Revolutionary developments along the El Paso and Ciudad Juárez border during the turn of the twentieth century created a cultural renaissance that resulted in scores of literary works, memoirs, films, and other artistic productions that rearticulated the experiences of living in a liminal border zone. This chapter explores serialized literature published by El Paso Spanish-language newspapers during the Mexican Revolution, including Tomóchic (1896) by Lauro Aguirre and Teresa Urrea, Los de abajo (1915) by Mariano Azuela, Memorias de mi viaje (1914) by Olga Beatriz Torres, The Wise Man of the Land of Moctezuma (ca. 1925) by Victor L. Ochoa, and the bilingual film by Félix and Edmundo Padilla, La Venganza de Pancho Villa (ca. 1930). I argue that the literature and film produced in these two cities along the international dividing line reveal the liminality of frontera itself produced much of the affective charge of fronterizo cultural productions.

The lived experience of law in medical practice and research is typified by intricate, sometimes complex and often mundane (perhaps even ritualistic) procedural requirements. While some scholars have been content thus to limit the normativity of law, Graeme reminds us that law is interconnected with ethics and that its distinctiveness may be better understood as process, particularly in boundary or liminal spaces where the roles of ethics and law are blurred. This processual conception of law is in turn a component of governance regimes that he depicts as ‘Ethics+’. He argues that ethics is always a necessary component of a robust and defensible regime of health research that is rooted in the core values and principles at stake while concurrently enabling adaptation and accommodation. Law as an ‘Ethics+’ governance regime embraces uncertainty and the liminal nature of the health research journey, while admitting value-based objectives that can act as foci for stakeholders. The chapter shows the bright beacon dimension of Graeme’s legacy, which points the way to a rich, non-formalistic account of law – not simply as law in action or law on the books but as law subsisting in-between.

UK law on assisted suicide is stuck in a cycle: courts uphold its illegality and defer to parliaments to enact change, but parliaments are reluctant to cross that threshold. This chapter deconstructs the case law on maintaining the status quo and constitutionally deferring to the legislature. It also considers reasons why legislators have declined to enact legal reform – autonomy issues, safeguards, palliative alternatives and the slippery slope. It looks at three jurisdictions in which this matter is overtly constitutional, and finds similarities among the criminal provisions that litigants sought to overturn and the rights on the basis of which they were overturned, leading to legislative change. The contested criminal provisions reflect the Suicide Act 1961 and the constitutional provisions against which they were considered to mirror the Human Rights Act. Currently, the only evidence of escape from liminality is a de facto policy of non-prosecution. With the UK Supreme Court poised to declare incompatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights, the ground has been laid for a constitutional answer that forces the legislature’s hand and enables a move beyond liminality.

This chapter draws parallels to the gothic trope that surrounded discussions on embryos in vitro in the 1980s as a frame of analysis that has grown in counter-response to law’s tendency to place entities either within the category of a ‘liberal, individual self,’ or outwith it (rarely in between). To explain, the gothic self is characterised by disorder, chaos, and dependency. It cannot be subsumed under the traditional ‘self’ that the law presupposes of its subjects. Further, within ‘the gothic’ lies the key concept of ‘monstrosity’, at the margins of what we deem to be human: ‘we stake out the boundaries of our humanity by delineating the boundaries of the monstrous’. While the gothic trope does not explicitly centre around ‘the in between,’ it is argued that we should see gothic entities as such, because of their common placement - legally, and sometimes socially - on the boundary between liberal, individualised human, and something akin to a science-fiction-esque ‘monster.’ The controversy that causes rhetorical parallels between new research and monstrous beings and mad scientists to be drawn is a major contributor to policy-makers reluctance to revisit the legal status of embryos in vitro.