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What literary conventions best help us understand the migrant refugee’s claim for protection, and the terms on which law claims to offer it? One contender to have attracted attention recently is ‘bildungsroman’ (‘formation novel’): the genre of fiction concerned with a marginalized individual’s testing personal journey towards maturity, self-realization, and acceptance within a nation state. However, in light of UK legislation passed in 2022 apparently aimed at ensuring that migrant refugees who arrive illegally should not have any cause to hope for such acceptance, this paper proposes that we look instead to conventions associated with the ghost story. The article focuses its attention on the figure of the ghost as issuer of an unsettling reminder of unremedied injustice and moral duty: of a call to action that also inspires dread and consequent efforts to make it disappear and retreat to where it came from. These qualities are here considered as a basis for understanding the figure of the migrant refugee in law and in artistic depictions, including public performance (“The Walk,” 2021-22), photojournalism (“Risking the Channel ‘death route’ to Britain – a photo essay,” 2020) and visual art (“Dzhangal,” 2016-17).

Imprisonment as an impediment to movement (the disempowering and frustrating loss of autonomy) and a container (the perception of being closed in, precipitating feelings of claustrophobia and fantasies of escape) is a wellspring of metaphors that frame normative thinking and critical reflections in law and humanities scholarship. Reviewing critical academic and parliamentary committee commentary on the UK government’s public health restrictions alongside some key collections of pandemic poetry and art, the article considers how experiences of lockdown have been framed in the popular imagination by imprisonment metaphors, and reflects on the broader significance of these metaphors for law and humanities.

Predictive technologies are now used across the criminal justice system to inform risk-based decisions regarding bail, sentencing and parole as well as offender-management in prisons and in the community. However, public protection and risk considerations also provoke enduring concerns about ensuring proportionality in sentencing and about preventing unduly draconian, stigmatising and marginalising impacts on particular individuals and communities. If we are to take seriously the principle of individualised justice as desert in the liberal retributive sense, then we face serious (potentially intractable) difficulties in justifying any sort of role for predictive risk profiling and assessment, let alone sentencing based on automated algorithms drawing on big data analytics. In this respect, predictive technologies present us, not with genuinely new problems, but merely a more sophisticated iteration of established actuarial risk assessment (ARA) techniques. This chapter describes some of the reasons why principled and social justice objections to predictive, risk-based sentencing make so elusive any genuinely synthetic resolution or compromise. The fundamental question as regards predictive technologies therefore is how it might even be possible to conceive such a thing without seriously undermining fundamental principles of justice and fairness.

The struggle for justice is commonly articulated in literature and drama through metaphors of physical encumbrance (cramped, constraining conditions, being entangled and mired) and escape (e.g. to open landscapes and a view of the horizon and sky). What is less well known or observed is that a comparable metaphorical opposition of encumbrance/escape plays an important role in legal language too. This article traces the appearance of this metaphor across some key moments in English criminal law in which injustice is conceptualised metaphorically in terms of being held up, kept down or back, impeded, constrained or contained, and that achieving a just outcome necessitates shaking off the encumbrance and getting free. The article argues that analysis of this metaphor establishes an important intersection between literature and law. Following a discussion of the relevant general themes, the article offers a close reading of a number of appellate judgments on a range of criminal legal issues. Some of these judgments are very well known and concern questions such as how courts should set standards of culpability (e.g. on dishonesty and recklessness) and assess a defendant’s responsibility (e.g. the availability of ‘excusatory’ defences to murder). We seek to throw light on the way that the metaphors of encumbrance and escape work (or in some cases fail to work) in legal language, and thereby to advance understanding of the moral intelligibility, persuasiveness and longer-term prospects of judicial rulings as authorities.

Our project has sought to investigate young people’s perceptions of coercive sexual behavior: how people identify consent and its lack and the propensity for people to blame victims. In particular, we wanted to examine what difference, if any, gender makes. Our findings may have important implications for policing and prosecuting sexual offences and for the work of charities and third sector groups providing services for young people and sexual assault victims.