Judges seek to maximize their own utility, like everyone else. Their goals include job security and promotion. Federal judges lack the electoral incentives that often drive state judges, but they could audition for promotion. I test whether they audition for promotion in their criminal sentencing. Using criminal sentences imposed in the federal courts from 2006 to 2023, I find that federal judges who are eventually nominated to a higher court hand down longer sentences than their other “contender” peers, though this effect is moderated by the judicial district. This effect is a mixture of judicial behavior and a selection effect—judges are promoted for a variety of other reasons, many of which may be correlated with criminal sentencing. While there is no across-the-board evidence of judicial auditioning during vacancies, there is evidence of judicial auditioning for some judges under some presidents. This behavior, though, ends at nomination: an event-study design finds that the announcement of a nomination has no substantive effect on the nominee's sentencing. These results show that, despite the different structure of the federal judiciary from state courts, strategic rationality on the part of judges may also shape federal criminal sentencing.

Studies of class action settlements have been notoriously difficult because of the logistical burden of assembling datasets from district court orders. This is especially true for non-securities settlements. Moreover, even when they have been undertaken, they have been of unknown representativeness. Yet, since the enactment of the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (“CAFA”), defendants have been required to send a notice to the United States Department of Justice every time they settled a class action, lest the settlement not be binding. These notices therefore have the potential to overcome many of the challenges and limitations of past catalogs of settlements. This paper is the first to assess the efficacy of the Department's CAFA notices to study class action settlements. Using Freedom of Information Act requests, I obtained a log the Department keeps of CAFA notices. Although the log contains thousands of entries and many more settlements per year than any prior dataset, I find that the log is unpredictably incomplete. This is especially apparent for securities class actions, but appears to be true of non-securities class actions as well. As such, the log will not improve the representativeness of class action settlement studies. But the log will mitigate the logistical burden of creating datasets and therefore should improve the frequency of settlement studies.

Because judges exercise discretion in how they handle and decide cases, heterogeneity across judges can affect case outcomes and, thus, preferences among litigants for particular judges. However, selection obscures the causal mechanisms that drive these preferences. We overcome this challenge by studying the introduction of random case assignment in a venue (the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas) that previously experienced a high degree of case concentration before one judge (Alan Albright), whom litigants could select with virtual certainty. To assess Albright's importance to patent enforcers, we examine how case filing patterns changed following the adoption of random case allocation and show that case filings in the Western District of Texas decreased significantly at both the intensive and extensive margins. Moreover, to shed light on why litigants prefer Judge Albright, we compare case management metrics and motions practice across randomly assigned cases and show that cases assigned to Albright received relatively early trial dates and generated fewer motions to stay pending parallel administrative invalidity proceedings and fewer motions to invalidate patents on subject matter eligibility grounds.

This paper (appearing here for the first time in English) is part of a debate between Joseph Raz, Robert Alexy, and Eugenio Bulygin previously published in 2007 in Spanish by Marcial Pons and now featured in this special issue of Ratio Juris. In responding to Raz, Bulygin sets out his main points of disagreement with Raz on the question, Can there be a theory of law? Bulygin challenges Raz's view of legal theory as consisting of necessarily true propositions that explain the nature of law by picking out a set of essential properties independent of the concepts used to identify law. He argues, on the contrary, that the necessary or essential properties of a thing (and so of law) depend on the concept we use to refer to this thing (law), suggesting that legal theories accordingly yield a plurality of concepts rather than uncovering a single privileged concept of law.

Crime doesn't pay. Or does it? We study the role of expectations regarding sanctions and the likelihood of detection on whether people obey the law. We examine how expectations influence whether people obey the law and conduct simulations of various enforcement counterfactuals. We find the average assessment of the likelihood of detection is reasonably accurate, but those who (mistakenly) believe the probability is lower than it is are much more likely to break the law. Further, expectations with regard to the likely consequences of getting caught are also heterogeneous. In our simulations, perceived fines have little impact on willingness to break the law, but a higher perceived likelihood of apprehension has an appreciable impact. Because marginal respondents are pivotal in the rate of law-breaking, debiasing expectations among the whole population has little impact.

This article develops an expectation-centred concept of legal certainty. It first reconstructs the notion of social expectation, distinguishing empirical from normative types and analysing their sources, reasonableness, and postdictive assessment. It defines legal certainty as the conformity of judicial decisions with the normative expectations shared by the majority of a relevant reference network; disappointment of those expectations generates legal uncertainty, while contexts lacking shared expectations remain indeterminate. The model isolates four analytic variables—(i) object of evaluation (single ruling or body of case law), (ii) the operative reference network, (iii) temporal standpoint (ex ante or ex post), and (iv) admissible content of expectations (formalistic versus informal). Combining these variables yields tailored submodels and measurable indicators. By mapping degrees of conformity rather than a binary state, the framework explains why observers anchored in different networks can reach divergent certainty judgments while remaining internally coherent.

More than a century ago, W. N. Hohfeld offered the most influential analysis of rights to date. However, his classification has rarely been received without criticism. Many of the objections to his framework stem from the longstanding debate between interest and will theories of rights. In this paper, I present an interpretation of Hohfeld's analysis that emphasises the institutional requirements necessary for it to be fully operative. I also argue that this alternative interpretation avoids the traditional objections raised within the interest vs. will theory debate. Finally, I examine the scope of application of Hohfeld's classification according to my institutional interpretation and discuss the functions it can effectively perform, particularly in light of legal certainty and the demands of the rule of law.

This article critically examines the tendency to settle political disagreements through constitutional amendments rather than through majoritarian legislative processes. The analysis argues that this trend triggers a “substantive overdose,” that is, the weakening of democracy as a process that legitimizes substantive decisions through the participation of citizens as free and equal decision-makers. This difficulty has two prongs: the first concerning legitimacy, the second agency. Constitutional amendments with substantive functions expand democracy's substantive core, compromising its ability to operate as a “procedural pact” that generates legitimate decisions protecting citizens’ equal liberty in the face of disagreement. Moreover, the judiciary's countermajoritarian power weakens citizens’ agency by reformulating their role from active decision-makers to passive claimants and jeopardizes majority rule as a distinctive trait of democratic decision-making. The article concludes by advocating for constitutional amendments that protect democracy's procedural core rather than enshrining substantive policy positions.

Pretrial risk assessment tools are used in jurisdictions across the country to assess the likelihood of “pretrial failure,” the event where defendants either fail to appear (FTA) for court or reoffend. Judicial officers, in turn, use these assessments to determine whether to release or detain defendants during trial. While algorithmic risk assessment tools were designed to predict pretrial failure with greater accuracy relative to judges, there is still concern that both risk assessment recommendations and pretrial decisions are biased against minority groups. We use the Virginia Pretrial Risk Assessment Instrument (VPRAI) as a case study to investigate the accuracy and fairness of risk assessment algorithms and judicial decisions. In this paper, we develop methods to investigate the association between risk factors and pretrial failure, while simultaneously estimating misclassification rates of pretrial risk assessments and of judicial decisions as a function of defendant race. This approach adds to a growing literature that makes use of outcome misclassification methods to answer questions about fairness in pretrial decision-making. We give a detailed simulation study for our proposed methodology and apply these methods to data from the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services. We estimate that the VPRAI algorithm has near-perfect specificity, but its sensitivity differs by defendant race. Judicial decisions also display evidence of bias; we estimate wrongful detention rates of 39.7% and 51.4% among white and Black defendants, respectively.

This article introduces the current special issue on legal theory and conceptual analysis, a topic explored through the lens of a debate that in 2007 engaged Joseph Raz, Robert Alexy, and Eugenio Bulygin on the question of the relation between the concept and the nature of law. We set the stage for this debate by outlining a history of conceptual analysis around the question of what is meant by an idea or concept and what could count as an analysis of a concept, and whether the structure of concepts is definitional or paradigmatic. This overview draws a map of the methodological disputes which have shaped modern legal theory, and within which we can situate the debate among Raz, Alexy, and Bulygin. We conclude by noting that, despite their disagreements, these three thinkers all view conceptual analysis (and specifically the analysis of the concept of law) as central to the issue of the proper object of the theory of law.

In 2007 Marcial Pons published in Spanish a debate between Joseph Raz, Robert Alexy, and Eugenio Bulygin that is now being made available in English in this special issue of Ratio Juris. This article revisits that debate by unpacking the way Raz conceives of the relation between a concept and the nature of a thing, on the premise that this is key to understanding what is here characterised as his “metaphysical proposal,” meaning the priority of metaphysical inquiry into the nature of law: We can only identify a concept as a concept of law by reference to law's essential properties. The explanatory direction runs from nature to concept, and in this sense Raz can be understood as rejecting the idea that an inquiry into the nature of law reduces to conceptual analysis.

Ratio Juris is making available the English translation of a debate between Joseph Raz, Robert Alexy, and Eugenio Bulygin that had been previously published by Marcial Pons in Spanish in 2007. The debates focus on Raz's distinctive view of conceptual analysis and his argument that it is central to theories about the nature of law. The exchanges with Alexy and Bulygin focus on how open and “parochial” our concepts, including our concept of law, really are, and the connections between legal theory and legal practice.

A patent system is a central tool in innovation policy. The prospect of monopolistic pricing supposedly encourages firms to innovate. However, there is scant empirical evidence supporting the existence of higher markups for patent-protected products. Using an original dataset that links consumer products to the patents that protect them, we study the impact of patent protection on product prices. Exploiting exogenous variations in patent status, we find that a loss of patent protection leads to an 8%–10% drop in product prices. The price drop is larger for more important patents and is more pronounced in more competitive product markets.

What do you want to do with your property when you die? This paper presents the results of a survey in which we asked this question to a nationally representative sample of 9000 American adults. We gathered data on respondents' families and then asked them how they would like to divide their property among those they leave behind. We find that people are more ambivalent about gifts to spouses and more generous to nonmarital partners than the law of intestacy generally assumes. People also give less to parents and more to siblings, extended relatives, and friends than expected and much more to stepchildren than expected. We find some significant differences by race, class, and gender, with women, African Americans, and people of less income and education preferring to give less to their spouses. Our findings improve upon empirical studies of probated wills by providing an unbiased sample, by including data on demographic characteristics, and by observing the preferences of people in unconventional families. We suggest that although intestacy law is often said to implement majoritarian preferences, it may be more consistent with a mix of majoritarianism, paternalism, and administrative efficiency.

This article presents the findings of a quantitative study on sentencing practices in Brazil, focusing on the presence of numerical patterns and “penal clustering” in judicial decisions. Drawing on a dataset of criminal sentences from São Paulo—the country's most populous and active judiciary—the research statistically investigates whether Brazilian judges display preferences for certain sentence lengths, such as even numbers, “round numbers,” and multiples of 6 months. The study also examines the role of numerical fractions in shaping sentence variability. Despite Brazil's civil law tradition and the absence of formal sentencing guidelines, the results reveal a significant degree of penal clustering, with judges consistently relying on a narrow set of sentencing values. These patterns suggest the influence of cognitive heuristics, particularly “anchoring effects,” in sentencing decisions. While the use of numerical fractions may enhance consistency and predictability, it may also constrain individualization—raising concerns about mechanical decision-making and reduced responsiveness to case-specific circumstances. The article discusses the implications of these findings for judicial training, institutional reform, and public policy. It argues for a more data-informed and psychologically aware approach to sentencing, capable of balancing the dual demands of consistency and individualization within both common law and civil law traditions.

The recent debate between Alexy and Ratti provides an excellent opportunity to discuss proportionality, balancing, and their substantive ramifications. In addition to critically analysing this debate, we take the opportunity to sustain several propositions that challenge the foundational pillars of Alexy's “principles theory” and Ratti's criticisms. Among other points, we argue crucially that (i) proportionality should not be confused with balancing, as the former imposes limits on the discretion of decision-makers, while the latter is an intellectual operation employed to solve normative conflicts; (ii) the structural difference between principles and rules lies in the indeterminacy of the regulated action-type, which explains the symptoms that have been correctly identified thus far; and (iii) neither balancing nor proportionality are conceptually linked to principles (just as rules are not to subsumption), though the structure of principles explains why they are more likely to be involved in conflicts that can only be solved through balancing.

Legal scholars and courts have long viewed disclaimers of affiliation as an ineffective tool for dispelling trademark confusion. We revisit this debate with new evidence from two randomized experiments. Consistent with earlier research, we find that disclaimers alone do not dispel consumer confusion. Our experiments show, however, that simply requiring consumers to register their recognition of a disclaimer can reduce confusion to levels that most courts would consider negligible. We tested two disclaimer acknowledgment tasks in an online shopping context: a burdensome task in which participants were required to retype the text of the disclaimer before they could continue with the study and a much simpler task in which participants were required to click a box affirming that they read and understood the disclaimer in order to continue. The tasks were similarly effective in lowering the probability of confusion to levels below the threshold that would typically trigger a finding of likelihood of confusion.

This essay revisits the early methodology of Rudolph von Jhering. It has often been dismissed due to its heavy metaphysics, unwieldy presentation, and alleged neglect of teleology. But a charitable reconstruction in contemporary terms reveals a coherence theory of jurisprudence that is in many ways superior to current coherence accounts. It emphasises simplicity as a guiding principle in doctrinal construction. I argue that contemporary philosophy of science vindicates its main points. Particularly, simpler theories are not only cognitively economical but also tend to be closer to the truth. Understood as outlining a coherence or unification theory of legal reasoning, Jhering’s Spirit of Roman Law has much in store for contemporary coherentists. It stands out in terms of sophistication, practical usability, and sensitivity to the philosophical and technical difficulties of legal coherentism. It also avoids problems of linguistic indeterminacy that trivialise numerous current coherence theories of law.

The American Bar Association has declared a “well-being crisis” among lawyers, but the empirical basis for this claim has been contested in recent years. This study systematically compares two high-quality, nationally representative surveys—the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH)—to measure the prevalence of mental illness and alcohol misuse among lawyers. In both surveys, lawyers report elevated rates of alcohol misuse compared with the general public and similarly educated peers. The NHIS finds that lawyers experience psychological distress at rates lower than the general public and similar to, or moderately higher than, similarly educated peers. In the NSDUH, by contrast, more than 40% of lawyers report moderate or serious psychological distress in the past year. This rate is significantly higher than those reported by the general public, by similarly educated peers, and the rate found in the NHIS. While we cannot fully explain all of the differences between the two national surveys, we resolve some of these differences by studying sensitivity to instrument validation and calibration and closely aligning the measurements used in both surveys. To assess the remaining differences, we identify several advantages of the NSDUH, including the privacy of data-gathering methods, additional clinically validated mental illness measures, and results that are more consistent with other national surveys. The persistent divergences between the NHIS and NSDUH underscore the challenges of measuring mental illness and the importance of continued work on survey implementation, validation, analysis, and interpretation.

While the U.S. healthcare system typically imposes significant out-of-pocket costs on those with insurance, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires full coverage of certain preventive health services. Still, one in four eligible Americans remains unscreened for breast, colorectal, and cervical cancer. We hypothesize that a lack of awareness about the ACA's requirement contributes to this gap. Additionally, we investigate whether prior experiences with medical debt deter individuals from seeking even free care, a potential spillover effect of broader healthcare cost burdens. We conducted an online survey experiment with 3354 insured U.S. adults aged 30–74 with moderate household incomes ($30 k–$99 k). We determined whether each one qualified for a free cancer screen based on age and sex, and found that n = 1406 had not received at least one recommended cancer screening. Those participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions in a 2 × 2 factorial design. In the “free care disclosure” (FCD) treatment, half were informed that ACA-required screenings are fully covered without copays or deductibles. In the “medical debt salience” (MDS) treatment, half were asked about their medical debt history before assessing screening intentions. In addition to measures of intention, the primary outcome was behavioral—whether participants requested a link to take a step toward screening, a proxy for screening behavior, which was not observed directly. As hypothesized, FCD increased screening-related behavior by 5 percentage points (p = 0.031), with effects varying by cancer type. Consistently, 45% of respondents indicated that “costs or coverage” was a common reason for not having gotten screening, and large majorities agreed that “going to the doctor or hospital can be dangerous financially,” “the American healthcare system is full of tricks and traps,” and “in America, healthcare is never really free” (80%, 65%, and 91% agreeing, respectively). MDS had no direct effect on behavior, but contrary to the hypothesis, individuals with medical debt were more likely to seek screening than those without (p = 0.011). These findings suggest that a lack of awareness about the law providing free preventive care is a significant barrier to screening. Proactive communication by clinicians or public health officials could save lives.

Many states bar employers from requiring or expecting employees to keep pay secret, and from retaliating against employees who discuss pay. In a nationally representative survey of 2369 US adults in 2021, people living in states with state laws barring pay secrecy reported more supportive attitudes regarding information-sharing and less concern about offending co-workers by asking about salary, but little to no difference in information-sharing behavior, beliefs or accuracy regarding the laws. Men were consistently more supportive of information-sharing than women, but the gender differential did not differ between groups of states. We randomized participants in each set of states to learn the law of their jurisdiction. In states with pay secrecy bans, participants who learned about the law reported significantly greater comfort asking others and intentions to ask others about compensation, compared to those who were not given information about the law.

According to the paradox of the just law, just laws do not create moral duties, even under the assumption that the law generally creates duties. Raz argues that this paradox arises in relation to laws which are both just and to which an independent moral obligation is attached, but his treatment of the issue is brief. In this paper, I offer a reconstruction of Raz’s argument. I argue that the argument is sound under what I term the “compliance conception” of the duty to obey just laws but fails under the “conformity conception” of that duty. I then present several reasons supporting the conformity conception. By distinguishing between these two conceptions and arguing that the conformity conception is correct, I solve the paradox of the just law.

This article defends a positivist view of human rights while highlighting the limitations of the naturalistic view in the context of human rights violations: the naturalist’s nontemporal, categorical conception of rights oversimplifies ex post moral reflection; its notion of unenforceable rights fails to address moral life after violations; and it marginalises viewpoints not already committed to human rights norms. By presenting these critiques, the article underscores the merits of the positivistic view, which can avoid these shortcomings. It ultimately claims that the positivist approach, recognising human rights norms as social facts, clarifies various perspectives on the normative force of these norms, thereby potentially envisioning a future commitment to them.

The law often asks judges to determine whether a violation is clearly established or whether legal language clearly or unambiguously supports a position. It demands that litigants not raise arguments or claims that would be easily dismissed. And for their part legal scholars have relied on the distinction between easy and hard cases as they delineate the concept of law itself. Yet, few have empirically studied assessments of legal difficulty. Here, we present the results of two studies that provide insight into the reliability of such assessments from laypeople and actual judges. For both populations, our key finding was this: assessments of case difficulty are highly predictive of the vote breakdown in a case; that is, the larger the size of a majority coalition, the lower the average difficulty rating registered by the members of that coalition (and, conversely, the smaller the size of a minority coalition, the higher the rating registered by its members). These results suggest that, while assessments of case difficulty are tied to case outcomes, they are a complex signal. Experiencing the feeling that a case is unusually difficult is not necessarily an indication that you are dealing with a 50/50 case, as is commonly assumed. Instead, it may be an indication that your position on the merits would be decisively rejected by the vast majority of others confronting the same question.

I estimate the relationship between increased creditor rights and legal expenditures of debtor corporations by evaluating a securitization law in India allowing secured creditors to seize collateral. The law reduced spending on legal proceedings used by firms to avoid foreclosure, because debt-related litigation decreased. Firms most affected by the law—with high proportions of tangible assets creditors could seize as collateral—significantly decreased spending on lawyers after the legislation. However, some debtor firms affected by the legislation filed for bankruptcy, either because they failed to successfully renegotiate debt with their multiple creditors or because they took advantage of the automatic stay to prevent creditors from seizing their assets. These firms would have incurred legal costs related to the bankruptcy process. Consistent with this intuition, the post-reform decrease in legal costs is smaller for firms that filed for bankruptcy after the legislation or were already closer to insolvency before the reforms. The results indicate that legal transaction costs associated with foreclosure avoidance are sizable and can be eliminated by strengthening contract enforcement.

Automated legal decision-making is often perceived as less fair than its human counterpart. This human–AI fairness gap poses practical challenges for implementing automated systems in the public sector. Drawing on experimental data from 4250 participants in three public decision-making scenarios, this study examines how different reasoning models influence the perceived fairness of automated and human decision-making. The results show that providing reasons enhances the perceived fairness of decision-making, regardless of whether decisions are made by humans or machines. Moreover, sufficiently individualized reasoning models have a stronger positive impact on the perceived fairness of automated decisions than on the perceived fairness of human decisions. This largely mitigates the human–AI fairness gap. The results thus suggest that well-designed reasons can improve the acceptability of automated governance.

This paper argues that the procedural rule of law (PROL) can provide a fruitful perspective of the dangers that artificial decision-making (ADM) poses in the public sphere. The procedural rule of law argues that the law must reflect the dignity of the legal subject. Unlike the formal and substantive definitions of the rule of law, the procedural rule of law can identify criteria for legitimate decision-making which can justify the continued need for human decision-makers. These criteria are reason-responsiveness and role-reversibility. Taken together, they require that the decision-maker be a thing that can engage in mutual recognition and can respond to individualized reasons. Furthermore, it can identify a particular wrong of ADM (procedural disrespect) which goes beyond the existing worries over transparency and bias. The conclusion is that the rule of law does seem to rule out widespread automation and implies the need for protected pockets of human discretion. In addition, the account presented here avoids common objections to the procedural rule of law and allows for more flexibility in procedural design than other, more well-known accounts.

This article examines the doctrine of consideration in the common law of contracts and attempts to identify a new and plausible justification for several features and implications of this doctrine. The first main conclusion is that the coherence of contract duties is facilitated by the enforceability of sealed promises, but only where the validity of executed gifts does not require consideration. The second conclusion is that any contract duty established by exercising power-conferring rules ought to be enforceable only if not subject to the promisor’s change of mind regarding such exercise. This implies that purely gratuitous promises, which are subject to such change of mind, ought to be unenforceable. The third conclusion is that the doctrine of consideration is prima facie justified because it ensures that contract duties established at formation are authoritative according to Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority.

The reason model of precedential constraint is supposed to generate a stricter doctrine than the minimalist result model. In the standard setting in which these models were originally formalized, that is exactly what we find. Surprisingly, however, in the more complex dimensional setting, the models become indistinguishable. In this paper, we provide an illuminating explanation of the collapse. We also shed light on recent proposals to modify the reason model, or the underlying dimensional setting, in order to avoid it. Finally, we show how the models can be made to collapse even in the simpler standard setting.

Can the dead subject later generations to their will? Legal and political philosophers have long worried about this question. But some have recently argued that subjection between generations that do not overlap is impossible. Against these views, we offer an account of this kind of subjection and the conditions under which it may occur—the Mediated Subjection View. On this view, legal subjection between nonoverlapping generations occurs when past generations seek to guide the future’s behavior, and legal officials in the future deem the norms and legal frameworks inherited from the past as reason-giving and action-guiding, and have the effective power to enforce them. Under these circumstances, we argue, future legal officials act as intermediaries of the past, enabling past generations to subject later ones to their laws. We first inspect the normative significance of subjection and introduce and motivate the Mediated Subjection View. We next scrutinize four objections to the possibility of legal subjection between nonoverlapping generations and show how our view can answer them.

Take two positions, both of which we take to be popular ways of thinking about law. First, some norm N is part of the law only if, and in virtue of, N being ultimately recognized or validated by the rule of recognition. Call this Hartian Orthodoxy. Second, statements about legal rights are best understood as claims about the existence of moral rights according to law. Call this legal perspectivalism. Here we show that the two are incompatible. Our argument is that, to account for certain arguments that mix legal and factual claims, perspectivalism must close the legal perspective according to some inference rule. As it happens, however, the only defensible candidates render perspectivalism incompatible with Hartian Orthodoxy.

This article rethinks ‘the global’ by analysing the emergence and growth of the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), an informal platform of multilateral counterterrorism co-operation which has been instrumental in the making of post-9/11 global security law and governance. It problematises and empirically analyses how global scale is enacted through the socio-material practices of translation and assemblage that have been deployed in the construction, maintenance and extension of the GCTF governance network. Drawing from interviews with policy experts and GCTF members, and from participant-observation in GCTF and UN events, the article contributes to the theme of the Special Issue and wider legal debates about the spatiotemporal dynamics of global law and governance by critically analysing how global scale is fabricated in practice and unpacking the politics of GCTF’s global scale-making processes. Focusing on specific techniques and norm-creation processes of the GCTF, like watch-listing toolkits and ‘good-practice’ documents on foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs) and countering violent extremism (CVE), the article analyses how translation, problematisation and enrolment practices have assembled the GCTF as an ‘apolitical’ global security governance body. Our approach opens novel possibilities for socio-legal research on the politics of scale-making and critiquing global security power in action through empirical attention to its assemblage practices.

This paper renews the contemporary and enduring salience of archaic and discredited concepts of spatiality and physical geographic determinism, but historicises, repurposes and reworks them: it is an essay in critical and decolonial palaeo-territorialisation. Concreteness may well have been misplaced, but place – and space – might not have been altogether mis-concretised. Rethinking the global is an opportunity to step back and think about macro-scales and macro-scalarity more broadly. This paper exhumes and decolonially/critically reappropriates Carl Schmitt’s Großraum concept (re-examining, along the way, if not quite rehabilitating the Meer und Land thesis and Mackinder’s ‘geographical pivot’ (Mackinder 1904)) as a heuristic device to explore the overlooked scales of continents and continentality in the genealogy of a global geographic imaginary that is as much geotectonic as geo-historical. ‘The Global’ would then come to signify pre-eminently – or perhaps has always signified – as the intercontinental rather than the international: a space or set of spaces in some ultimate sense conditioned by the configuration of the planetary crust yet nonetheless produced through historical processes. We may never have been global, but we have been (inter)continental for the last half-millennium. State sovereignty, (racial) capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, public international law, fascism, communism and neoliberal globalisation have all been projects or formations – directly or indirectly, by design or accident – producing, pursuing, exploiting, organising and ordering continental Großräume. Contemporary regional trade blocs, regional international governmental organisations, regional human rights systems, military alliances and even putative civilisational divides all reflect the perdurable continental horizons of our ostensibly global imaginary.

Earth–outer space interactions challenge conventional legal structures through dynamics that transcend jurisdictional boundaries and temporal scales. International law historically operates through specific spatiotemporal assumptions: geometric space, chronometric time, and cartographic politics. These elements structure how legal authority is conceptualised and enacted. This study recognizes the interconnectedness between Earth and outer space, positioning legal thought and practice within planetary and cosmic contexts. This integrative framework moves beyond anthropocentric and state-centric paradigms to address the indeterminate nature of multifaceted systems. The research employs an interdisciplinary methodology that integrates legal theory and doctrine, systems engineering, and systems science to analyse emergent phenomena such as orbital debris dynamics. The study concludes that addressing Earth–outer space interactions effectively requires not merely integrating existing legal regimes but reconceptualizing core legal concepts to align better with complex, multi-scalar and emergent dynamics.

From global tourism and free movement to refugees and climate-related displacement, human mobility is both a driver and an effect of what we think of as globalisation. Yet, the role of international law in constituting human mobility remains critically undervalued. In this contribution, we call for a radical rethinking of the role of international law in shaping our globe through the tenets of the mobilities paradigm in the social sciences. More specifically, we argue for the adoption of a mobile ontology of international law, which pits the constant flow of persons, goods and capital against dominant globalisation narratives predicting the end of place to take a focus on re-territorialisations of power. Taking human mobility as our starting point, we first show how mobility has been central to the foundation of key building blocks of international law. Second, we turn to the example of the global tourism regime to explore how law recursively disperses mobility around the world. Third and finally, we argue that the relationship between international law and human mobility is co-constitutive, as constant shifts in mobilities create unexpected effects, which in turn prompt further evolutions in law. We conclude by reflecting on the space for empirical and critical investigation that may open up by re-imaging (international) law as quintessentially mobile.

Contemporary practices of authority by states and non-state actors alike are at odds with international law’s orthodox time-spaces, causing disciplinary anxiety. As a result, although there is a sense of the importance of global value chains (GVCs), these are invisible to the disciplinary gaze. This is not limited to international law; neo-formalist contract law and private international law suffer the same fate. There is for some a turn to ‘the global’ to understand alterity. In this paper, I argue that understanding the time-spaces created by the practice of contracting can offer important reflection on, among other things, what ‘the global’ is. The paper explores the practice of exercising authority through contractual relations at the level of the individual contract, the chain as a whole, and the use of standardised contractual clauses and model contracts. The article suggests these contractual relations are constitutive not only of spatiality but of territoriality. As such, it is possible to reterritorialise global phenomena, and ‘the global’, that have until now been understood to have deterritorialised from state or international legal orders.

This article brings together different strands of literature to explore how time operates in international law as a technique of inclusion and exclusion. The question of reparations for enduring colonial and ecological injustices provides a useful entry point to examine, at a more granular level, the temporal foundations of the field and their distributive outcomes. Concepts of restitution, compensation, satisfaction as well as the doctrine of causation in the law of state responsibility, encode a specific understanding of time. This understanding, I argue, is embedded in a modernist worldview characterised by linear, abstract and universal notions of time. Calls for reparatory justice for colonial and climate wrongs attempt to defy and interrupt law’s forward motion by binding together interconnected (though unequal) pasts, presents and futures. In examining how international law reacts to those claims, and manages the conflict between law’s temporal abstractions and the concrete tempos of those seeking redress, this article reinvigorates the conversation on the politics of time in international law.

Norms of standing are puzzling. Your friend asks you for a favor. In the past, that same friend has failed to grant you similar requests. It seems that under such conditions, you are allowed to disregard your friend’s request as a reason for granting it, on the grounds that he lacked standing to make the request. Yet, given that friends’ requests are reason-giving, your license to disregard that (valid) reason is mysterious. We aim to dispel this sense of mystery by conceptualizing standing norms as procedural norms. Procedural norms are second-order (outcome-neutral) norms about how to engage with other norms. And norms of standing are a particular type of procedural norm, namely procedural exclusionary permissions. More generally, understanding standing norms as part of the “procedural branch” of morality exemplifies how the interplay between substance and procedure can clarify and demystify certain puzzles of moral discourse.

This paper analyses the recent viral #MeToo and #ShoutYourAbortion campaigns and argues that examining them illuminates our thinking about privacy and standing.The paper argues that one of the aims of these campaigns was to debunk the view that women did not have standing with respect to matters concerning sexual harassment and reproductive care. The myths the campaigns sought to discredit – myths about sexual harassment and assault and abortion – involve victim-blaming, and one thing we do when we victim-blame is deny that the victim had standing. This paper also argues that women proved they had standing through these campaigns by revealing what was private. This is, I argue, a way of ‘exploding’ the private sphere as MacKinnon famously put it. By looking to these campaigns, we can see that their strategy relied on the value of privacy.

In this paper, I argue against a widely held view about interpersonal moral relations inspired by Benjamin Cardozo’s landmark judgment in Palsgraf v Long Island Railroad Company, which I call the Relational Fault Requirement. The requirement holds that in order for A to commit a directed wrong against B, A must be at fault in relation to B. I present two ways of understanding wrongs that violate this requirement: (1) that one is wronged if one is harmed by a wrongful action, and (2) that one is wronged if one is harmed by a wrongful action and the outcome one suffers is sufficiently similar to the grounds on which the action is wrong. Accepting either of these ideas requires rejecting the Relational Fault Requirement and encourages us to rethink the core elements of directed wrongdoing.

Minors should not be punished as harshly as adults for any given crimes they commit. The most common explanation of why is that youths have diminished responsibility-relevant capacities. Recently, Gideon Yaffe has defended the revisionist view that the reason to give juvenile offenders a break in sentencing derives from their political disempowerment. Here, I defend a third alternative: youth is a developmental stage between legal infancy and adulthood during which people are owed special opportunities to cultivate their moral capacities and otherwise fortify themselves against engaging in criminal wrongdoing. Given that minors have not yet received all those opportunities they are owed, they have a claim to mitigated punishment on account of lacking a fully fair opportunity to protect themselves against criminal liability and punishment. They also have distinctive grounds to object to any punishment that would thwart their continued receipt of the developmental opportunity they are owed as youths.

Many claim that if a state is responsible for structural injustice, then that state lacks the standing to hold marginalized offenders to account. Call this the compromised standing claim. I argue that this claim sits in tension with a further assumption: that states hold offenders to account in their people’s name. Specifically, I argue that when A holds B accountable in the name of C, A’s own hypocrisy and complicity are not sufficient to undermine her standing to hold B accountable. This means that there exists a gap between a state’s responsibility for structural injustice and its compromised standing. After motivating this challenge, I consider one response according to which the people have lost their standing with respect to marginalized offenders and that the state, qua representative, inherits the standing of its people. I propose two strategies for making this response precise and argue that neither can vindicate the compromised standing claim in its standard form.

I develop and defend a novel account of the private law of remedies according to which it is best understood as facilitating deliberations between the parties about the just outcome of their dispute rather than correcting injustice or righting wrongs. According to my democratic conception, the parties are the ones who ideally ought to resolve moral uncertainty about justice between them by deliberating together in good faith about what justice requires. The law of remedies should therefore often refrain from offering a final judgment about what justice between the parties requires, instead setting and implementing fair default rules and principles in the shadow of which the parties will ideally articulate for themselves a joint vision of justice for their relationship.

The gated community is a unique site of social reproduction which has proliferated across India. Elite families are reproduced at the individual, household level but also at the communal level in service-rich private enclaves. These households rely heavily on specialised reproductive labourers who are deprived of worker status because they work in the private domain. Homeowners’ associations or resident welfare associations (RWAs) meanwhile regulate reproductive labour through surveillance and wage fixing and by regulating entry and exit. Despite their public function, RWAs claim no responsibility for worker welfare due to privity of contract and the exclusion of ‘domestic service’ from labour laws. We examine India’s new labour codes, establishment laws and constitutional law to pin responsibility on RWAs as public bodies for ensuring the fundamental rights and welfare of these workers.

Mapping of human rights abuses and international crimes is an increasingly common tool to evidence, preserve and visualise information. This paper asks, what does rights-informed mapping in the context of mass graves look like? What are the rights concerned and allied goals, and how might these practicably apply during a pilot study? The study offers an analysis of the goals and benefits espoused to accrue to mapping and documentation efforts, as well as an explication of rights arising when engaging with mass graves. Our findings underscore the imperative of understanding the full ramifications of the applicable context, in our case the life-cycle of mass graves. This will bring to the fore the rights engaged with the subject as well as the challenges with data points, collation and reporting as experienced in a pilot (Ukraine) where realities on the ground are not static but remain in flux.

In N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, core laws are written on stone. But the tablets are incomplete, open to interpretation and their authorship uncertain. Nonetheless, Stone Law forms the basis of the governance system. Ultimately, the narrative reveals that the Stone Laws are recent in origin and an instrument of subjugation whose claims to common sense belie its harms. This article considers immutability in law and the ways in which particular laws become as if written in stone. Constitutional law and jus cogens are two examples of immutable worldbuilding laws represented as inevitable, absolute, unyielding and perpetual. Debates in law and humanities on genre, performance, interpretation and the concerns of a particular era are often reflected and refracted through both the laws and the literature of an era. In particular, the practice of worldbuilding is used to demonstrate the wariness necessary when laws are represented as immutable.

This paper examines the core twin concepts of secularism and pluralism and their location within the Indian constitutional discourse, through a discussion of the hijab ban in the South Indian state of Karnataka. I suggest that attempts at Hindu majoritarian subversion of these core principles face challenges due to the structure of the Indian Constitution, and due to the constitutional agency and mutinies set in motion by women through their legal challenge of state action. I discuss the hijab ban in India and the two judgments on the ban as an example of this attempted subversion but also of its failure, suggesting that these judgments fall short in their reading of this interrelationship between secularism and pluralism. In doing so, I introduce a threefold analytical categorisation, pluralist constitutionalism, constitutional appropriation and constitutional derailment, to help us outline the tensions inherent in constitutional politics in the present.