This paper adopts a sociosemiotic perspective to examine how normative consensus and legitimacy are constructed in global artificial intelligence (AI) governance discourse. Drawing on a corpus of forty-seven international normative documents, the study identifies an emerging cross-textual consensus around three core principles – Safety, Human-centric and Fairness – and analyses how these are semiotically encoded. The findings reveal tensions between state and non-state actors, and between semiotic agreement and practical implementation. For instance, ‘Safety’ is often framed through securitisation discourse, while ‘Human-centric’ is increasingly grounded in international human rights frameworks. The study further shows that discursive strategies such as nominalisation help establish surface-level consensus but introduce ambiguity that undermines enforceability. By conceptualising governance texts as dynamic semiotic systems, this research moves beyond the hard law–soft law dichotomy, revealing global AI regulation as a contested arena of meaning-making. It offers a theoretical basis for advancing more inclusive and operational governance models.

It was a puzzle to the British and has been a puzzle to historians ever since, why the American colonists, who enjoyed a degree of liberty, political autonomy, and even low taxation that was the envy of subjects in the home country, would join in a risky revolution to sever ties with the nation of their origin. The answer, according to Edmund Burke, was in large part religion. “Religion,” he explained to fellow members of Parliament in his “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies,” always a “principle of energy,” was “no way worn out or impaired” in North America—and that religion was of a particular kind. Burke wrote: “The religion most prevalent in our Northern Colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.” Of all faiths, this hyper-Protestantism, wrote Burke, is “the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.” This article sets out the ecclesiological, experiential, and theological differences among the largest Protestant denominations in Revolutionary America and the ways in which these differences contributed not just to the revolutionary spirit, but to the democratic and republican strands of revolutionary and constitutional thought in the new United States. The biggest contrast was between members and clergy of the Church of England, who were most involved to remain Loyalists, Reformed Protestants (Congregationalists and Presbyterians), who inclined toward republicanism, and Baptists, who were the most democratic and individualistic.

Despite the social, political and personal importance of contentious death investigation, medico-legal autopsies have received scant socio-legal attention. By extending understanding of the importance of care for the dead in this context, this article begins to bridge that gap. To do this, I explore original empirical data from interviews with Anatomical Pathology Technologists who both assist during post-mortems and take responsibility for the care of the deceased’s body before and after autopsy. I argue that care is woven throughout their practice and identities. This care is enacted within a complex context of relations and regulations, such that practice can simultaneously be technically and morally ‘good’ (including actions that go beyond what is necessary or mandated). In making this argument, I both extend understandings of care to relationships with the dead, and contribute new insights into the way that coronial justice can, and should, gain legitimacy.

This paper seeks to question the strict separation between liberal and authoritarian legality by revealing the fictions and contradictions of liberal law necessary to maintain its order and the authoritarian practices involved in sustaining it. Bringing forth stories of carceral labour of women prisoners in an Indian prison who bear witness to authoritarian logics of punishment and animating spaces of legal ambiguity occupied by this labour, I draw out this dialectical relationship between liberal law and its authoritarian practices. I also demonstrate how carceral labour serves to construct labour and its subject outside prison as “free” (notwithstanding its actual conditions and relations of coercion), sustaining a seductive dichotomy between “free” and “unfree” labour. Both materially and psychically, the liberal rule of law asks us to deposit “unfreedoms” in prison and its practices so that the fantasy of the free liberal subject with rights and citizenship is sustained.

Why did the nineteenth century see so little progress in addressing smoke pollution, even as smoke was increasingly recognised as a problem and economical technological solutions were identified? This article argues that efforts to abate smoke were impeded by the antagonistic class relationship between stokers and manufacturers, which prevented the emergence of a mutually beneficial compromise around smoke abatement. Employers sought to reduce smoke by compelling their stokers to take greater care under the threat of punishment. Law played an important role, siding with employers to impose liability for smoke pollution on stokers. Even when stokers were not prosecuted directly, employers often demanded indemnities as compensation for careless stoking. This reinforced mistrust between the two classes, undermining efforts to bring stokers on board with the goal of abating smoke. These findings may offer lessons today, as climate policy continues to be opposed despite the availability of green technologies and the existence of a scientific consensus on climate change.

This paper is an act of remembrance, a testimony to the horrors inflicted on our lives and bodies as women prisoners of Tihar Jail No. 6, Delhi. It documents the struggles for life and survival of fellow women prisoners, and bears witness to the deaths of Fiza and Jesca. Through these experiences, I argue that the measures introduced in the lockdown prison during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic did not merely respond to a public health emergency, but inaugurated a field of penal experimentation that emboldened existing practices of custodial violence and sought to establish a new regime of impunity aligned with Hindutva politics. I demonstrate how isolation cells came to function as de-facto solitary confinement, how the jail manual was effectively suspended, how the right to life was stratified into hierarchies of “deservingness” by High Powered Committees, and how daily prison life was restructured through intensified surveillance.

Puerto Rico has recently emerged as one of the fastest-growing tourist destinations in the Caribbean, a shift accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic and promoted by the local government as a response to prolonged economic crisis, austerity, and socioenvironmental disasters. This article argues that Puerto Rico’s recent expansion of tourism is a legal extension of its offshore financial diversification project. It examines how tax incentives and credits, regulatory waivers, and investment laws, most notably the Puerto Rico Incentives Code (Act 60 of 2019), have integrated tourism and luxury real estate into the archipelago’s broader transformation from a corporate tax haven into an offshore financial center. Drawing on sociolegal and political economy scholarship, the article shows how tourism and offshore finance are legally and institutionally entangled, constituting a colonial offshore economy: a legal–fiscal framework that facilitates capital mobility, regulatory arbitrage, and speculative investment. Empirically, it combines legal analysis with two case studies of luxury tourism megaprojects, Moncayo in Fajardo and Esencia in Cabo Rojo, to demonstrate how the colonial offshore economy materializes through tourism development, restructuring land use, redistributing public resources, and intensifying legally mediated forms of displacement and socioenvironmental harm.