ABSTRACT
This chapters context is set by the meeting of an unlikely trio: Nigella Lawson, Judge Dredd and Jacques Derrida. The chapter seeks to further the study of comics and law by commenting upon the controversy surrounding the Obama Administration's drone programme via a reading of the Judge Dredd comics, in particular the 1978 John Wagner story 'The Day the Law Died'. It begins, first, by examining the Administration's drone programme, before then re-reading the programme through the aesthetics of Judge Dredd. Consequently for both Dredd and Obama, 'accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are all consolidated in this one man'. The chapter then contributes to an area of interdisciplinary legal scholarship which, as aforementioned, is notably under-represented. Finally, it closes by recalling Derrida's framework for examining this violent exercise of sovereignty because, for him, the death penalty always takes place through a totalitarian hybrid action, where the judge, the jury and the executioner, are one.
