustrating the timeless conflict individuals face when compelled to act against their understanding of the rule of law. Bolt presents More as a “hero of selfhood.” This paper analyses the concept of “selfhood” as depicted in the play, arguing that More’s core identity was fundamentally anchored in his unwavering commitment to civil institutions and the rule of law. Through this lens, the paper explores how individuals navigate and experience constitutional crises, using Bolt’s depiction of More’s struggle as a framework for understanding contemporary challenges to personal integrity within legal and political systems.

Spectacular images and imaginaries of migration fuel political and legal debate in the United Kingdom. The state responds to this spectacle through various modes of hypervisibility and invisibility in asylum law and policy. These concepts have previously accounted for the use of offshore asylum processing in other jurisdictions – the invisibilisation of hypervisible arrivals. This article however identifies hypervisibilisation and invisibilisation as shaping UK asylum law whereby, these concepts are deployed within the borders of the state in addition to externally as in other jurisdictions. The spectacle and specifically the spectacle of deterrence shapes and informs these processes.

This article addresses the question of how the ‘truth’ about homosexual asylum seekers is constituted through legal proceedings, what kinds of subjectivities are produced in the asylum process and how these issues reflect the EU law as it relates to questions of asylum. The analysis is carried out through the Foucauldian concept of confession and case analysis of the Court of Justice of the European Union’s legal praxis. The article concludes that the credibility assessment of homosexual asylum seekers can be understood as a confessional practice where ‘truth-telling’ subjects are produced and linked to relationships of power and domination.

While many critics have secured Samuel Taylor Coleridge an important place as a poet, environmental thinker, and political theorist, none have thoroughly examined how he unites his conservatism and environmentalism in his final work, On the Constitution of Church and State , to promote a theory of symbiotic constitutionalism. To resist the growing power of commercial-mechanical thought, he proposes a constitutional structure guided by ecological principles of balance, stewardship, organic change, and sustainability. This constitutional structure is comprised of multiple institutions that all work to moderate and synthesize society’s opposing forces into a symbiotic system.

The topic of this article is a comparison of two figures in Carl Schmitt’s late thought—the partisan and the katechon. Treating the former as part of Schmitt’s polemical philosophy, in which the object of polemic is his contemporary liberal and pacifist view of the institution of war, the author shows that the German jurist actually treats the partisan as the one who restrains the advent of the age of the latter, fought in the air, thus defending the soil as the site of warfare. He juxtaposes Schmitt’s reflections on partisan warfare with his reflections on the significance of the soil and earth and the terrestrial way of life for law, showing, first, that for Schmitt, the partisan is the bearer of the myth of the land as the legitimation of political and legal institutions, and, second, that the figure of the partisan is the link that binds together Schmitt’s fundamentally inconsistent thought.

In colonial America, governments relied on county court judges to render justice and maintain order. To be effective, judges needed wisdom to administer three diverse sources of authority: God’s law, English common law, and provincial statutory law. This article uses one colonial tribunal—Connecticut’s New London County Court—to explore an unasked question: what qualified these men to serve wisely as judges? Examining colonial Connecticut judges’ lives and careers unveils a bundle of shared characteristics that prepared them well to manage neighbors’ legal affairs: personal wealth, public service, military leadership, New England Indian relations, and religious administration experience.