In Chapter 2, I situate Johnnie To’s popular comedy, Justice, My Foot! (1992 審死官), which revolves around a lawyer defending a woman falsely accused of murdering her husband, in light of the drafting of the Basic Law and passage of the Bill of Rights in early-1990s Hong Kong. I argue that To’s film, which appeared at cinemas a mere three years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing, can be approached as a screening of a nightmare scenario on the minds of many viewers at the time: A Hong Kong-style lawyer trying to defend the innocent and maintain justice in a Chinese-style legal system that disregards basic human rights and that is plagued by corruption and nepotism. I will then explore the function of humor in the film to show how Justice, My Foot! repackages anxieties about the sinicization of law into a marketable cultural product for mass consumption.

I investigate how disputes over the interpretation of the Basic Law’s provisions on Chief Executive elections are refracted in Hong Kong’s gangster or ‘triad’ films. These disputes became increasingly acrimonious after 1997: Pro-democracy legislators, lawyers, and activists in the territory accused the Chinese government of failing to honor guarantees for democratization enshrined in the constitutional document, while the Chinese government accused the pro-democracy camp of attempting to bring chaos and undermine Chinese sovereignty in the name of democratization. I will examine a cluster of gangster films centered around conflicts over how a new leader in the criminal syndicate should be chosen, and argue that key terms in the city’s election debate are integrated into the films' dialogue and signal a conscious cinematic engagement with the constitutional impasse. I will then draw on the work of Robert Cover to offer an interpretation of Herman Yau’s The Mobfathers (2016; 選老頂) as a cinematic expression of the jurispathic violence, which Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in the course of the election controversy.