The search for a suitable response to this question was part of my inspiration in 2018 to write the first edition of Climate Change and the Voiceless: Protecting Future Generations, Wildlife, and Natural Resources. Prior to this book project, my work on climate impacts on future generations, wildlife, and natural resources — the voiceless communities addressed in the book — was conducted in silos. These three categories operated in their own lanes under the law with very little crossover between them. Two “light bulb” moments motivated me to seek to break down the barriers across these categories, ultimately leading to new forms of climate governance inspiration and opportunities.

As I was preparing to teach an Animal Law course in 2014, the first “light bulb” moment occurred. I found striking parallels and synergies between animal law and environmental law – ways in which animal law could learn from the evolution of environmental law and opportunities for the two fields to work together for mutual gain. The second moment occurred two years later and stemmed from work on my 2016 book on regional and global governance case studies in climate justice. Though the book focused primarily on protecting vulnerable human communities facing threats from climate change and how the law could reduce their vulnerability, it also addressed the need for the law to reduce the vulnerability of non-human communities (wildlife and natural resources) to adapt to climate change threats.

These two moments inspired me to seek how the law’s treatment of human and non-human vulnerability in the climate change crisis can be integrated. In preparing the first edition, I had three goals. The first goal was to underscore the intractable and worsening gridlock in climate governance efforts at the international and domestic levels, and how more effective governance mechanisms are necessary to protect the most vulnerable human and non-human communities. The second was to place vulnerable human and non-human communities “under one roof” and transition away from the law’s myopic anthropocentric lens by recognizing the shared vulnerability of human and non-human communities in the climate crisis. The third goal was to explore the parallels and synergies across these three communities and offer recommendations on how strategies and mechanisms in one context can be replicated and adapted to secure progress in the other contexts.

Since the publication of the first edition in 2019, remarkable progress has been made in advancing the three goals at the domestic, regional, and international levels in legislatures, administrative bodies, and courts and tribunals around the world. The second edition explores how success in the rights of nature movement can be a valuable platform for advancing the rights of wildlife in two recent cases in Latin American courts, where ecosystems and animal species within the ecosystems secured “win-win” outcomes in the same judicial proceeding. Moreover, it examines how the landmark climate advisory opinion in 2025 from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognizes that rights of nature and the human right to a clean and healthy environment – the foundation for many cases recognizing the rights of future generations to more ambitious climate regulation – are complementary and not mutually exclusive.

As of this writing in June 2026, the lack of political will and other legal barriers impeding effective climate governance in the U.S. and around the world has never been greater. Climate Change and the Voiceless, 2nd ed. seeks to offer hope at this pivotal moment in the fight for the future of climate governance. Based on the developments addressed in the second edition, my response to the question from the audience member now would be: “Hope and resilience can prevail, but recent successes in climate governance efforts protecting voiceless communities around the world need to be strategically leveraged to ensure that these human and non-human communities can adapt to the daunting future projections for climate change impacts.”

The post Finding Hope in the Climate Crisis: Prioritizing Protection of “Voiceless” Communities first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

We can only appreciate the revolutionary nature of this new and pragmatic approach to insolvency if we compare it to contemporary insolvency regimes. Even if from the later Middle Ages onwards, insolvents who had not committed fraud in Italy, the German lands, or France could try and free themselves from the debtor’s prison by applying for cessio bonorum, those who could not repay their debts continued to be regarded as sinners and thieves. In Rouen, for instance, former insolvents had to wear the shameful bonnet vert (‘green cap’) for a stipulated period, intended to protect others against the danger of engaging in transactions with those who had not paid their debts. In the French–speaking part of Switzerland, even more gruesome procedures dictated that insolvents be led around the city naked, sitting on a donkey, accompanied by a blaring trumpet player to ensure public attention. Having arrived at the central market, the unfortunate debtor had to hit a special pillar with their naked backside three times, crying out ‘cedo bonis!’, before being allowed to cede their possessions to the collective creditors. Similar shaming rituals, often including forms of public nudity and a humiliating display in the city’s prime civic or commercial spaces, were widespread throughout Europe at the brink of the early modern period. Even if in early modern England, those classified as ‘traders’, owing a minimum of £100 to a single individual, could enter a formal bankruptcy procedure, this left the vast majority of insolvents vulnerable to a harsh regime of imprisonment on mesne process. As many as 1 in 4 middling men in eighteenth–century London could expect to be incarcerated for debt at some point during their lifetime. In France, large–scale debt imprisonment could likewise be observed, only slowly decreasing towards the end of the ancien régime.

The seventeenth–century Dutch Republic witnessed an important shift in mentalities towards debt and insolvency that constitutes a sharp contrast with procedures in earlier times and other places. This came together with active urban authorities, who were not content to sit back and leave the problem of insolvency to be fixed by the market. Instead, Amsterdam’s legislators and judges actively intervened in private property rights for the common good. From 1647, it became possible to force a dissenting minority of the creditors to accept a composition that restructured the repayment of (part of) an insolvent’s debts in several instalments. This allowed the insolvent to revive their business, resulting in larger potential repayments than a simple execution of their estate. While intervening in the rights of the dissenting creditors, the Amsterdam court both served the interests of the majority of creditors and the urban economy. The creditors were no longer held back by ‘one or a few ill–affected people’, the insolvents regained their credit and could once more contribute to society. Similarly, the Desolate Boedelskamer ensured that applicants for cessio bonorum were non–fraudulent and could therefore grant this legal solution without shaming sanctions. Evidence from the archives shows that for these insolvents, too, a legal solution secured by the impartial and professional procedure of Amsterdam’ urban court allowed to regain credit and revive their businesses.

In early modern Amsterdam, insolvency did not result in widespread imprisonment for debt. At the peak of the Dutch Republic’s golden age, urban authorities coupled good governance with a healthy pragmatism. As a result, capital investments were preserved to a greater extent than would have been possible without the systemic trust generated by Amsterdam’s legal authorities, compensating for the deficient information position of individual creditors. Amsterdam’s court allowed industrious but unfortunate citizens to receive a second chance to contribute to both urban economy and civic community rather than facing humiliating public punishment. Would you like to read more about this revolutionary shift in mentalities in the Dutch Republic, as well as what we can learn from a successful institution like Amsterdam’s Desolate Boedelskamer? Read all about this and more in Court, Credit, and Capital!

Maurits den Hollander is assistant professor of legal history at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. This is his first book, for which he was awarded the Human Solvency Prize 2024-2026 by the “F. Datini” International Institute of Economic History.

Court, Credit, and Capital by Maurits den Hollander

The post Punishment or Pragmatism? Lessons for Dealing with Failure from the Dutch Golden Age first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

Submarines are foremost known as warships. Currently, Australia, South Korea and Brazil are looking to enhance their navies through the addition of nuclear-powered submarines. The legal status of a submarine as a warship and, potentially, its nuclear power or nuclear weaponry have implications for the application of different international laws. Yet the various exemptions and immunities that apply to warships do not preclude the impact of international law on warship operations. Furthermore, not every submarine is in fact a warship. These vessels may be bound by additional or different rules drawn from a variety of sources of international law.

While the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea creates a detailed framework for regulating ocean use, only one of its 300+ provisions explicitly refers to submarines. The Convention obliges submarines to surface when they are traversing the territorial sea of a coastal state. This rule evolved from laws of neutrality in place during World War I and was a critical element in decisions about contemporary rules on warship navigation in maritime areas closest to a State’s shores. The importance of the rule was apparent in the 1981 “Whiskey on the rocks” incident when a Soviet submarine was grounded on the Swedish coast. Sweden’s response allowing for the use of low-power depth charges remains an important legal benchmark for permissible coastal state responses to unlawful submarine intrusions.

International law impacts submarines across the range of their activities. Transnational criminal law and laws on the use of force are essential in assessing State efforts to suppress and prevent so-called narcosubs, which are increasingly used to further international drug trafficking. The deployment of underwater autonomous vehicles for intelligence gathering and scientific research re-enlivens longstanding debates on permissible activities in another State’s exclusive economic zone. The implosion of the Titan submersible in 2023 and tragic instances of submarine accidents causing all crew to be lost at sea demand closer scrutiny of rules on navigational safety, search and rescue and the legal status of wrecks at sea. The March 2026 sinking of the Iranian Navy frigate ⁠IRIS Dena by a US submarine, USS Charlotte, highlights how rules on targeting and the duty to rescue under international humanitarian law must be brought to bear in times of armed conflict.

International law must occupy a place of importance in State decision-making about submarines rather than being obscured in the depths of ocean governance. Our new book, Submarines in International Law, provides the first in-depth treatment of this subject, examining both the legal history of submarines and contemporary laws regulating the many diverse submarine operations.

The post Submarines Cannot Escape the Reach of International Law first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

Following the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica in the 1990s, both of which occurred in the presence of UN peacekeeping operations, a new commitment to prevention arose. Since then, dedicated capacity for prevention has developed within the United Nations, regional organisations, government institutions and non-governmental organisations. This has been supported by a growing field of research. Yet so far, these efforts have been insufficient to eradicate genocide.

My research takes a new approach to this critical question. It begins from the premise that preventing genocide is eminently possible. We know this because it has already happened – multiple times. There are many societies in which genocide has not occurred, despite demonstrable risk. Some societies have exhibited a multitude of risk factors, yet have avoided disaster even in circumstances of severe and imminent risk. These examples of resilience can provide excellent insights into effective approaches to genocide prevention.

Take, for example, the case of Bulgaria during the Holocaust. Bulgaria was a Nazi ally, with a substantial minority of around 48,000 Bulgarian Jewish citizens. Like Jews elsewhere in Europe during this period, Bulgarian Jews experienced increasing discrimination and persecution. Jews in Bulgarian-occupied lands such as Thrace and Macedonia were denied citizenship and deported to the death camps. The Nazis were determined to exterminate Bulgarian Jews as well – so determined that a secret agreement was signed and the cattle cars for the deportations began to arrive in the country. Yet, through a combination of extraordinary factors – including fierce opposition to the deportations from political and religious leaders – the genocide never proceeded.

More recently, we can also consider the case of the Yazidis trapped on Mt Sinjar, Iraq. When Islamic State, or ISIS, seized control of the Sinjar region in August 2014, tens of thousands of Yazidis fled to Mt Sinjar. Under Islamic State’s extremist ideology, they knew that they were targeted for genocide and that this was their best hope of survival. Very quickly, however, the Yazidis found themselves trapped and in dire peril. Mt Sinjar was a barren, rocky mountain with little shelter from the searing desert heat, and many began to suffer from dehydration and exposure. In desperation, they appealed to the international community for assistance. Within days, incredibly, rescue came from not one but two sources. US military forces held ISIS at bay, while Kurdish militia opened a precarious escape route.

Examining extraordinary cases like these provides vital insights into genocide prevention. Through doing so, we can identify key factors that promote resilience and protect vulnerable groups. These cases demonstrate that there are many things that can be done to reduce the risk and likelihood of genocide in at-risk societies. The easiest and most effective measures typically require deployment well ahead of a crisis. But even in circumstances of extreme risk, effective prevention is possible.

When we bring together a collection of such cases, even more powerful findings emerge. A number of factors can be identified that have contributed to genocide prevention across multiple cases. We know these factors have the strongest potential to contribute to genocide prevention – because they already have, multiple times. This allows for an evidence-based approach to genocide prevention.

Image: Srebrenica Genocide Memorial.

See link here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Memorijalni_centar_Srebrenica-Poto%C4%8Dari2.JPG

Author is: Andrija1234567

The post Genocide Prevention: An Evidence-Based Approach first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

Much of how infrastructure is viewed, the aspirations it fulfils and the values it reflects are determined by the processes that give rise to its conceptualisation and implementation. Whether it is established through corruption, greed and indifference or through a process that responds to the aspirations of those for whom the infrastructure serves determines the extent to which it advances social good. A key element of responsive infrastructure development is driven by the attention placed on pre-project community–investor consultation and communication channels.

This book explores the emergent development and challenges in implementing community–investor consultation, dispute prevention and facilitation mechanisms amongst multilateral and national development banks operating in the Asia Pacific region. In the several decades since the development of the first multilateral community–investor dispute resolution and accountability mechanisms, much has been learned about public facilitation, community engagement and dispute prevention during the early stages of major infrastructure development programs.

Drawing on a qualitative triangulating approach that compares public facilitation policy design with case-based practice, the book analyses the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Asian Development Bank (ADB) and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) community–investor dispute resolution policy design. Case studies, surveys and interviews of select private non-state actors in the Asia Pacific region address the question of whether, and if so how, multi-stakeholder community–investor public facilitation methods contribute to the prevention and early resolution of infrastructure disputes and advance sustainable development objectives.

^{* The author thanks the Government of Hong Kong’s University Grants Committee for its support through CRF Grant (C7030-24G).
[1] Mahmoudi, H., Roe, J., & Seaman, K. (Eds.). (2022). Infrastructure, Wellbeing and the Measurement of Happiness. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.}

The post Is an Ounce of Prevention Worth a Pound of Cure? Assessing the Development of Dispute Prevention Mechanisms in Infrastructure Financing first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

In this book, I argue that the various instances of international administrations are representative of a broader agenda where international organisations play an increasing role in global governance. International administration can be understood as a manifestation of political authority by officials of an international organisation over a territory, this authority being over the legislative, executive and judicial structures. These practices of authority elicit in turn counter-claims of accountability by local actors, vying to keep in check these international governors. Sovereignty does not only manifest itself through practices of authority, but also through practices of responsibilisation and accountability. Rather than focusing solely on what is included in the mandate of peace missions for instance, I argue in favour of an approach through practices. As such, sovereignty is best understood as a set of practices, more preciselystruggles between actors vying to assert their political authority and another set ofactors striving to keep this political authority under check.

I develop this argument through an exhaustive survey of all projects of international administrations, from the League of Nations to the United Nations, focusing on how international officials have made claims to assert their political authority over specific territories and populations and reviewing all the accountability demands expressed by local actors and how these demands have shaped the future practices of international administrations. The analysis has been done through archival research in Geneva and New York, but also through interviews on the ground for more recent interventions (Kosovo, Timor-Leste and Haiti). A few interesting insights emerge from the analysis. For instance, if the scholarship tends to see the League of Nations’ administration of Danzig and the Saar Bassin as two flagship cases of international administrations – cases where “League administration, therefore, is, truly and really, international administration” to quote a very enthusiastic League of Nations official – in reality the practices of authority by international officials was quite limited. In these two cases, great power politics prohibited the League of Nations to play its full role as an international administration, limiting the practices of sovereignty displayed by international officials. Two cases are nevertheless particularly interesting in terms of political authority displayed by the League of Nations. First, in the case of the Upper Silesian regime, if the Mixed Commission was mostly deprived of political authority in the region, the Arbitral Tribunal can be seen as displaying authority over the territory. In the case of Leticia, the mission did manage the everyday life of the town of around sixty inhabitants for a while, displaying a caretaker’s role in the administration of the territory which will have echoes in future UN international administrations such as West New Guinea or Eastern Slavonia.

In the case of the United Nations, among all the cases reviewed and analysed, I specifically discuss four cases of international administration: the Congo, Kosovo, Timor-Leste and Haiti. If some of these cases have clear mandates enabling the deployment of an international administration on the ground (Kosovo and Timor-Leste), the cases of the Congo and Haiti need to be elucidated through archival work or through interviews. It is striking to note the role of the United Nations as early as the 1960s in the Congo, especially in the context of the demise of Patrice Lumumba. Similarly, the United Nations found itself at the centre of politics in contemporary Haiti, playing the role of “kingmakers” and interfering in multiple ways in local politics. The lessons of such international enterprises are humbling for international actors: rarely do these international administrations actually deliver the political goods promised. Sometimes they do however; we discuss the case of the negotiation over the Timor Gap led by the American Ambassador Peter Galbraith on behalf of the Timorese and which managed to secure very positive gains for the small island country. However, more often than not, international officials end up being the target of resistance by local actors, vying for accountability measures that international organisations tend not to be able to deliver on. This should be an important consideration to keep in mind for those voicing calls for international administrations as an answer to the current international crises, from Gaza, Haiti, Sudan, to the Ukraine.

The post International Leviathans: Practices of Sovereignty by International Administrations first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

There certainly is. Much of the scholarly and popular writing on the Declaration has been marred by fundamental misunderstandings of the document and its historical context. My book One Nation Under Law: The Meaning of the Declaration of Independence counters two such misunderstandings.

First, scholars such as Garry Wills have insisted that the Declaration did not create one American nation, but thirteen entirely separate ones, each bearing no more legal relation to each other than they did to France or Russia.  This view is profoundly mistaken.  The Declaration of Independence announced the legal existence of the “United States of America,” in which the states were legally confederated together from the moment of independence.  That confederation would later be reduced to written form and explicitly confirmed in 1781, but in its first five years, the United States operated under an unwritten constitution, a form familiar from English practice.  Although the details of its internal structure were far from clear, and difficult questions of sovereignty were never conclusively resolved, anyone looking at the United States from abroad would have seen the emergence of one nation, not thirteen. Such a view is amply supported by the Declaration’s text, by the history surrounding its adoption, and by the views of later Americans in the political, judicial, and popular spheres, looking back at what the Declaration had accomplished.  One little-known illustration of this point: the first appeal from a state court to a federal tribunal was filed on July 4, 1776 (resulting in a reversal of the state court decision), a fact entirely inconsistent with the thirteen-independent-nations view.

Second, the Declaration is often portrayed as an ode to a minimalist night-watchman state.  Yet the Declaration’s extensive charges against George III are as much about ineffective and incompetent government as they are about tyrannical actions.  The very first charge is that the King had vetoed laws that were “the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good.”  It is a demand for more and better law, not less.  The charges also have much to say about constitutional structure, illuminating how legislative, executive, and judicial power should be appropriately constituted to most effectively secure the people’s right to self-government.

Along the way, the book seeks to counter other myths that have hindered our understanding of the Declaration.  For example, the correct text of the Declaration of Independence is not to be found in the parchment copy currently enshrined in the National Archives.  Instead, it is in the first printing issued by Philadelphia printer John Dunlap on the night of July 4, 1776, and subsequently reprinted in newspapers across the country.  Similarly, it is a mistake to view Thomas Jefferson as the primary author the Declaration; the Declaration was authored by the Continental Congress in the voice of the American people.  And although the Declaration is not “law” in a strictly formal sense, it is nonetheless a legal document of continuing legal significance.

The post The History of the Declaration of Independence first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

In November 1957, the government led by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, submitted a law proposal that overhauled the tax and expenditure rules employed by the central government. Following the rules established by the regime, the bill was submitted to the Spanish Cortes. Its members proposed 44 amendments to the bill. However, Franco rejected most of those amendments and the bill was enacted essentially as proposed by the government in the first place.

What explains this variation in the outcomes of lawmaking processes across these two autocracies? Why are legislatures in some authoritarian regimes more powerful than others? Why does influence on policies and politics vary across dictatorships?

These questions guide our book, Lawmaking under Authoritarianism. In it, we argue that lawmaking institutions and outcomes in autocracies depend on the nature and dynamics of factional politics. When the factions within the regime are united and embedded, they are powerful enough to resist imposition by coalition partners. This leads to high levels of power-sharing and legislatures with greater influence. On the contrary, when the factions are not united n/or embedded, they are not powerful enough to resist imposition by coalition partners. This results in lower levels of power sharing and legislatures with a more limited role in policymaking.

To test these ideas, we combine methodologies and primary and secondary sources to comparatively analyze three authoritarian regimes with different factional politics: the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional in Argentina between 1976 and 1983; Franco’s regime in Spain between 1943 and 1976; and the military dictatorship in Brazil between 1964 and 1985.

In each case, we dive into archival collections, official documents, biographies, oral history archives, and historiographic accounts to identify, describe, and explain the nature and trajectory of the factions in the regime, the characteristics of the lawmaking institutions and outcomes, and the mechanisms linking them to the factional politics of the regime. 

This book improves our understanding of lawmaking under authoritarianism, specifying how and under which conditions legislatures perform their lawmaking function within authoritarian regimes, and by helping to elucidate how legislatures may be consequential to policy and politics. It also provides new perspectives on how the authoritarian regimes of Argentina, Brazil, and Spain operated and their place within the universe of authoritarian governments.

The post Legislating with the autocrat? first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

During the spring 2026 quarter, the Youth and Education Law Project (YELP) released a report titled “Strengthening Civil Rights Enforcement in California Schools: A Call for Sacramento to Fill the Gap Created by Washington D.C.”

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) was formerly the place most families went with complaints of discrimination or harassment in public schools. After the OCR was effectively dismantled in early 2025, YELP began working with a statewide coalition of educational advocates to identify solutions for civil rights enforcement in California schools. Together with the coalition, YELP students created this report. See related post by partner organization, Disability Rights California.

This report points to California’s primary educational complaint mechanism, the Uniform Complaint Procedures (UCP), managed by the California Department of Education (CDE), as a solution to California’s civil rights enforcement gap. The report argues that an increase in funding, staffing, and legal training to the UCP is necessary to fill this gap. Furthermore, the report describes how the CDE could improve data analysis efforts and promote interagency collaboration on civil rights enforcement. 

In May, YELP’s Associate Director, Abigail Trillin took students to Sacramento to advocate for California to improve state-level enforcement of civil rights in educational spaces along with a coalition member from Disability Rights California, Conrad Crump.

The report is published here. 

Student Team: Aasim Yahya (JD ‘27), Meghan Gilmore (JD ‘27) 

The Framers of the United States Constitution understood from their own experience that democratic governance risks such majoritarian tyranny unless “ambition . . . [is] made to counteract ambition,” in the words of James Madison in Federalist 51. Although the founding generation spoke often of a need for republican virtue, they came to accept that human nature leads to the formation of political factions intent on commandeering the powers of government in service to private ends – what present day political economists call rent seeking.

In my book American Factions: How the U.S. Constitution Can End Extreme Partisanship I describe and explain the partisan nature of present-day American politics, document the history of the Framers’ multiple efforts to control the corrupting influence of political factions, and examine how over two centuries the three branches of the federal government have distorted the Framers’ thoughtful design.

American politics have always been partisan, as the Framers anticipated.  But with the exception of the Civil War, in which the South rejected the constraining influence of union, the Constitution of divided and limited powers has forced compromise on most matters of public concern. That is no longer the case. Congressional inaction and avoidance of responsibility, growth in federal power at the expense of the states, emergence of an ever more powerful executive, and judicial deference to legislative abdication and executive overreach have combined to empower minority and majority factions.

The Constitution proposed by the Philadelphia Convention and ratified by the states included several structural devices intended to limit the influence of factions: union of thirteen very different states; vertical separation of authority between a national government of enumerated powers and state governments of traditional police powers; horizontal separation between the legislative, executive and judicial functions of government; a bicameral legislature in which one branch represents the states and the other represents the people; executive veto of measures enacted by Congress; a judiciary with life tenure and authority to void unconstitutional actions of the other branches; a president elected not by popular vote but by a system giving slightly greater influence to less populous states; removal of a president by impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate; and amendment of the Constitution not by popular vote but by three-fourths of the states.  To be sure, all these institutional arrangements were the product of compromise among the delegates.  But with few exceptions, Federalists and Anti-federalists agreed that their compromises would help control the corrupting influence of factions. 

Erosion over time of some of these limits on direct democracy has contributed to the extreme partisanship that characterizes present-day American politics.  The best hope for ending extreme partisanship lies not in more virtuous representatives or a more democratic Constitution but rather in restoring and reinforcing the Constitution’s original constraints on political factions and majority rule. 

The post How the U.S. Constitution Can End Extreme Partisanship first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press.

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.

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.