The Abstract King: Hellenistic Royal Wills and the Immortal State

Forthcoming, Journal of the History of Ideas 86.3: 411-443. 

This article treats the corpus of Hellenistic Royal Wills and argues that the regal testament helps conceive of a State that is not coterminous with the ruler but that is, instead, an entity that keeps on living when the king dies. The article makes this claim by drawing upon legal material, particularly the Roman law of inheritance and the Hellenistic sources on royal and other public wills. Tracing the ability of the testament to secure continuity, the article uncovers a quasi-corporation engendered by the public use of the will and connects it to a nascent idea of the continuous State.

Painting History: Picture, Witness and Ancient Historiography

2024, History & Theory 63.3: 403-431 (link). 

Painting History asks what is at stake in historiography's millennia-long courtship of painting: why do historians identify themselves with painters and their work with pictures? In this article, I turn to an episode of interaction between textual and visual media (particularly to Herodotus, Polybius and the Alexander Mosaic) to argue that both are structured by the same simple desire that continues to exert its force today: the desire to see for oneself. The article ultimately uses this convergence of word and picture to revive a figure long forgotten in the theory of history: the witness.

In Flagrante Delicto: On the Legal Implications of Sight

2023, Arethusa 56.1: 77-116 (link).

In Flagrante Delicto mobilizes the ancient puzzle of “catching somebody in the act” to reconsider our understanding of crime and punishment. The puzzle resides in the fact that criminals caught in the act were punished more severely than those who were not. But why? The article shows that the distinction is expressive of the legal power of sight: the crime seen to be done is worse than the crime that has remained undetected. This surprising link between sensory experiences of crime and gravity of punishment, I argue, rekindles a forgotten connection between the eye and the law, thus reorienting our understanding of why we punish: because of what was visible. 

Debt in the Scales: Mechanics and Metaphor in the ancient Mediterranean

2023, Mètis N.S. 21: 283-317 (link). 

Debt in the Scales understands the metaphor of the scales of justice as a negotiation of the problem of value equivalence: why would anyone ever accept monetary compensation as being “equal” to the wrong done, instead of exacting “an eye for an eye”? This article argues that the scales’ legal import resides in what, conceptually and technologically, the instrument can do: able to render dissimilar things equivalent, the balance makes all objects, including crime and compensation, potentially exchangeable. 

Limit Cases: Sovereign Citizens and a Jurisprudence of Consequences

Forthcoming in M. Hertogh and P. de Winter (eds.). Empirical Perspectives on the Effects of Law: Towards Jurisprudence of Consequences. (link)

This article mines existing Dutch case law involving sovereign citizens (quantity; date; demographic information; socio-economic information), thus exploring ways to get a quantitative purchase on a movement that has thus far proven elusive to empirical analysis. The data, when paired with scarce quantitative and qualitative data from abroad, suggest four factors might help account for the popularity of Sovereign Citizenship: large-scale societal upheaval; center-periphery conflicts; loss of status among older men; and middling socio-economic status as well as self-employment.  

Sovereign Citizens in Belgium and Beyond: Questioning State, Citizenship and the Social Contract in 2024 

Forthcoming, Acta Falconis 60.3: 1-36 (in Dutch). 

This article considers the sovereign citizen-movement from the vantage-point of contemporary citizenship. It offers the first cross-national explanation of movement and traces its roots to 20th c. American libertarianism, in whose individualist criticism of social contract theory it is especially interested. The budding popularity of that criticism (and of the movement as such), I argue, is a consequence of the pandemic-engendered clash between the promise of individual autonomy and the reality of minimal control. 

Sovereign Citizens and Criminal Law 

2024, Dutch Journal of Criminal Law 2024.3: 1-12 (link). 

The contribution discusses the interaction between criminal law and sovereign citizens, a growing group of people who reject the Dutch legal system altogether. Nationally as well as internationally, they are increasingly coming under the authorities' scrutiny. Enlisting Austrian and German criminal law responses to sovereign citizens, I map current Dutch responses, make specific judicial and legislative recommendations, and argue that the true problem resides not in the sovereign citizens, but in the erosion of institutional trust they embody.

Sovereign Citizens in Law and Caselaw: an Overview

2024, Nederlands Juristenblad 254: 300-315 (in Dutch). 

Sovereign Citizens provides the first overview of Dutch judicial interactions with a group of citizens whose numbers have been steadily on the rise since the pandemic: the Sovereign Citizens. On the basis of 110 unique cases, the article lays out which cases sovereign citizens bring to court; which arguments they advance while in court; and how courts respond or might respond. Drawing on comparative legal material, the article places this movement in an international context and ends with a series of broader reflections on the sudden appearance of this group in the Dutch legal system.