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I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity. 1 Defying the Threshold It is perhaps trite to observe, but no less evident, that law does not operate or exist in a vacuum. The manifold ways in which legality and culture intertwine can directly inform our understandings of law and its status in contemporary life. 2 Cultural legal studies is about exploring this world outside traditional law and doctrine: moving beyond the legal text and wallowing in the rich diversity of the worlds of human culture, narrative, and art. Indeed, it is asserted that it is only by crossing the threshold at law's traditional limits, by venturing through the looking glass into law's epistemological hinterland, that these important cultural dimensions can be encountered, reflected upon, and interrogated. But this is no simple interdisciplinarity; cultural legal studies does not just involve taking aspects or insights from other disciplines and applying them to law. 3 Rather, in crossing law's cultural threshold we are challenging the very existence of that threshold. When we reject the limits of traditional legal texts, we not only challenge law's limits but also the forms in which law can appear. And in this expanded world we find multiple forms of law beyond the dry texts of statutes, judgments and policy documents. We find what William MacNeil might call a 'lex populi': a jurisprudential world of popular imagination and visual codes, diverse in its cultural 1 Morrison and McKean (2004) np. 2 See, for example, Goodrich (1990); MacNeil (2007); Manderson (2000); Sherwin (2000). 3 On interdisciplinarity generally see Nissani (1997), and in law Vick (2004). 2 dynamism, seething with the traces and hallmarks of legality. 4 But this 'other world' is also one of rich humanity and aesthetic experience, 5 of the complex human realities that dwell beyond the limits of law's rational order. 6 In entering the looking glass of cultural legal studies, in tumbling down the legal rabbit hole, we are discovering that we have not crossed any boundaries at all. It turns out that, after all, law was always bigger than we had thoughtand bigger than traditional legal study was able to think. It is to this defiance of law's cultural threshold that this article is dedicated-to the crossing of the boundary and the discovery of its non-existence. In examining this boundary navigation, there are two tools that are of particular importance and that can help us not only understand what is happening when we partake in cultural legal studies, but also feel the benefits of an expanded legal horizon. Our first tool is psychoanalysis. There is a strong connection between the traditional boundaries of law and the limits of rationality; the blackletter orthodoxy of yesteryear may have receded significantly, 7 but the priorities of mainstream study and practice remain those allied with a particular rational order. 8 In crossing law's cultural threshold we are not only...

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Criminal justice is a perennial theme in modern comics published in the United States and United Kingdom, with dominant narratives revolving around the protection of the innocent from crime and harm or the seeking of justice outside the authority of the state. The history of the comics medium and its regulation in the mid-20th century, particularly in the United States, shows how the comics medium itself—not just its popular content—was embroiled in questions of criminality, in relation to its perceived obscenity and fears that it caused juvenile delinquency. Indeed, the medium’s regulation shaped the way it has been able to engage with questions of crime and justice; the limitations on moral complexity under the censorship of the 1954 Comics Code in the United States, for example, arguably led to both a dearth of critical engagement in crime and justice concerns, and an increased evil or psychopathy in criminal characters (because more nuanced motivations could not be depicted under the Code). From the 1980s onwards, the restrictions of the Code abated, and a broad “maturation” of the form can be seen, with a concurrent increase in critical engagement with criminological questions. The main themes of comics research around crime and comics after the 1980s include questions of vigilantism and retribution, seen as the dominant concern in mainstream comics. But other leading questions go beyond these issues and explore comics’ engagement with the politics of crime and justice, highlighting the medium’s capacity to question the nature of justice and the legitimate exercise of state power. Moreover, stepping back and considering the general relationship between comics and criminology, comics can be seen as important cultural forms of expression of moral and social values, as well as potentially alternative orders of knowledge that can challenge mainstream criminology. From free speech, juvenile delinquency, and vigilantism, to politics, culture, and disciplinary knowledge, there are significant interactions between comics and criminology on a variety of levels.