Jothie is a socio-legal scholar whose research explores the intersections of law, language, and state power. She is a full-time Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation (ABF) in Chicago and serves as the Book Review Editor for the Law & Society Review. She completed her law and English degrees at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and earned her Ph.D. from the Melbourne Law School, where her doctoral research was awarded the university’s Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence.
Her scholarship focuses on how states, both democratic and non-democratic, weaponize legal discourse, narrative, and institutional technicalities to achieve illiberal ends. Her first book, Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore (Cambridge University Press, 2012), provided a critical analysis of Singapore’s “authoritarian legalism”. The study demonstrates how a state can carefully maintain judicial procedures and commercial legal frameworks to garner international legitimacy, while simultaneously using those exact legal instruments to constrain political dissent and regulate civil society.
Expanding her focus to global governance and state violence, her monograph Discounting Life: Necropolitical Law, Culture, and the Long War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2023) examines how the United States normalized extrajudicial and extraterritorial actions. Rather than analyzing traditional statutory law, her research tracks how narrative, media imagery, and political affect were leveraged to create a “necropolitical law” that frames targeted killings as legally permissible, ultimately devaluing lost human lives as collateral damage.