What if humans could speak directly with nonhuman animals? Across law and science, interspecies translation is emerging as a key preoccupation: from legal efforts to grant ‘rights of nature’ to rivers and forests, to AI-powered attempts to decode animal communication through bioacoustics and remote sensing. This article argues these efforts do not merely represent nonhuman entities but actively constitute new forms of political subjectivity of human and nonhuman like. Drawing on Michel Serres, Niklas Luhmann and Cornelia Vismann, I conceptualise ecological translation as the process through which alterity is rendered legible, and a shared ‘home’ ( oikos ) is produced. Law and science are treated as parallel cultural techniques that translate the more-than-human world into governable forms. It is not that something is lost in translation. It is that translation is a cultural technique that reconstitutes the entities it mediates in the process of mediating between them. Ultimately, ecological translation functions as a technology of sovereignty; constructing what counts as ‘Nature’, who may speak for it, and under what authoritative conditions.
This article examines the role of judicial emotion, particularly disgust, in English criminal law responses to adult, private, consensual sexual acts that resulted in injury. Using Meachen [2006] EWCA Crim 2414 as a focal point, it explores how courts apply the doctrine of consent under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. While doctrinal analysis shows inconsistencies in how consent to harm is treated across sexual offences and offences against the person, this article argues that these inconsistencies can be understood through the lens of emotions. The analysis of key cases cited in Meachen identifies themes of boundaries, contamination and animality that may be shaping judicial perception of harm and normality.
Until the early twentieth century, there was recourse by British administrators to martial law. However, such a concept was not considered to be law, at least not by many legal theorists. Martial law only ever existed after an ex post assessment, constructed from the common law of necessity and through the issuance of grants of indemnity. Despite this, within British society, martial law developed a normativity of its own. Employing the imaginary as a mechanism through which to conceive martial law, thereby, offers an important contribution to its current theorisation within the legal (historical) discourse: providing a means to properly interrogate its uneasy place within the historical record. This is important because the twentieth century saw the adoption of statutory provisions that were inspired by this imaginary and the utilisation of the rhetoric that accompanied it. Moreover, it is through conceptualising martial law as a product of the imaginary of law that one is able to reflect more broadly on the construction of the legal order and conceptualisations of normativity.
The first surviving references to unwritten law and to autonomy come to us from Sophocles’ Antigone . Legal readings of the tragedy routinely focus on the contest between conflicting norms, like natural law and legal positivism. These readings typically assume the truth of Antigone’s claim that an unwritten Higher Law supersedes Creon’s decree. Yet after she is accused of acting autonomously, she abandons this Higher Law and appeals instead to a law she has made for herself. This article explores the danger that appeals to Higher Law in adjudication may encourage claims based in autonomy, self-determined law, amounting to “Higher Lawlessness.”
This article explores how 'life' - the fetus, the person and our relations to one another - is 'conceived' in reproductive law and politics through the use of socio-legal fictions. Rather than operating as neutral, technical devices, I argue that legal fictions are socio-legal instruments invoked in moments of reproductive moral controversy and uncertainty that actively produce legal persons and serve to contain and domesticate law's excesses. Drawing on Fitzpatrick and Esposito, I argue that where socio-legal fictions are used to resolve uncertainty and contradiction in the law, they can only do so by taming relational and excessive forms of life into governable legal categories, leaving rights-based claims precarious and vulnerable to persistent challenge and undermining. I conclude by arguing for a more relational, affirmative approach to reproductive law.
In times of crisis, the law often devolves into managerial administration, suspending rights and reducing subjects to bare life. This essay argues that Albert Camus’s philosophy of revolt offers a critical ethical resource for reimagining justice and solidarity when juridical frameworks fail. By placing Camus in dialogue with Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, we propose a framework for solidarity as horizontal justice . Rather than displacing rights, this conception of solidarity identifies the ethical conditions under which rights retain force when legal protections are suspended or hollowed out. It generates binding norms through mutual vulnerability, limitation, and shared responsibility. We contend that Camusian ethics provides a necessary counter-jurisprudence capable of re-politicizing justice in response to technocratic abandonment.
This article examines the institution of criminal attempt in Old Georgian criminal law through the analysis of the legal monument known as the Law of Bagrat Kouropalates. Given the ongoing scholarly debate concerning the dating of this legal text, the article briefly addresses the issue of its chronological attribution. Particular attention is paid to the existence of the principle of subjective imputation in Old Georgian criminal law, within which the concept of criminal attempt is examined. The main objective of the article is to demonstrate the progressive nature of Old Georgian criminal law, especially in its reliance on subjective imputation as a basis for determining criminal liability. Although the study focuses on the legal history of Georgia, it contributes to broader discussions in European legal history by offering insight into the development of criminal liability and culpability during the ninth and tenth centuries. The article may therefore be of interest to scholars concerned with the historical foundations of criminal law. The findings contribute to European legal historiography by demonstrating that sophisticated concepts of criminal culpability were already present in ninth-century Georgian law. The significance of this inquiry is not limited to doctrinal legal history. The way a legal culture distinguishes between mere intention, preparation, attempt, and completed offense reveals broader assumptions about moral blame, social order, and the relationship between inward culpability and outward harm. In this respect, the law of Bagrat Kouropalates is valuable not only as a Georgian legal monument but also as evidence of the cultural and ethical foundations of medieval criminal liability. Examining criminal attempt through this lens makes it possible to situate Old Georgian law within wider interdisciplinary discussions concerning law, morality, and legal consciousness in premodern societies.
This article examines the global rise of "pseudolaw"-an umbrella term encompassing "sovereign citizens," "Freemen on the Land," "Reichsb & uuml;rger," and related movements that reject state authority while performing their own versions of law. Building on examples from Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and North America, it argues that pseudolaw cannot be understood merely as pathology or delusion. Instead, it should be seen as a form of prefigurative legality: a performative practice through which adherents enact alternative legal orders "as if" their desired sovereignty already exists. By drafting documents, issuing liens, or conducting courtroom rituals, participants embody legality without institutional sanction, challenging the state's monopoly over lawful meaning and subjection. There are, however, differences between pseudolaw and other forms of prefigurative practice. Accordingly, evaluating pseudolaw as prefigurative legality extends our understanding of legal prefiguration.
