Consent – the organizing principle of legal responses to sexual harms – rests on a yes-versus-no binary. Yet, ambivalence is pervasive in sexual life, often eluding binary simplicity. This article assesses the implications of ambivalence for sexual consent jurisprudence. Drawing on interviews with Israeli gay and bisexual men regarding their experiences in (semi-)public sexual venues, it examines a context in which sexual norms have historically developed outside dominant cultural scripts, where ambivalence is particularly salient. Through the men’s testimonies, the conditions under which ambivalence leaves individuals uncertain of how to name sexual harms, identify boundary violations, or assign responsibility are mapped. Grounded in these findings, alongside sociological theories of ambivalence and socio-legal theories of sexual consent, the article adopts dialectical sensibility to capture what binary consent models tend to flatten: the simultaneous presence of agency/coercion, empowerment/vulnerability, and pleasure/danger within a single sexual interaction. Ambivalence in these “gray zones” is therefore reconceptualized here as neither anomaly nor individual failure but as a structuring – and even productive – feature of sexual life, complicating theories that cast ambivalence as primarily suppressive. Finally, the analysis underscores the limitations of prevailing consent paradigms and surfaces new questions about how criminal law might respond to the indeterminate realities of sex.

Prosecutors in England and Wales may start or continue a prosecution only if to do so is in the public interest. No general account has previously been given, however, of what the public interest consists in. This paper aims to provide such an account, drawing on a study of all policies and guidance published by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Its principal conclusion is that, in most cases, CPS guidance imposes on prosecutors an obligation to seek an appropriate penalty for those against whom there is sufficient evidence. In more serious cases, this obligation effectively renders prosecution mandatory. In less serious cases, it may be outweighed by countervailing factors, and out-of-court disposals may constitute an appropriate penalty. However, only a limited range of factors are clearly recognised as counting against prosecution. CPS guidance also lacks clear principles regarding when prosecutors may exceptionally pursue non-punitive aims.

The article examines the history of British private investigators. Historians and criminologists have shown how the police have never monopolized security or protection. The same can be said about investigation, although this is much less well understood. Private investigators have a key place in the social distribution of investigation, widely portrayed as both heroic uncoverers of the truth and as invasive “snoops.” Their work therefore opens wider questions about who should be able to know what about whom. This article focuses on the period between 1965 and 1975, which saw a range of criminal investigations, public inquiries, and press reports around private investigators, against the background of shifts in data technologies and cultures of “transparency.” This article asks why “invasions of privacy” by private investigators caused so much public concern in this period, but the attempts to restrict their activities largely petered out. It argues that the answer lies in uncertainties of the category of privacy and, more specifically, the unresolved role of the British state. In the context of changing relationships between the state, market, and the wider distribution of investigation, privacy protections did not meaningfully distinguish between who was accessing information and the reasons they were doing so. The article draws on sources including the evidence submitted to the 1972 Younger Committee on Privacy, the papers of the Director of Public Prosecutions, published memoirs, and local and national newspapers.

This article presents conclusions from a study of 1,400 criminal trials in cases involving anti-caste and tribe violence, filed in the trial court of Aurangabad District (Sambhajinagar) in western India. Employing computational analysis upon the metadata and text of decisions filed under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) (POA) Act 1989 during a 20-year period (2002–2023), I offer an exploratory socio-legal analysis of hate-crime adjudication in India. This article sheds light on hitherto unexplored questions about criminal adjudication in India such as: Which cases are most likely to result in acquittals and convictions? What kind of evidence does the court consider and in what manner is evidence read? How frequently are cases dismissed due to witnesses turning hostile? What kinds of punishments do Indian courts hand out? How long do criminal trials typically last? What kind of charges are most commonly brought against the accused in these cases? How easy is it to get bail and what conditions do courts typically impose? How long do POA-accused spend in jail before they get bail?. In doing so, this article offers a first-of-its kind phenomenology of ‘hate-crime’ adjudication and, more broadly, of criminal adjudication in India.

Only two cases of migrant trafficking have been successfully prosecuted in Canada (R v. Gonzalez-Valbuena and R v. Domotor). This article considers why by offering a comparison of human trafficking offences defined at section 118 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) and sections 279.01-279.011 of the Criminal Code of Canada (CrC). We also assess the application of these provisions to seven publicly reported cases of migrant trafficking. We demonstrate that the anti-trafficking frameworks fail to capture the offence of migrant trafficking. We also confirm that the prosecution of migrant trafficking is undermined by the promotion of racist and gendered ideas of victimization in judicial decision making. Our analysis offers support for the work of Nandita Sharma (2005) on the existence of “global apartheid” in the Canadian context, which operates to sustain the illegalization, criminalization and removal of specifically racialized female migrants from Canada.

This paper critically examines the legal and normative implications of remote AI weapons detection (AWD) systems currently under trial in England and Wales. Positioned as a technological solution to rising knife crime and counter-terrorism challenges, these systems claim to reduce reliance on traditional stop and search practices by identifying concealed weapons without physical contact. We make an original argument that such technologies invert the established logic of stop and search – effectively transforming it into a new concept of ‘search and stop’ – with significant consequences for individual rights and police accountability. Through a doctrinal analysis of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE), relevant case law from the European Court of Human Rights and England and Wales, and the directed surveillance regime under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the paper addresses five core questions: (1) whether AI-generated outputs can satisfy the legal standard of ‘reasonable suspicion’; (2) whether remote scanning constitutes a ‘search’ in law; (3) the implications of these systems under equality law and police duties under PACE; (4) how the technology engages surveillance law and the right to privacy; and (5) what reforms or safeguards are needed for lawful and legitimate use.

Campaign contributions – their salience, how they distribute, and their implications for political accountability and local control – have been studied extensively in the executive, legislative, and, increasingly, state judicial contexts. How reported campaign contributions vary across local prosecutor candidates as well as inform prosecutor election outcomes, however, are comparatively less well understood despite an increasing amount of campaign contributions flowing into local prosecutor elections over time. Drawing from a leading and recently released dataset that links campaign information from 3,123 local prosecutor candidates and the most recent election cycles across 2,205 districts between 2012 and 2019, this study seeks to develop an initial accounting of factors which plausibly inform local prosecutor candidates’ campaign fundraising success. To do so, the models evaluate how reported campaign contributions distribute at the individual candidate and district levels and separate contested and uncontested prosecutor elections. When it comes to campaign contribution totals, while findings from contested and uncontested election models, as expected, evidence important differences, these differences are generally stable across the candidate and district levels. Comparing findings from candidate- and district-level models, by contrast, uncovers an important difference involving incumbency status. Taken together, the findings make clear that while campaign contributions inform prosecutor election outcomes, factors that inform fundraising success vary across contested and uncontested elections as well as across candidate- and district-levels. These variations, in turn, raise important distributional concerns.

In September 1833, eleven students aged between fourteen and twenty-one were imprisoned and brought before judge Manuel Joaquín Valdivieso in Santiago de Chile. They were accused of leading a rebellion that had rocked the country’s foremost educational institution, the Instituto Nacional, earlier that month. When asked who had initiated the revolt or invited them to join, the students refused to name names, insisting instead that theirs had been “a complot of all.” Their statement echoed similar assertions made by protesters across the Spanish Atlantic, from Castilian peasants to Andean Natives. Tracing the confrontation between the Instituto students and Judge Valdivieso, this article examines how appeals to collective agency and unanimous action disrupted the attribution of penal responsibility. I argue that such strategies served not only to deflect blame but to assert the legitimacy of revolts and other dissident political acts. The article explores how students confronted the judge’s interpretation of their movement, from their motivations to the dynamics of the insurrection. To justify their revolt, it shows, the Instituto students had to mobilize their knowledge of the law—not to claim its protection, but to undermine its capacity to render their actions intelligible.

How do lawyers understand legality in contemporary India? We examine the experiences of lawyers in Delhi, who defend people accused under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), statutes increasingly deployed to target dissent and minority groups. Drawing on in-depth interviews, these trials produce a sense of normlessness—where foundational assumptions about rules, processes, and institutional roles collapse. Lawyers describe an “alien” legal world marked by unpredictability, an absence of established procedure, and blurred boundaries between judges, prosecutors, and police. While ordinary cases retain a sense of normality, UAPA and PMLA cases destabilise imaginations of the legal process, compelling lawyers to speculate on motives and majoritarian influences. We explore how lawyers respond through insistence on procedural norms and strategies to mitigate harm to clients. These narratives illuminate the transformation of legality into a contingent, shape-shifting form of power, challenging deterministic accounts of authoritarian legality