The 1892 collision between the British merchant ship Ravenna and the Japanese torpedo boat Chishima generated a three-year legal debate over jurisdiction in territorial waters. Challenging the conventional notion that the coastal State enjoyed full sovereignty over its maritime territory, this article argues that contested jurisdiction in territorial waters was ubiquitous at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to imperialism, which played a pivotal role in transforming the coastal waters of semi-colonial countries into overlapping legal zones, political speculations and the absence of a uniform legal standard also put the coastal State's assertion of maritime sovereignty into question. On the one hand, semi-colonial states, such as the Meiji government, sometimes strategically avoided asserting maritime sovereignty when they deemed it appropriate for national interests. On the other hand, there was also a wide cleavage of opinions among Western powers regarding coastal jurisdiction. Scrutinizing the entangled currents of imperialism, political speculations and maritime laws in the Chishima case, this article contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on the polycentric oceanic world by displaying the rarely discussed contested jurisdiction in territorial waters before World War II.

In Tyrer v. United Kingdom (1978), the European Court of Human of Human Rights ruled that judicial corporal punishment contravened Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which proscribed “degrading treatment or punishment.” The case unfolded at a formative moment in British legal activism, as left-wing civil-liberties lawyers who had been wary of human rights discourse began taking cases to Strasbourg. The case also involved tactical challenges for British politicians and government lawyers. The case originated on the Isle of Man, which is close to the British mainland but constitutionally not part of the United Kingdom: it is a “crown dependency” with its own executive, legislature, and judiciary, and it persisted with judicial corporal punishment long after the practice had been abolished in Great Britain. By convention, the British government respected the island's laws and criminal-justice policies, but Britain was responsible for the island's compliance with international agreements—including the European Convention on Human Rights. How the British government dealt with the Isle of Man during and after the litigation had direct implications for a host of other small territories in what remained of the British empire—in particular, Britain's remaining Caribbean territories. The Tyrer case's protracted endgame was an object lesson in how much Britain's “unwritten” constitution depends on negotiation, manipulation, and avoiding the overt exercise of powers that might crumble upon use.

The Imperial Japanese Army imposed martial law (gunritsu) in areas occupied during each of the full-scale conflicts it fought between 1894 and 1945. This article traces changes and continuities in the purpose, function, and content of martial law during the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Asia-Pacific War to advance our historical knowledge of a much-understudied aspect of Japanese warfare. In so doing, it details the development and evolution of martial law as an instrument of military power showing how regulations were also influenced by and, therefore, tended to reflect the different wartime priorities and macro-level policies of the (military) leadership. It also highlights that the character of martial law remained largely unchanged and reveals that many of the legal practices utilized during the Asia-Pacific War were rooted in earlier conflicts. It ultimately argues, however, that wartime context and immediate military objectives took precedence over any longer-term political ambitions in Asia and, more crucially, over the welfare of civilians under occupation.

Why have scandalous sprees of lawbreaking by U.S. government officials proven so seductive yet so difficult to prosecute? This article takes the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan–Bush era as an instructive case study and red flag in the attitudinal erosion of the belief in the rule of law among American conservatives. Before the scandal broke, officials and legal counsels willfully mis-interpreted a clear prohibition to fund counter-revolutionaries and fabricated a post-facto presidential permission in order to sell weapons to Iran without congressional oversight. Congress's assumption that government officials would obey its statutes resulted in neither wrongdoing being punishable by criminal sanctions. Conservatives therefore argued that ends justified neglecting certain laws while also denying they had broken any laws. Prosecutors found themselves compelled to prosecute Iran-Contra's defendants over more prosaic crimes such as lying and stealing rather than more abstract and damaging ones. President George H. W. Bush's pardon of Iran-Contra defendants contributed to an impunity that further eroded the American rule of law to this day.