In the United States, the steady yellow light means that a driver should either speed up or slow down. State laws written about a driver’s behavior at these yellow lights are vague and indeterminate and result in what is referred to as the dilemma zone (Hurwitz et al. in Transp Res Part F Traffic Psychol Behav 15(2): 132–143, 2012). This paper will reconsider law’s vagueness as intentional rather than problematic, insofar as cultural understandings of the yellow light lead to a (...) framework of visual jurisprudence in which drivers interact with law through legal discretion and common sense confronting a yellow light. Through a jurisprudential juxtaposition between the yellow light and red light cameras used to enforce yellow lights, the semiotics of automaticity compete with the semiotics of context-bound decision-making. (shrink)

v. 1. Editorial introduction -- v. 2. The English and Latin texts (i) -- v. 3. The English and Latin texts (ii).

This article allies the 1997 PlayStation video game Final Fantasy VII with Slavoj Žižek’s writings on ecology to critique the area of legal philosophy known as ‘earth jurisprudence’. Earth jurisprudents argue that law bears a large part of the responsibility for humanity’s exploitation of the environment, as law helps to bar nature from subjectivity. However, as Žižek warns—and as FFVII illustrates—the desire for meaning incites people to manufacture a harmonious vision of nature that obscures the chaotic forces at work in (...) the environment and ultimately absolves humanity of responsibility towards the world. Therefore, earth jurisprudence’s program of using legal rights to limit human intervention should be rejected in favour of an approach that enables people to take an active role in addressing the ecological crisis. (shrink)

Existing accounts of the Rule of Law are inadequate and require fleshing out. The main value of the ideal of rule of law for liberal political theory lies in the notion of predictability, which is essential to individual autonomy. The author examines this connection and argues that conservative theories of rule of law claim too much. Liberal theory equates the rule of law with legality, which is only one of the elements necessary for a just social order.

This paper examines the forms of life established through the visual governance of the Australian social security mobile app —the Express Plus Centrelink app. It is argued that the app exceeds established accounts of juridical and administrative power. The app involves a seeing that is not public, a responding that is not writing and a de-materialisation of an institution and its disciplinary apparatus. It is argued that the app creates proto-literate subjects that are required to respond to a real-time sequence (...) of images in a highly structured and circumscribed manner to become complicit in the digitalisation of their life. (shrink)

In the United States, handicapped parking spaces tether the social construction of need to the legal assurance of equality of accessibility. However in places such as Fenway Park in Boston, the threat of terror distorts the intention of these spaces by politically reconfiguring their presence and meaning. As a result, our public interest is legally manipulated and socially challenged to preference the abstraction of threat over real life in even the most ordinary of places.

law's oscillation between power and meaning -- Law's screen life : visualizing law in practice -- Images run riot : law on the landscape of the neo-baroque -- Theorizing the visual sublime : law's legitimation reconsidered -- The digital challenge : command and control culture and the ethical sublime -- Conclusion : visualizing law as integral rhetoric : harmonizing the ethical and the aesthetic.