The issue could not be more timely. Currently before the United States Supreme Court are two cases challenging state laws that categorically bar transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports. In ruling on these cases, the Supreme Court will need to decide whether the laws violate statutory or constitutional prohibitions on sex discrimination.

As a matter of legal doctrine, the answer is not clear. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 permits sex segregation in sports but says nothing about how transgender individuals should be classified. The Supreme Court held in 2020 that discrimination based on transgender status in employment–where transgender employees were engaged in the same conduct as non transgender employees–was a form of sex discrimination. The Supreme Court was explicit, however, that its holding said nothing about how transgender individuals should be assigned or treated in sex-segregated contexts. The Equal Protection Clause permits sex-based classifications only when the classification is substantially related to an important state interest. Courts have struggled with the question of whether categorical exclusion of transgender girls from girls’ sports is substantially related to the state’s interest in fair play. And, if transgender girls cannot be categorically excluded from girls’ sports, can cisgender boys?

The current Supreme Court cases will not settle the issues. This is true for reasons both legal and political. Even if the Court upholds categorical bans as legally permissible, they will not be required. If the Court strikes down categorical bans, more limited ones will still be in play. States will continue to have leeway to pass laws permitting (or requiring) various degrees of inclusion—laws that will themselves invariably be challenged. At the federal level, Congress may choose to amend Title IX so as to make its demands with regard to transgender girls’ inclusion in girls’ sports explicit—a change which would then itself be subject to constitutional challenge.

Ultimately, and over time, judges, legislators and voters will need to decide how eligibility rules should be drawn. My book provides a framework for thinking about what society should require by focusing on what is at stake. Organized sports are associated with three primary types of benefits. The basic benefits of sports are the physical and psychological ones that athletic participants get from athletic endeavors. The special benefits of sports are the distinct set of goods—sometimes tangible sometimes not—that go to the small group of winners. The group benefits of sports are those that non participants get in the form of role-modeling and increased self-esteem from seeing those with whom they socially identify rewarded and celebrated. Although the benefits of sport attach to all levels of play, they attach to different levels in different degrees. At the early childhood and recreational levels, the basic benefits predominate as both the reason and the reward for play. At more elite levels, the special and group benefits of sports become more pronounced.  Sex and Sports suggests how, at each level of play, eligibility rules should be drawn so as to maximize the benefits of sports for girls and women—both transgender and cisgender—recognizing that under some circumstances the interests of the two groups will in fact diverge.

The post Sex and Sports: Transgender Rights and the Culture War Over Girls’ Sports first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

The Cambridge Handbook of Islam and Environmental Law, the first of its kind, publishes this month. Drawing on twenty-four contributors across fourteen countries and four continents, it maps Islamic environmental thought from classical fiqh to contemporary climate litigation. It is an act of recovery and of optimism. The legal tools exist. The issue, though, is whether nations and the international community will use them.

The Loss and Damage Fund, agreed at COP 27 in Sharm el-Sheikh and operationalized at COP 28 in Dubai, remains vastly underfunded relative to the scale of harm already visited on the most vulnerable nations. One underexamined dimension of that harm is military. Armed conflict destroys ecosystems, contaminates water supplies, and generates emissions that fall almost entirely outside the accounting frameworks of the Paris Agreement. The communities that survive war, and then survive the floods, droughts, and displacement that follow, bear compounded losses for which no fund has been designed. And just because more international and regional action is needed does not absolve countries from a justice-first mindset within their own political boundaries. At all political levels, we must strive to advance the cause of justice and work to protect the most vulnerable peoples and ecosystems first.

Islamic legal tradition developed responses to exactly this kind of compounded harm. Classical fiqh prohibited the destruction of trees, crops, and water sources in warfare, constraints on environmental harm during conflict that predate the Geneva Conventions by more than a millennium. The hima system, practiced across the Arabian Peninsula and into Andalusia, designated protected zones where extraction was prohibited and ecosystems were maintained for communal benefit. In Ottoman governance, waqf endowments, charitable trusts with perpetual legal standing, financed the upkeep of water systems, forests, and agricultural land across generations. In Al-Andalus, Islamic water law shaped and extended the acequia irrigationsystems of southern Spain, many of which remain in operation today: a living inheritance of Islamic environmental governance embedded in European land use.

These are worked-out models of what has, in fact, happened, and we should open our minds to using them to build frameworks for the future. The hima protected biodiversity before that word existed. The waqf created durable institutions for environmental management without state enforcement. The acequia systems distributed water equitably in conditions of scarcity.

What they have not had, until now, is recognized treatment alongside international climate law, comparative environmental law, and environmental justice scholarship. This Handbook argues that the resources for more just and more durable climate governance already exist in our historical, religious, and spiritual traditions, and that bringing them into the fore of the conversation, six months before COP 31 convenes in Turkey, is long overdue.

The communities least responsible for the climate crisis have the deepest legal traditions for living within planetary limits. That is where the academic, policy, institutional, finance, and governance fields need to look in a true spirit of humility with an open mind and heart. The scale of the planetary crisis demands no less. The moment to start is NOW.

The post What Climate Law Has Been Missing for 1,400 Years first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

Traditionally, relations between private individuals in the marketplace have been governed by private law. This area of law enables individuals to pursue their own interests while primarily seeking to ensure justice between them through doctrines such as good faith, misrepresentation, and the duty of care. It is enforced by aggrieved parties who bring claims before civil courts – a mechanism known as private enforcement. However, as markets have become increasingly regulated, particularly within the EU, private law now operates alongside market regulation in shaping interpersonal relations across areas ranging from product safety, consumer sales, and financial services to competition, digital services, and artificial intelligence. Unlike private law, market regulation is primarily designed to steer the behaviour of market participants in pursuit of public goals, such as market efficiency, sustainability, innovation, and consumer protection. It employs both public and private law instruments – such as authorisations for market entry and duties of care – and relies not only on private parties but also on regulatory agencies to ensure compliance, a mechanism known as public enforcement.

The collision between traditional, interpersonal justice-oriented private law and instrumentalist market regulation raises many questions. For instance, can a firm be held liable under private law for breaching regulatory duties? Can it comply with its regulatory duties yet still be in breach of its private law obligations? If a firm operates within a regulatory sandbox where regulatory requirements are temporarily relaxed, can it incur civil liability for harm arising from the experiment? Can aggrieved individuals rely on the findings of a regulatory agency in civil proceedings? To what extent can regulatory agencies be involved in providing compensation in cases of mass harm? Can a firm be subject to both an administrative fine and civil liability for the same regulatory violation? And can a whistleblower who exposes a regulatory breach be granted full immunity from civil liability?

These questions reveal tensions between the core values underpinning market regulation and private law: the common good and interpersonal justice; legal certainty and individual fairness; and uniformity and diversity. The central question underlying the book, therefore, is how market regulation and private law can be reconciled. To address this question, the book develops an integrated analytical framework that helps us better understand their interaction in both standard-setting and enforcement, within the EU and beyond. This novel framework emerges from analysing market regulation through the traditional private law lens and private law through the regulatory lens, along both descriptive and normative lines. It reflects elements of current legislative, judicial, and administrative practices across multiple jurisdictions and regulated sectors, and provides a basis for examining them.

I argue that market regulation and private law are two sides of the same coin. To reconcile them is to enable them to work in tandem, while acknowledging their distinctive characteristics and, where necessary, making trade-offs between the competing values that underpin them. This mode of interaction places demands on both discourses: private law should be receptive to the public interest logic of market regulation, while regulatory discourse should be receptive to the relational logic of private law. Fundamental rights – such as the right to private and family life, the right to non-discrimination, and the right to an effective remedy – can foster this interaction, serving as a bridge between market regulation and private law.  

Ultimately, reconciliation between market regulation and private law is essential to developing innovative responses to contemporary challenges. But how can this be achieved in practice? The book therefore also translates theory into practical guidance for legislators, courts, and regulatory agencies. It shows that such reconciliation can be pursued through incremental steps taken by each actor at both the EU and national levels. It further invites scholars and practitioners in regulation, public law, private law, law and economics, EU law, and national law to move beyond established modes of thinking and collaborate across disciplines while piecing together the reconciliation puzzle.  

The post Piecing Together Market Regulation and Private Law: The Reconciliation Puzzle first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

Congratulations to students in the Organizations and Transactions Clinic on a successful quarter. We highlight their work below.

What is actually happening is both more interesting and more important.

AI is already beginning to reshape civil dispute resolution, not simply by replacing human actors, but by changing how legal systems work around them. In The Cambridge Handbook of AI in Civil Dispute Resolution, we explore this transformation across a remarkably wide range of settings: public courts, online dispute resolution platforms, mediation, arbitration, access-to-justice tools, and systems designed to help people understand and navigate disputes before they escalate.

One of the central messages of the book is that AI in dispute resolution is not just about adjudication. It is also about access. In many legal systems, the real problem is not that people are judged by machines, but that they never meaningfully reach justice. Civil justice is often too expensive, too slow, too complex, or too inaccessible for ordinary users. Against that background, AI can offer real promise. It can help organise large amounts of legal information, support case management, assist users in understanding procedures, and make certain forms of dispute resolution easier to access.

But that promise comes with equally serious risks.

AI systems can reproduce bias, obscure reasoning, weaken accountability, and encourage overreliance on outputs that appear authoritative but are not necessarily accurate or fair. In the justice context, those risks are amplified. A small error in an entertainment app is one thing; a flawed recommendation in a legal dispute is another. That is why the debate cannot be reduced to a question of whether AI is “good” or “bad”. The real question is how it is designed, deployed, regulated, and supervised.

This is also why a comparative perspective matters. The book brings together examples from different parts of the world, from predictive and administrative tools in Brazil to generative AI in the Dutch legal system, China’s internet courts, and European debates shaped by the EU AI Act. These examples show that there is no single pathway for AI in justice. Technologies develop differently across jurisdictions because legal traditions, institutional capacities, and normative priorities differ.

So where does this leave us?

In our view, AI should not be understood as a substitute for justice, but as a structural force that is already reshaping it. That makes careful governance essential. We need systems that are transparent, human-centred, and attentive to due process, fairness, and inclusion. In the European context, this is not merely a policy preference: the EU AI Act treats certain AI systems used in the administration of justice as high-risk.

We also need to move beyond slogans, whether utopian or catastrophic.

The future of civil justice will not be decided by technology alone. It will depend on the choices lawyers, judges, policymakers, designers, and users make now.

The real challenge is not whether AI will enter civil dispute resolution. It already has. The challenge is whether we can ensure that it serves justice rather than distorts it.

In this spirit, we present a book with 22 chapters, which we hope will inspire and interest you.

The post Not a Robot Judge: What AI Is Really Doing to Civil Justice first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

This conflation is particularly visible in the context of the so‑called “global war on terror,” but it is far from unique. Ongoing debates regarding whether military operations by the G5 Sahel Joint Force are regulated  by IHRL or IHL, or a combination of the two illustrate the continued uncertainty. Similar questions have arisen concerning whether confrontations between security forces and criminal organizations in Rio de Janeiro, or between competing drug cartels in Mexico, satisfy the NIAC threshold. Increasingly robust UN peacekeeping mandates have prompted further discussion about whether UN forces may themselves become parties to a NIAC. Most recently, President Donald Trump asserted that U.S. strikes against “drug cartels” in the Caribbean were lawful under international law on the basis that the United States was engaged in a NIAC with these groups.

Even where the existence of a NIAC is uncontested, significant ambiguities persist regarding the personal, geographic, and temporal scope of the applicable law – issues that carry profound consequences for determining who may be detained without charge or targeted without warning. In the absence of any central authority to resolve these matters in real time, states continue to exercise wide discretion – and controversial practice is expanding.

Clearly identifying the existence of a NIAC entails profound and reverberating legal significance. This is demonstrated by the impressive range of international actors engaged in conflict identification. For example, both national and international criminal tribunals must determine the existence of a NIAC to prosecute war crimes. The UN Human Rights Council engages in conflict identification to assess whether violations of IHL or IHRL have occurred, while human rights courts and UN treaty bodies undertake similar assessments when interpreting and applying IHRL. At the same time, national courts and tribunals engage in conflict identification to assess asylum or subsidiary protection claims, while insurance firms determine the existence of a ‘war’ to activate war exclusion clauses.

The motives that drive each of these actors to identify armed conflict inevitably influence their respective determinations. This can be seen with respect to not only the existence of a NIAC, but also the geographical and temporal scope of NIAC. Indeed, it is not uncommon for multiple actors to reach different conclusions as to the existence of a NIAC based on the same factual circumstances. These conflicting interpretations are not only the result of the motives that drive them, but equally the result of a broad spectrum of uncertainties surrounding the legal concept and contours of NIAC.

Image credit: fabrikasim / Freepik

The post Armed Violence and International Law: Identifying Non-International Armed Conflict first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

Kingson was right. The way people live, work, and save is changing rapidly, but our tax system was built for an earlier era when people lived in one place, worked in one place, and belonged to one political community for most or all of their lives. Today, people relocate and their lives and livelihood, their families, their jobs; their wealth and economic activity effortless transcend national borders. Yet taxes on individuals — the most important source of revenue for almost every country—still rely on old assumptions about residence, nationality, and community that globalization has rendered outdated or even meaningless.

On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the writing of the first model tax treaty—we met at Oxford for a conference the results of which are presented in this  new book: on Taxing People: The Next 100 Years.  Globalization complicates taxation. It generates unprecedented mobility of people, resources and economic activity. The digital revolution and the merging of social and cultural communities across national borders removed barriers and allowed people and businesses greater flexibility in operating major aspects of their operation across national borders.

Alongside these changes in technology and daily life, we have seen major changes in tax policy and governance: the rise of interstate tax competition, the development of new institutions, and the expansion of some actors’ influence alongside the diminishment of others’. These developments have had major effects not only on the power of states to tax, but also on the legitimacy of taxation, raising concerns for justice at the national and international levels.

The chapters of this book reconsider individual’s taxation looking forward to the next 100 years: They reconceive the goals of taxation and the role of international taxation and consider the potential roles of governments and international institutions in designing a tax system that puts people at its core.

Chapter by chapter, prominent tax academics explore urgent questions regarding how belonging, work, and investment impact and should impact taxation.  Among the questions the book asks are: Who owes taxes where?  Should the obligation to pay taxes depend on citizenship? Residence? Source? Something else? How should tax systems adapt to aging populations, gig and remote work, new forms of belonging and migration, and the aftermath of colonialism?  What is the right timeline for taxation?  A year? A lifetime?

International institutions coordinate tax rules across countries, but they face criticism for failing to represent the interests of poorer regions or for relying on frameworks that reflect colonialism. Some of the chapters of this book imagine new forms of tax governance built from the bottom up, empowering  citizens within states, as well as regions or groups historically left out of international tax policymaking. Others look to more radical experiments, such as allowing taxpayers to allocate part of their tax payments directly to other jurisdictions — a kind of democratic crowdfunding for global redistribution. The authors evaluate modern modes of cooperation  from theoretical, practical, and historical perspectives.

Meanwhile, social transformations impose new demands on tax systems. Remote work blurs boundaries between home and workplace. Aging populations and lengthening lifespans strain welfare systems. Care work—often unpaid or underpaid—creates gender and wealth inequalities that current tax systems fail to address.

The world where a person worked in their sole nationality state for a single employer for their entire career are done and unlikely to return.  Our new world is increasingly borderless, not only in terms of human mobility, but also in terms of economic, political, and moral allegiance. People are living longer and forging more numerous and varied bonds with multiple states.  These changes are profound and likely enduring, and they have implications for how societies fund public goods and redistribution. If taxation is to remain legitimate, effective, and fair, it needs to address the way people live now and be flexible enough to adapt to the ways people and their states will operate in the future. To prepare for the second century of taxing people, this book invites us to rethink the fundamentals.

The post Taxing People: Yesterday Versus Today first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

Kelsen unequivocally rejects what has become one of the main tropes of the populist rhetoric: namely, the opposition between “the People” and the political “elites”. For him, this dichotomy rests on a dangerous fiction: the belief that a unified, homogeneous entity (the Volk) exists outside representative institutions whose will can and must be directly embodied by a single leader (the Führer), self-professedly untouched by the corruption of the political establishment and thus best positioned to champion the interests and claims of the “true”, hard-working people. Against this dangerous simplification and deliberate illusion, Kelsen emphasizes pluralism, social conflict, and the (often uncomfortable) complexities of party democracy. Political will, he argues, is not discovered or revealed but constructed through institutionalized processes of mediation, negotiation, and compromise. Political indirectness, intermediary bodies, and the challenges of electoral representation – specifically, the relationship between majority rule and minority rights and the tension between inclusivity and accountability of elected governments – are best understood not as a betrayal of democracy but as structural conditions of its very possibility in complex mass societies.

Kelsen’s sophisticated analysis of political leadership is especially relevant in democracies increasingly tempted by authoritarian figures. Democratic leadership, on his account, differs fundamentally from autocratic rule. In a liberal democracy, leaders do not govern by virtue of superior insight, charismatic authority, or privileged access to transcendent truths. They remain contestable, accountable, and – crucially – peacefully removable (by means of periodic, free, and truly competitive elections). Whereas democratic authority is constantly forged through an open-ended process of creation and circulation that empowers citizens’ critical thinking, autocracy relies on the myth of exceptional leaders who claim a monopoly of Truth and cast themselves as messianic redeemers. By doing so, they set themselves above and beyond the democratic principles of accountability, moderation in the exercise of executive authority, legitimate opposition, and rotation in office – that is, the backbones of party democracy.

In an era pervasively marked by populist simplifications and authoritarian temptations, Kelsen’s sober, procedural, and pluralist vision of democracy remains a vital source of insights for thinking about democratic resilience, and for recognizing the first symptoms of an autocratic involution of democratic leadership.

Finally, one of the distinctive strengths of Kelsen’s contribution lies in his sustained attention to the gap between the ideal image of democracy and the way it actually works in mass, heterogeneous societies where partisanship and disagreement are inevitable. Rather than concealing this gap behind tempting abstractions or moralizing rhetoric, Kelsen insists on confronting it directly. Democracy, in his view, is not weakened by the acknowledgment of its imperfections. Rather, it is strengthened by a vision of politics that places social conflict and partisan views at its core, promotes an ethics of compromise that genuinely respects the legitimacy of political antagonists, and thus prevents its drowning at the hands of populist ventriloquists and potential autocrats in disguise clothing themselves in the mantle of electoral legitimacy.

The post Revisiting Kelsen’s Democratic Theory: Lessons for Contemporary Democracies first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

This book, at its core, is a renouncement of a belief system: doctrinal legal approaches to ‘law and torture’ research and practice. At the same time, it is articulation of new belief in disbelief: critique and the disciples of that disparate tradition. And it is a stringing together of all that which allowed me to frame provocative questions of doctrine – and all that didn’t quite find a home in my doctoral dissertation, because it was either somewhat distant or dangerous to defend in a traditional institution as a law school. Diplomatically put, this book is an attempt to enrich (though not as to correct) what I view as a relatively impoverished field of ‘law and torture’, namely dominant doctrinal legal approaches to torture’s adjudication (and by extension prevention). I say impoverished because legal practice and research remain mostly oblivious to the wider discussions around core questions of pain, the state, violence, responsibility, recognition etc.

Genesis

I was set up on this path engaging with the work of Vicky Canning, Toby Kelly, Andrew Jefferson, Steffen Jensen, Stanley Cohen, Lutz Oette, and Danielle Celermajer – the last of which propelled me to weigh in to the point where I use her recurring phrase ‘widening the apertures’ as my subtitle. Danielle’s discussion of her book ‘The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach’ in Copenhagen more than five years ago defined a generative shift for me. I could plainly see how it split colleagues seated around me – some were not ready to receive her messages and grew grumpily defensive as others were remarking how it would’ve been the book that they would’ve written. The conversation grew as those in the Celermajer camp (particularly Andrew Jefferson and Tomas Max Martin) introduced me to what were to become intellectual muses including Veena Das, Austin Sarat, Thomas Mathiesen, Judith Butler, David Garland, Nils Christie, Scott Veitch, Emily Kidd White, Pierre Bourdieu, Talal Asad.

Provocations

I draw up five core provocations from these inspirations: (1) that legal doctrine dominates but disconnects important elements in understanding torture’s lifeworld; (2) that linear understandings of progress conceal failures of doctrine; (3) that human rights law has exceptionalised torture in a state-deferential manner; (4) that evidentiary discretion on the part of authoritative courts and committees has served this exceptionalisation; and (5) that potent clues are to be found in engaging with ideological and imaginational dimensions.

Those who’ve read my work before^[1] might have charged me with not offering answers. And I’ve also been guilty of posing the question of utility to other colleagues. The value of any work like this (and what drives me) is (1) etching out a critical position for others to reflect on or reference and (2) to help myself and others to (perhaps riskily^[2]) pick up and pick at their doxa.

Those who find all this too provocative can readily flick the channel to doctrine, enjoy the programming, the echo chamber, though the world burns. Law will surely not save us. In that sense this is a bleak book, for those more into their Bosch than their Botticelli.

^[1] And this is its thorough reworking.

^[2] I say risky not only because it might lead to disillusionment and putting oneself out of an otherwise rewarding job as a legal advisor but more importantly because it can feed state strategies against anti-torture work. A cross-cutting argument I shield myself with in the book is that that anti-torture work is unreflectingly state-deferential anyway.

The post Law and Torture first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

As the world’s second-largest economy, China is a major source of companies seeking overseas listings. These overseas-listed Chinese companies have played a significant role in host markets, with important implications for international securities regulation. It is therefore critically important to develop a proper understanding of China’s approach to the development and regulation of cross-border listings, particularly at a time of ongoing and escalating geopolitical tensions.

This book represents a serious attempt to address this need. Specifically, it examines several important questions, including: why Chinese companies pursue cross-border listings; under what circumstances Chinese courts may exercise the extraterritorial jurisdiction of securities law in matters relating to such listings; how national security considerations may affect cross-border listings; how the legality of the variable interest entity (VIE) structure should be assessed; how China–US audit oversight disputes have evolved; how cross-border securities misconduct should be regulated; whether foreign securities judgments can be recognised and enforced in China; and whether China will further open its capital markets to allow foreign companies to list. These issues revolve around the central concern of investor protection, which is already challenging in a purely domestic context and becomes even more complex in a cross-border setting, where regulatory and judicial cooperation across jurisdictions is required.

The book has several key features that will benefit readers. First, it offers a comprehensive and up-to-date account of the cross-border listings of Chinese companies, enabling readers to develop a holistic and accurate understanding of this important area of law. Second, it provides a context-based and practical analysis of the subject from a Chinese perspective. To this end, the book not only explains what the law is, but also why it has developed in its current form within China’s specific institutional context. Finally, it goes beyond the letter of the law to examine the political, economic, and social factors that shape the environment in which the law operates. This broader perspective helps readers understand the rationale behind past regulatory actions and anticipate future developments. In sum, the book is of both theoretical and practical significance for understanding the regulation of cross-border listings from a Chinese perspective.

The book has received warm endorsements from a diverse group of internationally renowned scholars, including John Armour (Oxford Law Faculty), John C. Coffee Jr. (Columbia Law School), Eilís Ferran (Cambridge Law Faculty), Jill E. Fisch (University of Pennsylvania Law School), Jesse M. Fried (Harvard Law School), and Curtis J. Milhaupt (Stanford Law School). It also features thoughtful forewords from two key figures involved in formulating the legal framework for cross-border listings of Chinese companies in the 1990s: Mr Anthony Neoh, SC (Chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission from 1995 to 1998; Chief Adviser to the China Securities Regulatory Commission from 1999 to 2004) and Mr Xiqing Gao (General Counsel of the China Securities Regulatory Commission from 1992 to 1995; Vice Chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission from 1999 to 2002).

The post China’s Development and Regulation of Cross-border Listings first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

The emergence of MDTs has introduced challenges that are unprecedented for both society and legal frameworks, requiring policymakers and scholars to move beyond established modes of thinking and adopt fresh perspectives. This imperative shaped a pivotal decision early in my research: to treat the governance of neurotechnology and emotion technology as interconnected challenges. While traditional approaches have often conceptualised neurotechnology as an isolated phenomenon, A Datafied Mind advances a more holistic perspective, arguing for an integrated, nuanced, and multilayered regulatory framework.

A second deliberate choice in my research was to focus on secondary law. This decision reflects both the procedural and political challenges of adopting new primary legislation and the potential of secondary law to serve as a responsive avenue for regulation. Accordingly, the book critically examines existing regulatory gaps and limitations and explores potential policy pathways to strengthen the framework. It also demonstrates how secondary law can provide agile and adaptable tools to address many of the risks posed by MDTs, especially when these technologies extend beyond the narrowly defined medical field. This approach complements ongoing debates on international regulatory instruments and facilitates an analysis of secondary law’s role within a multilevel governance framework.

Two legal instruments are central in this context: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act). Under the GDPR, MDTs are most commonly associated with the category of biometric data. However, accurately classifying data processed by MDTs under the correct biometric category is highly complex, leaving substantial amounts of data without enhanced protection. This gap is particularly pronounced for data processed by text-based MDTs. Given the widespread deployment of large language models, this regulatory blind spot is increasingly concerning. A Datafied Mind argues for a conceptual shift: away from focusing solely on the technology or the biophysical parameters used to datafy people’s inner state of mind and towards safeguarding the information that truly warrants protection. To this end, the book proposes the introduction of “mind data” as a sui generis special category of personal data under the GDPR.

Although the GDPR establishes foundational protections for personal data, its provisions were not designed to address the specific challenges posed by AI-driven technologies. In response, the EU has adopted the AI Act to regulate such systems directly. The AI Act is the first legislative instrument to specifically address Emotion Recognition Systems (ERS), establishing a multilayered regulatory approach. Viewed in its broader context, the AI Act’s treatment of ERS reflects a nuanced legislative effort to enable innovation and technological development in a nascent field while simultaneously imposing first regulatory guardrails. Nonetheless, A Datafied Mind argues that the AI Act cannot be regarded as a definitive regulatory framework for MDTs. It should instead be treated as a general baseline, to be supplemented by further legal measures, including sector-specific restrictions or prohibitions.

Following a general analysis of these two regulatory pillars, the book turns to four concrete use cases: mental health and well-being, commercial advertising, political advertising, and employment monitoring. It examines how sector-specific legislation complements the general framework, drawing on both established instruments and more recent ones. The analysis shows that, through strategic adaptation and effective deployment of existing legal instruments, the regulatory framework governing MDTs could be significantly strengthened. In some areas, more stringent substantive rules are urgently required; in others, the principal challenge lies in ensuring effective compliance and enforcement.

Ultimately, A Datafied Mind seeks to inform evolving debates on the governance of emotion technology and neurotechnology, promoting responsible innovation and the development of regulatory frameworks capable of addressing the risks posed by these transformative technologies.

The post When Minds Are Turned Into Data: Governing Emotion Technology and Neurotechnology under EU Law first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

To do this, the book showcases a methodology of sustained engagement with archival sources. Our contributors draw on court records, government memoranda, institutional archives, and private papers to reconstruct how EU law was argued, implemented, and contested across both the Member States and the European institutions. Going beyond simply trying to explain canonical judgments in isolation or the development of specific doctrines, the chapters situate key decisions within broader legal, political, and administrative contexts. This archival approach reveals the contingencies, deliberate choices, and institutional constraints that shaped the development of EU law.

Debates about EU law are typically framed in the language of doctrine: supremacy, direct effect, competence, proportionality. These terms are, with good reason, the bread and butter of EU law textbooks and academic discourse. But our study reveals that they evolved gradually, only partially formed and were very deeply contested. They were developed over time by judges, lawyers, civil servants, and national courts operating within specific historical contexts. Awareness of this historical context can improve and sometimes even transform our understanding of contemporary legal doctrine. A field of EU law that fails to incorporate this historical consciousness is left impoverished. Doctrinal analyses remain indispensable, but they cannot explain how legal authority was established, why resistance emerged, or how national responses to EU law varied so markedly.

The History of European Union Law makes the clear statement that EU law should also be learned and taught as a historical product and not only as a settled body of doctrine. In many teaching contexts, EU law appears as a fait accompli, a fully-fledged constitutional order whose formative decades are condensed into a handful of cases and principles. Instead, our view is that EU law is something that had to be envisioned, interpreted, defended, and, in many cases, then cautiously accepted (or even flat out rejected) by national legal and political systems. The feedback received from national orders then in turn helped reshape the EU system. This is a tableau of competing forces all pushing to find an acceptable equilibrium that allowed EU law to bring desired benefits at bearable costs.

Through introducing historical texture to EU law, the book encourages students and scholars to ask not only what the law came to be, but how and why it developed in particular ways. It also helps to explain why EU law and the constitutional practice it has developed – has never been uniformly received or uncontested, how that contestation actually helped shape and mould the legal system, and why present tensions between courts or governments should be understood as part of a much longer history rather than as exclusively recent developments.

The post The History of European Union Law first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

Velazquez is best known for his role in the Oscar nominated film Sing Sing depicting how he and other prisoners had formed a theatre group in the maximum security prison where he was imprisoned for 23 years.

Velazquez’s case, including his claim for compensation, demonstrates American exceptionalism when it comes to wrongful convictions, a phenomenon I document in my new book Justice for Some available in open access from Cambridge Core.

In Justice for Some, I argue that the United States, unlike other democracies, insists on proof of factual innocence to remedy wrongful convictions. This strict rationing of justice is related to its continued use of mass imprisonment. It has also produced world leading levels of compensation for the wrongfully convicted.

The concept of proven factual innocence is powerful in part because it is populist and more easily understood than the concepts of miscarriages of justice, the safety of convictions or judicial error used in many other countries.

The American National Registry of Exonerations has recorded over 3,700 exonerations since the advent of DNA testing in 1989. These cases have resulted in over 35,000 lost years in prison. They have also resulted in over $4.5 billion being paid in compensation even though less than half of exonerees receive any compensation at all. https://exonerationregistry.org

My book also makes use of a United Kingdom registry that records just under 500 remedied wrongful convictions since the 1970s.

Registries for both continental Europe and Canada record less than 135 remedied wrongful convictions in each registry.

In short, the United States produces many more wrongful convictions than other democracies. At the same time, it also remedies compensates them at a world leading rate.

The country closest to the United States is the Peoples Republic of China, another mass imprisonment society. Like the US, China insists on proof of factual innocence, often as after multiple court hearings. China has also started compensating those who can prove their factual innocence more generously. At the same time, there are dangers that in both countries generous compensation for the few may help legitimate unjust legal systems for the many.

Although strongest in the United States and China, populist requirements for proven innocence are spreading. Since 2014, they are required to receive compensation for miscarriages of justice in England and Wales. This regressive change had resulted in drastic declines in amounts paid to compensation and denial of compensation to those such as Victor Nealon who were excluded by DNA.

American reformers have proposed that a right to claim innocence should be added to international law but this may have regressive implications in many other parts of the world.

To be sure those who can prove their innocence should receive justice. But they are not the only ones who should receive justice.

Velazquez’s case illustrates the power of proven factual innocence and its populist appeal. He received remedies first from the press  and then the elected executive before American courts finally overturned his wrongful murder conviction.

Velazquez was freed from prison not by American courts but by a grant of clemency from then New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2021. In 2022, President Joe Biden apologized to Velazquez for his wrongful conviction. These elected politicians were influenced not only by Velazquez’s good works but by media reporting and a private lab’s testing in 2020 that produced a DNA exclusion from a betting slip that the perpetrator had handled.

In the years since, and as detailed in my book, executive clemency has become politically polarized in the United States. There is a danger that political polarization may produce a post-truth world where even factual innocence may be less valued.

The fact that politicians who hoped for re-election were ahead of American courts with respect to exonerating Velazquez reveals much about the decline of the rule of law in the United States.

After his 2000 conviction, Velazquez’s appeal was denied as is typical in American exoneration cases. American appeal courts focus on legal error and have stricter standards for considering new evidence than courts in many other countries.

In 2006, Velazquez representing himself filed for federal habeas corpus. American legalism allows more opportunity for the convicted to claim relief, first in state and then in federal courts.

This relief was denied with the Federal Court judge stressing that Congress in its Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 had restricted habeas corpus.  Velazquez had not proven his innocence as required by clear and convincing evidence. The court stressed that prior courts had upheld convictions in other cases, like Velazquez’s case, where eyewitnesses gave inconsistent details about their testimony.

Mistaken eyewitness identification is a leading cause of wrongful convictions.

The inconsistencies in Velazquez’s case were striking. Some witnesses had initially identified the perpetrator as a  Black man with long braided hair whereas Velazquez is Hispanic and had very short hair. Some said the perpetrator used his right hand to shoot the victim  whereas Velazquez is left-handed. The court deferred to the jury which had rejected Velazquez’s alibi defence even though it was supported by phone records and the testimony of his mother and girlfriend.

Velazquez kept asserting his innocence but in 2016 a five judge New York appeals court unanimously rejected his claim of factual innocence. The fact that two of four eyewitness who identified him as the perpetrator at trial had recanted and another man had confessed to being the shooter was not enough to even justify either a full hearing on Velazquez’s motion or a new trial.

The Court again insisted on clear and convincing evidence of innocence standard which explained required that innocence be “highly probable”. This is a much less generous standard than applied by the English Court of Appeal and many others in the Commonwealth which focus on whether a guilty verdict is safe or reasonable or constitutes a miscarriage of justice.

It was not until 2024 and with the consent of then Manhattan District Attorney Melvin Bragg that a court overturned Velazquez’s wrongful murder conviction. Without the magic of DNA evidence,  he may never have been exonerated despite the many weaknesses in the evidence used to convict him. This is a sign of a mass imprisonment society that assigns too much weight to the finality of convictions.

Velazquez told reporters that his exoneration was a “bittersweet unveiling of a tragedy” He stressed “People really don’t get what it’s like to be in prison” where all prisoners receive inadequate medical care and many die after being released. He stated “It’s important to keep hope alive for that many people, because we have hundreds of thousands of people potentially that are innocent, languishing in prisons right now… it’s really about the movement. It’s about the people, it’s about the injustices, and it’s about how we can leverage our voices and come together to really try to demand change that’s necessary.” “Criminal Justice Advocate Jon-Adrian Velazquez cleared of wrongful homicide conviction” New York Amsterdam News Oct 3, 2024.

Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, the founders of the American Innocence Project, argued 25 years ago that DNA exonerations were largely a matter of luck and would eventually dry up as police used DNA testing in the small minority of crimes involving biological evidence.

Scheck and Neufeld deserve a Nobel Prize and other honours for their successful work in a hostile and punitive environment. Nevertheless,  they may have been overly optimistic about the competence of American police and prosecutors in their 2000 book. DNA exonerations, like Velazquez’s continue to this day.

But DNA has been a double edged sword. Although it provides powerful evidence of innocence, it has helped raise the standard for remedying wrongful convictions. It only provides justice for some.

The United States has embraced high and populist standards of proven innocence. They provide justice for some but they threaten to eclipse more generous standards of remedying wrongful convictions used in other democracies that provide justice for more.

Kent Roach is a Professor of Law at the University of Toronto and Co-Founder of the Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions

The post American Exceptionalism, Comparative Miscarriages of Justice and JJ Velazquez first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

That boundary is now being redrawn under the political conditions of the second Trump presidency, where corporations and their leaders are openly pressured and singled out. This has prompted renewed scrutiny of whether earlier corporate visibility reflected lasting commitments or more contingent forms of engagement.

The question today is no longer whether corporations belong in politics. Practice settled that question years ago. The more pressing issue is how corporate involvement operates once politics becomes openly transactional—once regulatory discretion, enforcement, and retaliation move from background risks to overt features of the political environment. It is against this backdrop that corporate silence has become noticeable, if not troubling—at least for some observers.

Over the last decade, corporate involvement moved well beyond traditional lobbying. Firms engaged contested issues directly, embedded social commitments into internal policies with external consequences, and, at times, performed functions typically associated with public authority. This was not episodic or symbolic. It became a recurring feature of how policy outcomes were shaped across a range of socioeconomic domains, contributing to the expectation that corporations might function as public-facing actors in moments of political dysfunction.

Corporate Power and the Politics of Change (Cambridge University Press, 2026) offers a framework for understanding this phenomenon, which I describe as “corporate governing.”

What changes in the second Trump presidency is not corporate governing itself, but the political environment in which it operates. More centralized authority, more aggressive use of regulatory discretion, and greater tolerance for retaliation do not eliminate corporate governing; they make its constraints, limits, and vulnerabilities harder to ignore.

One consequence of this shift is divergence rather than convergence in corporate behavior. Some firms retreat from visible engagement. Others continue to act, but with less public signaling and greater reliance on internal policies, operational decisions, and compliance architectures. Still others persist openly, often because they face different exposure, operate in different markets, or have less to lose. What looks like corporate silence, in other words, is not the disappearance of corporate governing but a predictable response to heightened political cost and uneven constraint.

Some have described the current corporate silence as hypocrisy. That critique misses the point. Corporate engagement was never stable or principled in the way public governance is expected to operate. It was always contingent—responsive to incentives, pressure, and risk. As political conditions shift, so does the visibility and form of corporate involvement. The present moment reveals not moral backsliding, but the structural limits of relying on corporations to perform public functions.

This book does not evaluate these developments as virtues or failures. Nor does it express a view on the desirability of the underlying policy choices corporations have made over the years. Instead, I advance an organizing argument: rather than an aberration or a solution, corporate governing is a structural response to political dysfunction, market pressures, and legal permissiveness. In some settings, it can facilitate change. In others, it can distort accountability, fragment pluralism, and displace democratic processes.

To make sense of these effects, the book separates questions that are often conflated. Is corporate governing consistent with corporate law and fiduciary duties? Often yes. Is it strategically rational for firms? That is for firms themselves to determine. Does it benefit society? At times, but not necessarily. Does it pose risks to democratic institutions? Possibly.

By disentangling these questions, the book moves the debate beyond slogans—whether celebratory or critical—and toward institutional analysis. It explains why backlash was predictable, why corporate behavior varies across firms and issues, and why neither blanket activism nor enforced silence offers a stable equilibrium.

Seen from this perspective, the second Trump presidency does not mark a break with the past so much as a clarifying moment—one that brings into sharper focus both the reach and the limits of corporations acting as political and governing actors.

The post Corporations as Political and Governing Actors in the Current Era first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

The shift is driven by necessity as much as innovation. Caseloads are rising, budgets are shrinking, and society expects services to be as fast as their smartphones. Courts that once struggled with backlogs now turn to AI tools that can read thousands of pages in minutes. Virtual hearings save time, travel, and cost. Digital evidence systems handle everything from CCTV footage to blockchain records. The promise is attractive: justice made faster, fairer, more consistent, and more accessible than ever before. However, technology is not just helping courts run more efficiently—it is reshaping how justice feels, how it is accessed, and how it is understood. The transformation is raising questions far more urgent and fascinating than most people realize.

Take the digital divide as an example. Online courts are convenient for some, but alienating for others. A rural resident without stable internet, an elderly person unfamiliar with apps, or someone with disabilities facing a poorly designed platform may find the digital shift more exclusive than empowering. True “equal access” remains fragile when technology itself becomes the gatekeeper.

Then there’s the paradox of transparency. Digital systems make court decisions easy to find and study—but they also expose sensitive data and amplify public pressure in unprecedented ways. When every ruling is instantly searchable and shareable, judges face scrutiny not just from peers, but from social media, interest groups, and political actors. What begins as openness can distort the very judicial independence it aims to protect.

And then there is the most profound question: who really decides?

AI already helps judges with research, identifies patterns, and even drafts judgments. It can suggest which cases are similar, which arguments appear stronger, and which precedents matter most. It helps courts move faster and stay consistent. But we must ask: if algorithms guide too much of the process, do judges remain independent decision-makers, or do they become supervisors of machine-generated logic? When a judge follows or overrules an AI’s recommendation, is the court still truly human?

Cross-border justice faces dilemmas of its own. Technology makes it theoretically easy to bring parties together from different countries. But sovereignty, incompatible laws, and strict data-transfer rules mean digital courts cannot simply operate “globally.” A virtual hearing may be global in appearance, but it’s anchored in a web of national politics and power defined by borders. The tools that connect us also highlight the deep-seated national divisions they cannot override.

These themes—efficiency, access, AI, sovereignty, transparency, independence—form the heart of the debate about where technology will take justice next. And they are precisely what Smart Court: The Court of the Future examines in depth. The book examines the changes underway, and explores how technology will redefine the values at the heart of justice: fairness, independence, and human dignity.

The courts of tomorrow will not look like the courts of today. Whether that future is empowering or alarming depends on how societies respond to the challenges ahead. The debate is not about machines replacing judges; it is about how technology will reshape the values that define justice itself. For anyone interested in where law, technology, and society intersect, the transformation inside our courts may be the most critical revolution of the digital age. It’s a story still being written, and it falls to the legal community to fill the next chapter.

The post Smart Court: How Technology Is Rewriting the Future of Justice first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

Across every sector, from finance to retail to tech, corporations and their executives issued public statements proclaiming solidarity with Black communities and pledging to confront racial inequality. I watched this unfold like many others—partly inspired by the apparent shift. After all, the Business Roundtable (a consortium of Chief Executive Officers), had declared that the purpose of the corporation also included consideration of the interests of stakeholders like employees and consumers. The language felt sweeping, confident, and moral.

Five years later, many of those pledges have faded, softened, or disappeared altogether. In my book, Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress, I explore how and why that happened—and what it reveals about the deeper relationship between corporate power, language, and racial justice in America.

To write Disclosureland, I studied more than 2,000 companies. What emerged was a pattern: corporations issue public commitments about racial justice not primarily as moral or social acts, but as strategic disclosures designed to shape reputation, reduce legal exposure, and manage shareholder and consumer expectations.

These words are powerful tools. They can move markets, quiet critics, and bolster public trust. But they are also fragile. When the political climate shifts as it has under the new administration, those same statements can become liabilities. The result is a rhetorical whiplash: one year, companies declare that Black lives matter; the next, those same companies quietly remove the word “race” from their websites or annual reports.

The Problem with Opportunistic Language

Corporate pledges to equity often sound visionary. But what they too often lack is historical grounding. Few acknowledge the long histories of exclusion, wage inequality, and racialized labor practices within their own walls. Without that acknowledgment, today’s language of racial equity floats free from the past, serving less as a commitment to change and more as a kind of marketing performance.

That disconnect allows companies to gain from the moral capital of equity language without taking the risks real change demands. In other words, they can profit from progress without practicing it.

Reputation Management

Over and over, I found examples of how language becomes a shield. Public statements about diversity and inclusion can deflect criticism and delay regulation. When questioned about lack of progress, companies point back to their statements as proof of commitment.

This pattern is especially visible in moments of scrutiny. Consider how some firms responded after being accused of racial discrimination or inequality: rather than address structural issues, they expanded their “equity” sections online or hired new diversity officers. These actions are meant to appear responsive while maintaining the status quo.

Intensified Retreat

Under the Trump administration, this dynamic has only intensified. Some companies have chosen to soften their diversity language—substituting “belonging” or “inclusion” for “race” and “equity.” Others have erased references to race or DEI altogether.

The logic is the same: protect brand value, anticipate political backlash, and avoid drawing attention from regulators or shareholders skeptical of “woke capitalism.” Behind each rhetorical shift lies a calculation about what matters most—profit, not principle.

But these shifts are not without consequence. They send a powerful signal to employees and customers that racial justice was conditional, contingent on convenience. When corporations can pivot so easily, the credibility of all such commitments is undermined.

Should Words Have Consequences?

That question lies at the heart of Disclosureland. Should corporations be allowed to benefit financially from their public commitments to racial justice and then walk them back with impunity? What does it mean for our collective pursuit of equality when the marketplace rewards symbolic virtue but punishes sustained reform?

I argue that these actions have moral and legal implications. Public statements are not just words; they are market instruments that shape investor behavior, employee trust, and consumer perception. When those statements are misleading or opportunistic, they distort how we value corporations in both economic and ethical terms.

A government truly committed to addressing racial inequality could treat such disclosures as part of a broader framework of accountability. That might mean regulatory oversight of diversity reporting or legal standards for consistency between corporate speech and corporate practice. In short: if corporations choose to speak on racial justice, their words should bind them to something real.

What Comes Next

As citizens, employees, investors, and consumers, we all have a stake in how corporations talk about race. We can demand greater transparency, insist on measurable commitments, and challenge the idea that words alone are progress.

But my book is not simply about corporate hypocrisy. It’s about the systems that make that hypocrisy profitable and how, through policy and law, we might begin to change them.

I invite readers to look closely at the world of corporate communication, to see beyond the polished statements and into the systems that produce them. Because only when we understand the consequences of corporate words can we fully appreciate the importance of accountability.

The post What Corporate Words Teach Us About Race first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

The origin of the European Union and EU law is traditionally taught and studied as an embodiment of the peace process for the European continent after the Second World War. A growing multi-disciplinary field, however, has shown that while the proposition that inter-European peace animated the idea of a united Europe is unmistakable, colonialism and decolonisation also shaped the outlook and methods that characterised the early days of European integration. The book Colonialism and the EU Legal Order builds on that scholarship.

Colonialism is a capacious and contested term. It is commonly, including in the book, taken to stand for both a form of rule and a historical period of European territorial expansion. All chapters of the book reference the European colonial enterprise, which accelerated in the fifteenth century in North and South America, and culminated in the late nineteenth century in Asia and Africa. It is with the repercussions of the latter period in particular that the chapters of this book predominantly grapple.

The book is divided into four parts reflecting the different case studies used by the authors to analyse the relationship between colonialism and the EU legal order. First, the book opens with eight chapters that concern colonialism and different areas of substantive EU law. Marise Cremona writes about trade; Daniela Caruso about agriculture; Karim Fertikh about social security; Lionel Zevounou about discrimination; Diamond Ashiagbor about labour law; Kako Nubukpo about currency; Veronica Corcodel about migration; and Janine Silga about development policy. The second part comprises two chapters that examine the connections between colonialism and actors within EU institutions. Véronique Dimier writes about actors in the EU Commission and Michel Erpelding about actors in the Court of Justice of the EU. The third part contains three chapters that analyse exits from the EU and how the history and aftermath of these exits relate to colonialism. Amel Benrejdal Boudjemaa writes about Algeria; Ulla Neergaard about Greenland, and Stephen Coutts about Northern Ireland’s exit from the EU with Brexit. The fourth and last part contains chapters by Antoine Vauchez and Iyiola Solanke that look towards the future and address the question of how we build on the knowledge and scholarship concerning the interconnections between EU law and colonialism. Taken together, the chapters of this book make the case that understanding more about colonialism and the EU legal order is not merely, although it is also importantly, a historical exercise. It has the potential to constitute a starting point for examinations of current EU law, and dialogue with people interested in acknowledging and moving away from Europe’s colonial history.

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