There is a certain nexus between art and crime; while crime has long served as inspiration for artistic expression, this paper argues that visual representations of women and discourses of sex and violence within specific art movements also serve as inspiration for violent crime. Bridging the gap between art and crime, this paper first sets out the theoretical grounding of the arguments presented within, with a focus on the connections between power, control and femicide, drawing from the Foucauldian tradition. The paper then turns to consider representations of gender, violence and killing in film and fine art, before examining the various syntheses between the Surrealist movement and femicide. This paper aims to interrogate how cultural, political and social discourses, including as they are produced/reproduced in art, are implicated in the commission of gendered violence, specifically here femicide, and what this tells us about the relationship between these discourses and power, control and violence.

Rajkumar Hirani’s film Dunki (2023) takes its name from an immigration method that is popular among undocumented immigrants originating from states such as Punjab, Haryana, and Gujarat in India. Using this film as a case study, this article critiques immigration and visa laws that engender methods of crossing borders such as dunki, identifies the inherent classicism and racism embedded in such laws, and explores how they generate a false dichotomy between dunki and the “right way” of immigrating. It argues how such laws are aligned with neocolonial ideological projects that seek to contain and control the mobility and circulation of bodies and epistemologies from former colonies, demonstrating how what Aníbal Quijano terms the “coloniality of power” operates in the context of contemporary visa and immigration law.

This article explores the relationship between the law and personhood, dispossession and dignity. It asks: How might we move beyond a conception of dignity as the bounded property of the liberal, autonomous agent, toward a more capacious understanding of dignity, as the affective relationality between persons? How does the negative force of the death penalty radiate beyond the condemned and exert its power over their loved ones, family, and even the staff of the prison? What might it mean lose one’s autonomy, a word that derives from the law (nomos) over the self (autos), in the face of the state’s management of life and death? Exploring the moral and legal staging of the death penalty in Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency (2019) and Boo Junfeng’s Apprentice (2016) this article examines conceptions of personhood when “civility” meets capital punishment.

The introduction to a special issue of Law, Culture and the Humanities on “Goodrich’s Law,” which critically engages and celebrates the scholarly corpus and conduct of Professor Peter Goodrich.

The present occursus is a collection of amicable essays and a somewhat erumpent desire on my part both to escape and in doing so to thank those who have so generously and variously hobbled, impaled, expanded, dissected, tracked, uplifted, gouged, wounded, excited and obliquely improved upon the limitations of my scribblings. I am variously, to take the more exotic appellations, a mouse, an infected space, a heterosocialite, a crow with an arrow through the eye, a dreamer, an aporia, a scandal, a spectre, an errancy, an intersection, a promiscuously polyamorous textualist, a threat, a satirist and a critic. So many faces, such introitus, a zarzuela of the laws of love. Whatever else is to be made of these missives familiar and philological, they force a reckoning, a reflection upon the paths taken, the uncertain trajectory, the dreams and the hauntings that fall under the equivocal designation or aporia of a life.

This article will demonstrate how a constitutive tension between the sovereign decision on the state of exception and the norm structured by the rule of law has not just animated legal discourse in the colonial period in India, as exhaustively demonstrated by Nasser Hussain, but has also affected the making of the Indian Constitution, exacerbated by the crisis of partition. This antinomy, on closer inspection, is antinomic merely in form and appearance, for the exception, although understood as outside, and against, the norm, is also lodged deep within it. This article will delineate how a constitutive state of exception structured the exception as the norm and encoded it within the rule of law.

Culture is the phenomenological materiality of lived experience. How a particular group of people inhabits public space is one way to see culture in action. The artistic ability to translate culture through painted narratives of the past and present is a tool for seeing culture in action. Through the visible accessibility of public memory painted in dynamic spaces of public infrastructure, the mural enlivens the relationship between culture and cultural heritage, making visible the painted narrative and spatially significant public forum to which the public audience is invited. This article explores the mural as one example of how public art, through the tri-dimensionality of paint, messaging, and color, culturally signifies the esthetics of public infrastructure as a way to visualize public memory. The intersectional weaving of public memory, public art, and longevity positions a legal remembering of cultural events framed through the mural-ization of law and street art. This framing of event and memory creates liminal spaces of legal tension on the street that serve as sites for cultural engagement. This framing of public memory through the four examples described in the paper shed light on how culture and law invites reception and craft intent using public infrastructure through message, meaning, color, and placement.