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Children's competitive sport in Australia poses barriers for children with disabilities. Sporting structures generally do not provide opportunities for children with disabilities to compete in a manner that is meaningful and fair to them, and generally not with the mainstream competitions. Such treatment may be discriminatory, either wrongfully or unlawfully so. Using Australia's Little Athletics as a case study, this paper uses systems thinking to holistically map the influences on a child with disability's experiences in a sporting contest, to identify how the socially constructed environment affects structures and rules and how the law might shape those. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts with the increasing discussions on juridification in education. Concerning theorizing on such processes, we examine the poor implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, CRPD (2008) in the school sector of Germany. The paper considers the reasons for this failed endeavor by analyzing the complex, multilevel relations between policy and law in different national and historical contexts. With this, aspects of juridification as a process in education policy can be illuminated. In this regard, we suggest crucial aspects regarding juridification in public education: a focus on regulative failures in juridification processes, juridification's contexts, the mandate for putting it into action, the allocation of resources, and finally, its objective and subjective rights dimensions, i.e. how an individual can claim rights within the machinery of public education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Michel Serres's caution with figures of the limit, border, and boundary which philosophy and social theory put into play, his work can fruitfully be read as a proposal to rethink limits for a social and natural contract. By following up on the intimate connection between limits and law in his work, this paper shines a light on Serres's argument for a parallelism of limits and laws; and particularly highlights the partially underacknowledged role of entropy for this matter. First, attention will be drawn to the role of topological boundaries for Serres's structural consideration of a natural contract in a number of his works (e.g., The Natural Contract, Atlas, Hominescence), in order to demonstrate the indispensable connection between topological boundaries, a topologically conceived ethics, and a topological approach to law. This grounds the argument for a second step, which will focus on the role of entropy and entropic difference for his understanding of processes of social organization as well as a proposal of a "new natural contract." Similarly, this will emphasize the linkages between entropic figures of the limit and respective conceptions of a contract. This "new natural contract," as Serres calls it, not only goes a long way in connecting themes around thermodynamic and informational entropy of the early Hermès series to his later employments of entropy in social theory, but also integrates different criticisms of his earlier natural contract and critiques of a Western-centric form of naturalism. The aim of this paper is to show that Serres's approach to entropy engenders a reconsideration of a natural contract that not only thoroughly integrates his own non-essentialist and non-dualistic understanding of nature, but that opens up a horizon of resonances with feminist and postcolonial critiques of the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poland is a case of a state in which the role of legislative bodies in the political system has been gradually reduced at the various levels – national, regional, and local. Recently, this process has been related to executive aggrandisement observed in Poland, but the roots of this phenomenon can be traced back to the political transformation of this country observed after 1989. At the national level, the deteriorating legislative role of parliament manifests itself in four general processes: (1) The executive power treats the Sejm (lower chamber) as a subordinate institution. This involves formally introducing laws forced by the government in the form of proposals written by members of parliament (MPs) (as a way to shorten the legislative process and limit public consultations required by law); (2) Speeding up of parliamentary works – the Sejm is treated as a voting machine and not as a forum where debates and discussion take place; (3) Public consultations are superficial and the regulatory assessment impact is minimal; (4) The influence of the opposition on legislative processes is reduced to almost zero. Similar processes can be observed at the regional and local levels. The subnational legislative bodies are often under the control of executives. Instances of voting with no or limited discussions (favouring the governing majority) can be sometimes observed during the sessions of local and regional councils. This paper analyses the weakening of the legislative function in Poland at different levels, using a qualitative approach and data from desk research, media analysis, in-depth individual interviews and focus group interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is an ample body of literature in the anthropology of moralities there is a surprising dearth of research on conscience per se. In Malta over the last ten years there has been a proliferation of a public discourse of ‘conscience’ – its affordances, freedoms and its legal safeguards. This has been the result of debates over reforms leading to the liberalization of sexual and family life, including most recently debates over the legalization of abortion. While the language of conscience in various human rights instruments claims a universal character its meanings, inflections and significance can vary in important ways. There is a blurred boundary between conscience and religion. This paper examines the ways in which conscience is deployed and the significance of the appeals to a national conscience in a European confessional state. It looks at the specific meanings of conscience in Malta and a brief lexical and political history It then moves on to look at the ways objections of conscience are framed in contemporary Malta in light of theological debates and their ramifications in Catholic Malta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michel Serres proposes that we reform our relation to the non-human world by striking a new contract to extend democratic rights and legal protections to nature. Following Serres's lead, this has for the most part been understood in strictly legal terms. In this paper, I will show that the natural contract also has a narrative dimension, and moreover that taking this into account reveals an engagement with the Principle of Sufficient Reason that puts the relation of the natural contract with law in a new light. The natural contract appears not as a standalone, law-based response to the climate emergency but as part of an ongoing rational practice that involves the law, the sciences, and a wider narrative exploration of the human and the non-human. After outlining Serres's proposal for a natural contract, I will look briefly to his account of Lucretius in The Birth of Physics where both narrative and contract play an important part. Law is treated as a regularity arising from the connection between events, and further as a form of equilibrium modelled on the most advanced knowledge available. Serres's discussion of Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason in The Natural Contract shows that the composition of such an equilibrium is both narrative and rational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As both a marriage act and an immigration act, the Expatriation Act of 1907 restricted U.S. women's freedom of marriage by stating that marrying aliens would lead to loss of U.S. citizenship. To study the effects of the Expatriation Act, I conduct a statistical analysis using 1910 full-count U.S. census data. I find that the Expatriation Act of 1907 generated significantly negative effects on intermarriage between American women and foreign-born men, particularly noncitizens. In particular, I find that it was the citizenship, rather than men's non-U.S. origin, that accounted for the negative effects of the Expatriation Act of 1907 on intermarriage. These results show a decline in male immigrants' marital assimilation, and potentially social and economic assimilation. As for the magnitude, the effects were large: the decline in intermarriage was at least 15 percent relative to the pre-Act intermarriage rate. Besides these main results, selective emigration to Canada and Europe driven by intermarriage cannot explain the main empirical results of the paper. The Expatriation Act of 1907 also had no significant effects on women's entry into the marriage market. Finally, the effects of the Expatriation Act of 1907 on intermarriage were heterogeneous by family immigration background, but less so by geographic region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is rapidly developing interest in legal coding, the development of machine-consumable code representations of legal rules. However, interpretive ambiguities inherent in legal rules make it challenging to directly translate law into code. Interpretive ambiguities pose challenges for legal coders, who must determine the extent to which they disambiguate rules, as well as the interpretive methods applied. Similar interpretive issues have been historically addressed in the field of legal translation. This paper argues that a legal translation framework, known as the principle of fidelity, can be used to better understand and resolve interpretive ambiguities inherent in the legal coding process. Three models of fidelity prominently discussed in legal translation literature are adapted and applied to legal coding. Accordingly, the application of fidelity models to the legal coding process could provide new understanding and methods to address complex interpretive ambiguities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scott Hershovitz's Law is a Moral Practice develops a bold, novel, and comprehensive account of law: the moral practice picture. Its central thesis is that legal relations (rights, duties, powers, etc.) are moral. They are real, full-fledged normative relations, connected to genuine reasons for action, and endowed with robust normativity. Nothing less than ordinary moral relations. The account is compounded with a deflationary view of theories in general jurisprudence and of the debates about them. In this vein, Hershovitz recommends that we move away from theorising about law (understood as a set of legal norms), and focus on the nature of legal relations instead. In this paper, I pursue two interrelated objectives. First, I address Hershovitz's main arguments for the view that legal relations are moral. Second, I take the issue with the asymmetry between the deflationary and inflationary stances he advocates for legal norms and relations, respectively, arguing that this different treatment is unwarranted, because the deflationary stance is, and because this very combination of attitudes is unstable. Properly understood, questions about the nature and determination of legal norms and relations can't but be seen as complementary aspects of a unified legal metaphysics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physicians generally recommend that patients resuscitated with naloxone after opioid overdose stay in the emergency department for a period of observation in order to prevent harm from delayed sequelae of opioid toxicity. Patients frequently refuse this period of observation despiteenefit to risk. Healthcare providers are thus confronted with the challenge of how best to protect the patient's interests while also respecting autonomy, including assessing whether the patient is making an autonomous choice to refuse care. Previous studies have shown that physicians have widely divergent approaches to navigating these conflicts. This paper reviews what is known about the effects of opioid use disorder on decision-making, and argues that some subset of these refusals are non-autonomous choices, even when patients appear to have decision making capacity. This conclusion has several implications for how physicians assess and respond to patients refusing medical recommendations after naloxone resuscitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental health remains a niche topic in bioethics, despite being a prominent social determinant of health. In this paper we argue that if bioethicists are to take the project of health justice as a serious one, then we have to address environmental injustices and the threats they pose to our bioethics principles, health equity, and clinical care. To do this, we lay out three arguments supporting prioritizing environmental health in bioethics based on bioethics principles including a commitment to vulnerable populations and justice. We also highlight and advocate for environmental law efforts that align with these priorities, focusing specifically on the need for a right to a healthy environment. Our intention is to draw attention to the legal and ethical concepts that underlie the importance of a healthy environment, and urge bioethicists to prioritize both legal and ethical advocacy against environmental injustices in their practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives an account of the most significant elements of Derrida's ethical thought, drawing on the desert of the Hebrew Bible, which Derrida associates with a moral law that is ethically troubling. Partly with reference to Kierkegaard's account of the story of Abraham and Isaac, Derrida examines how ethical law can become subordinate to the sovereignty of the power apparently at the source of ethics which may then destroy moral law. The political equivalent of this is the decision proposed by Carl Schmitt, drawing on Kierkegaard. Derrida's famous statement that "deconstruction is justice" is the recognition that justice, and ethics in general, is caught between the formality of law and the violence of the sovereign power. One outcome of this is sacrifice as substitution, where ethics becomes recompense for violation through sacrifice. Sacrifice is the offering of a substitute. The substitution becomes repeated and itself is then the source of violence contravening some sense of ethics. Derrida's attempts to escape from these deserts include a poetics which recognises the subjective and the aesthetic in the interpretation of law. It also includes the development of a form of sacrifice which is the individual responding to violation in an individualised way which cannot be substituted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pharmaceutical sector corruption undermines patient access to medicines by diverting public funds for private gain and exacerbating health inequities. This paper presents an analysis of UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) compliance in seven countries and examines how full UNCAC adoption may reduce corruption risks within four key pharmaceutical decision-making points: product approval, formulary selection, procurement, and dispensing. Countries were selected based on their participation in the Medicines Transparency Alliance and the WHO Good Governance for Medicines Programme. Each country’s domestic anti-corruption laws and policies were catalogued and analysed to evaluate their implementation of select UNCAC Articles relevant to the pharmaceutical sector. Countries displayed high compliance with UNCAC provisions on procurement and the recognition of most public sector corruption offences. However, several countries do not penalise private sector bribery or provide statutory protection to whistleblowers or witnesses in corruption proceedings, suggesting that private sector pharmaceutical dispensing may be a decision-making point particularly vulnerable to corruption. Fully implementing the UNCAC is a meaningful first step that countries can take reduce pharmaceutical sector corruption. However, without broader commitment to cultures of transparency and institutional integrity, corruption legislation alone is likely insufficient to ensure long-term, sustainable pharmaceutical sector good governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reconstructs the experiences of prominent Charleston merchant Colin Campbell, and his niece Louisa Campbell, to explore how Scots loyal to the Crown during the American Revolution later defended their interests in Scotland's Court of Session. Using the case of Campbell and Ferrier v. Campbells (1796) as an organizing framework, it demonstrates how Scots litigated their suffering at the hands of American Patriots. It shows how lawsuits like it were embedded in a larger transatlantic legal ecosystem that shaped their outcome. The legal contest between Louisa Campbell and her cousins over Colin Campbell's American property tied together legislatures and courts in South Carolina, Georgia, London, and Edinburgh. By doing so, they compelled the Lords of Session, the judges who sat on the bench of Scotland's supreme civil court, to define American Independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When is a horse not just a pack animal but a criminal accomplice? When is a lamb more than just livestock, but a form of contraband or a witness in court? Pursuing these questions in Van, a Kurdish-majority province of Turkey bordering Iran, this article examines how human-animal collaborations facilitated Kurdish smuggling economies, or what locals called qaçax. I conceptualize qaçax and kaçak (the Turkish word from which it originated), as the inexhaustible capacity to escape control. As the state's counterinsurgency against Kurdish guerillas established an extensive regime of surveillance and control in the Van borderlands, pack animals enabled smuggling convoys to evade state control and survive deadly anti-smuggling ambushes. Smugglers (and smuggler animals) also collaborated to elude the legal evidentiary processes and undermine allegations of smuggling brought against them. Rather than viewing animals as mere objects of legal knowledge, as existing studies have tended to do, the human-animal collaboration in court shows how the animals actually co-produce such knowledge. The smugglers' evasion of criminal charges in court further troubles the categories of illegality and informality that are frequently associated with smuggling, and permits us to think of smuggling economies beyond binaries of legal-illegal, formal-informal, human-nonhuman or living-nonliving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UN Protection of Civilians sites in South Sudan were separated from adjacent towns by barbed wire fences, mounds, watchtowers and patrolling peacekeepers. Building on and contributing to recent legal geography scholarship on jurisdictions, we explore how legal norms, institutions and rivalrous claims of jurisdiction remake these places of protection and blur spatial boundaries by creating trails that entangle the worlds inside and outside of the sites. The article also provides an unusual example of a powerful public authority – the United Nations – resisting claims that they have jurisdiction. The article is based on qualitative research in Wau and Bentiu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]