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The rationale behind state support for, and obedience to, normative rules and obligations has long been a topic of international law scholarship discourse. What has yet to be fully established, however, is why virtually all states have agreed to adhere to a seemingly novel global paradigm with ambitious yet non-binding objectives – the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This article identifies six factors as contributing to the influencing power of the SDGs – namely, the role of law, particularly inter- and transnational law, the legitimacy of the framework, the notion of reciprocity, reputational concerns, national self-interest, and the moral duty to address the shared global challenges of sustainable development. By exploring their strengths and limitations through several theoretical frameworks (including Harold Koh's theory of transnational legal processes, Thomas Franck's theory of legitimacy, and Ryan Goodman and Derek Jinks' three mechanisms of social influence), this article argues that the combination of these factors motivates voluntary state commitment, reporting, and cooperation under the SDG framework and that, overall, the SDGs offer a versatile lens to explore the different motives for state adherence to a soft law framework in the inter- and transnational legal spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The minority question has long been a hot topic in Central and Eastern Europe. Whereas most CEE countries guarantee the privileged position of the dominant nation, they also recognize the existence of national minorities and provide special rights for them. Hence there is an apparent contradiction between the values of the nation-states: unity and diversity. This article proposes that to resolve this contradiction, it is necessary to define the concept, scope and limitations of group-specific minority rights, as well as their relationship with other human rights and the nation-state. Constitutional courts are appropriate candidates for this task. However, based on our analysis of the relevant constitutional jurisprudence of five CEE countries – Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia – it seems that constitutional courts in the region have failed to properly conceptualize minority rights. Instead of developing appropriate tests for assessing the constitutionality of legal regulations, they have only superficially touched upon the conceptual issues of minority rights, using incidental, case-by-case arguments to justify the (un)constitutionality of the legal provisions. Therefore, this article also attempts to outline a constitutionality test that may be suitable for constitutional courts to consistently evaluate submissions that challenge the constitutionality of laws on minority rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Dental and mucosal injuries from laryngoscopy in the peri-operative period are common medico-legal complaints. This study investigated lawsuits arising from laryngoscopy. Methods: Westlaw, a legal database containing trial records from across the USA, was retrospectively reviewed. Plaintiff and/or defendant characteristics, claimed injuries, legal outcomes and awards were extracted. Results: Of all laryngoscopy-related dental or mucosal injuries brought before a state or federal court, none (0 per cent) resulted in a defence verdict against the provider or monetary gain for the patient. Rulings in the patient's favour were observed only when laryngoscopy was found to be the proximate cause of multiple compounding complications that culminated in severe medical outcomes such as exsanguination, septic shock or cardiopulmonary arrest. Conclusion: Proper laryngoscopy technique and a robust informed-consent process that accurately sets patients' expectations reduces litigation risk. Future litigation pursuits should consider the low likelihood of malpractice allegation success at trial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes key shifts in judicial decisions relating to public health powers during the pandemic and the implications of those decisions for public health practice. Then, it gives a preview and call for partnership in developing a legal framework for authority that guides public health to better activities, processes, and accountability in service of the public's health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

References to the European Convention on Human Rights by Israeli courts – the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights as sources of comparative law – comparative law as technique of legitimation – content analysis of use by domestic courts of European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence – European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence and deference to state [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now over ten years since the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or Court) first established that asylum seekers are inherently and particularly vulnerable on account of their very situation as asylum seekers. This occurred in its Grand Chamber judgment in the case of M.S.S. v Belgium and Greece. This article critically examines the Court's subsequent asylum jurisprudence through the lens of vulnerability. The analysis reveals that the Court has engaged in 'vulnerability backsliding'. Specifically, it traces the ways in which the Court has surreptitiously reversed the very principle of asylum vulnerability it itself established in M.S.S. The consequence of this backsliding is not only that the judicially recognised concept of asylum vulnerability is undermined, but that some of the most vulnerable applicants that come before the Court suffer renewed marginalisation, and, in some circumstances, exclusion from the 'special protection' to which they were previously afforded courtesy of M.S. S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship in law and society has engaged in novel ways with maritime spaces, articulating how they inform legal theory more broadly. This essay builds on such scholarship, and on a broad-brushed survey of maritime history, to make two basic arguments. First, a look at political and legal processes regarding maritime spaces reveals that law is transnational 'all the way down'. Legal theorists often assume that transnational legal processes are an added layer beyond domestic and international law. But the maritime perspective reveals that transnationalism comes first, both analytically and historically, as a constant negotiation of the relationship between what is 'inside' and what is 'outside' a polity. Second, the maritime space begins, at least in dominant legal traditions, as an absolute exteriority – imagined as outside or beyond polities and jurisdictions. But with the climate crisis and the emergence of the Anthropocene we may observe an inversion, the sea now appears as a record of harmful human activity; a mirror showing a troublesome collective portrait of humanity. The inversion from a maritime exteriority to the intimacy of ubiquitous environmental harm defines the parameters of law and politics today. The essay concludes with reflections on how the maritime perspective may best be engaged today in responding to that image through political action. It conceptualizes what I call the 'commonist lifeboat' – a model of bottom-up universalism for tumultuous times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the turn of the seventeenth century, jurists such as Alberico Gentili (1552–1608) and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), began to advance a novel account of the law of nations (ius gentium) as a law that binds a world of sovereign states. That they would produce such a theory is surprising, however, considering that sovereign states were neither the dominant form of political organization at the time, nor did conventional medieval jurisprudence treat them as the normative standard. This article traces this evolution to a broader transformation in legal interpretation. In an effort to put Roman law on a more rational foundation, jurists such as François Connan (1508–51) and Hugues Doneau (1527–91) connected the origin of law to the unfolding of a certain account of human sociability, with the result that a conception of the state as an autonomous body acquired a normative status within their version of the global legal order. It then argues that we should see Gentili's work on the ius gentium as part of this tradition. In so doing, the article demonstrates how the innovations of a particular school of legal interpretation, by combining Roman law with a distinctive social theory, contributed to making the sovereign state the legal norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on the work of several exceptional scholars from the disciplines of philosophy, law, and history. My central aim is to introduce and explicate an idea closely related to (and derivative of) the concept of rights talk, a concept I call 'constitutional emotivism'. By drawing upon scholars including Mary Ann Glendon, Jamal Greene, A.J. Ayer, and Alasdair MacIntyre, I aim to gather the conceptual threads that I trace through their work which together form the idea of constitutional emotivism. In a sentence, constitutional emotivism is the conflation of moral disagreements with constitutional rights grievances. When this conflation occurs, rights conflicts that never needed to occur in the first place reinforce rights talk and its uncompromising nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue that Dworkin's one-system view of law and morality is not as easy to refute or dismiss as some would suggest. In a recent article, Dindjer criticizes a new kind of opposition to legal positivism characterized by both its opposition to a two-system view of law and morality and its promotion of a one-system alternative picture. By re-examining Dworkin's criticisms of the two-system view and by providing additional reasoning of my own, I show that Dworkin's one-system interpretative approach is not just sensible but also promising in refocusing contemporary debates in general jurisprudence on a moral and political reading of the structural features of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal norms serve as practical standards for individuals and officials. While this 'normative aspect' of law is widely acknowledged, its significance for theories of law remains contested. In this paper, I examine three views on the matter. First, that we should explain legal norms as reason-giving. Second, that we should explain legal discourse as being about reasons for action. Third, that we should explain law as capable of being reason-giving. I survey some challenges associated with each of these views. What they have in common is an implicit assumption about the form that normative explanation must take: that it must be a linear, non-reductive explanation. There is an alternative model for normative explanation available, however. That model explains normative notions in terms of the practices and attitudes involved in recognizing, offering, and demanding them. I highlight the potentials, and limitations, of this practice-centered alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a theoretical and doctrinal solution to a vexing question in public law: how to determine the justifiability of Charter rights-limiting administrative decisions. The jurisprudence suggests three approaches, or modes of reasoning: minimal impairment analysis, 'interest balancing', and 'values-advancing reasoning'. Like Cerberus, the guard dog of Hades, Canadian public law has become three-headed. While scholars and courts argue about which mode of reasoning is categorically best, the culture of justification compels us to ask instead which provides the most compelling explanation for each rights-limiting decision. Just as cutting off one of Cerberus's heads would diminish his effectiveness as a guard dog, rejecting either of the modes of reasoning would limit decision makers' capacity to explain their decisions and undermine a culture of justification. The article makes a theoretical case for retaining all three modes of reasoning and sets out a doctrinal approach to determining when each is applicable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many formerly incarcerated people have civil legal needs that can imperil their successful re-entry to society and, consequently, their health. We categorize these needs and assess their association with cardiovascular disease risk factors in a sample of recently released people. We find that having legal needs related to debt, public benefits, housing, or healthcare access is associated with psychosocial stress, but not uncontrolled high blood pressure or high cholesterol, in the first three months after release. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2022, the Camden Coalition Medical-Legal Partnership began providing civil and criminal legal services to substance use disorder patients at Cooper University Health Care's Center for Healing. This paper discusses early findings from the program's first year on the efficacy of the provision of criminal-legal representation, which is uncommon among MLPs and critical for this patient population. The paper concludes with takeaways for other programs providing legal services in an addiction medicine setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accounts of human beings as vulnerable have provided powerful reposts to liberal individualism in recent decades. Concurrently, the European Court of Human Rights' jurisprudence on Convention states' positive obligations often obliges public authorities to address particular vulnerabilities. These developments reflect elements of different theoretical accounts of vulnerability but lack a coherent approach to the human subject. Exploring the impact of this in the UK Supreme Court's jurisprudence, we evaluate two case studies in which positive obligations have been imposed on the police; (1) public order in the context of inter-community tensions in Northern Ireland (DB v. Chief Constable of Police Service of Northern Ireland) and (2) police investigations in regard to serial sexual offending (Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis v. DSD). This jurisprudence illustrates how some domestic judges are supplying their decisions with rationalisations which are lacking in the European Court's case law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nancy Cartwright's 1983 book How the Laws of Physics Lie argued that theories of physics often make use of idealisations, and that as a result many of these theories were not true. The present paper looks at idealisation in logic and argues that, at least sometimes, the laws of logic fail to be true. That might be taken as a kind of skepticism, but I argue rather that idealisation is a legitimate tool in logic, just as in physics, and recognising this frees logicians up to use false laws where these are helpful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are hate crime cases so rarely prosecuted? Most states and the federal government have hate crime laws on their books, yet available data indicate few prosecutions in most jurisdictions. Drawing on case files and interviews with police and prosecutors in one jurisdiction, three institutional impediments to hate crime prosecution are identified: evidentiary inflation, by which law enforcement uses a higher burden of proof than what is required by statute; loose coupling between police departments and prosecutors' offices; and cultural distance between law enforcement and victims. Findings also reveal that advocacy groups and media can successfully increase the visibility of cases and draw the attention of prosecutors. The findings align with aspects of legal endogeneity theory and enhance our understanding of the role of organizations in constructing the meaning of law. The results also help explain why some laws are rarely enforced, even when they have support from key personnel in an organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Law and the Invisible Hand: A Theory of Adam Smith's Jurisprudence by Robin Paul Malloy is a book that reconstructs Adam Smith's theory of jurisprudence based on hints scattered throughout his work. Malloy argues that Smith was a complex thinker who prioritized justice and the public interest over self-interest and profit. The book explores the interplay between informal and formal institutions in society and the role of the impartial spectator in guiding individual actions. While some readers may have concerns about the concept of the impartial spectator and the exclusion of other perspectives, the book offers a valuable perspective on Smith's thinking and its implications for legal reasoning. [Extracted from the article]

Discussions of metaphysical grounding have recently found their way into general jurisprudence. It is becoming increasingly common to frame the debate between positivism and antipositivism as a disagreement about what facts metaphysically ground legal facts. In this article we critically evaluate this grounding turn. First, we argue that articulating the debate about the nature of law in terms of grounding holds the promise of recasting it in a common vocabulary. Second, we argue that this comes at a cost: framing the debate in this way obscures a range of further disagreements that cannot be usefully analyzed in terms of metaphysical grounding. We conclude that grounding may give us a clearer picture of what we already knew, while obfuscating a number of important questions to which it cannot, and is not intended to, provide answers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the transformation within a specific branch of German Salafism from a publicly-assertive da'wa (proselytizing) to a politically accommodating and legal advocacy movement. In doing so, a process analysis that focuses on internal and reflexive narrations among Salafi leaders and lay members, through a three year-long mosque-based ethnography (2018–2021) and textual analysis (2008–2022), is employed. Previous studies focused predominately on the "Salafi growth phase" (2005–2015) in Germany that is associated with the attraction of exclusive group boundaries, flat hierarchies and informal networks. Less research exists on the current "decline phase", which has commenced a re-orientation and critical reflection on past strategies and new ways of civic engagement and legal pragmatism. By exploring this new phase, the article integrates a longitudinal dimension into conventional research protocols on contemporary Salafism. The paper concludes with a discussion on the converging struggles for recognition among Muslim and other religious minorities in Europe, while linking these transformations to domestic opportunity structures rather than transnational reconfigurations of so-called "global Salafism". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is law made worthless to the marginalized? Drawing on ethnographic observations in Paris and New York City, I establish a typology of devaluation practices in deportation hearings. I analyze how informal court practices devalue court actors, the hearing, and the law itself. Despite different levels of formal protections for migrants, deportation adjudication is pared down and devalued in both cities. This devaluation, however, followed distinct logics. New York hearings were characterized by a utilitarian law logic, where process and ritualistic elements deemed inessential were shed, leaving a stripped‐down core focused on case processing. The minimal protections available to migrants were weakened further. By contrast, hollow law emerged in Parisian hearings, where everyday court practices eroded the more generous protections granted to migrants through formal law. While analyses of immigration adjudication have focused on decision‐making, determinants of legal outcomes, and the interpretation of formal criteria, I instead conceptualize the courtroom as a space where value is actively unmade through informal practices, drawing on insights from the sociology of valuation and evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Online misinformation endangers the infrastructure of fact essential to public discourse and presents an even greater threat where it is being utilised as a weapon by hostile state actors. In recognition of these dangers, Singapore has implemented legal measures to combat online misinformation, enacting in quick succession the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) and the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act (FICA). These statutes open up novel frontiers of development for Singapore's free speech jurisprudence. Indeed, these statutes confer upon government authorities the power to compel the authors of certain material to display notices stating that the material contains falsehoods or originated from a hostile information campaign. Yet, should one accept that the constitutional right to freedom of speech extends to the freedom not to speak, the compulsion of such expressions may well be unconstitutional under Singapore's free speech guarantee. This article will study the theoretical justifications for a prohibition against compelled speech to evaluate whether Singapore free speech jurisprudence ought to recognise such a prohibition, propose a doctrinal framework to analyse compelled expressions by reference to US, UK, and Canadian jurisprudence, and critically assess how the POFMA and FICA would fare under such a doctrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that despite its claim to be most concerned with the nature of law in the generality of cases, legal positivism's almost exclusive focus on Anglo-American law has prevented the tradition from adequately answering the question of law's authority. This article argues that much positivist analysis either ignores, or takes for granted, the participation of the local population in the historical development of any given society's law and legal system. This failing means that positivism, and much of analytical jurisprudence, does not provide a truly general, non-circular explanation of authority that accounts as equally for post-colonial legal systems as it does for the Anglo-American systems with which positivism has been most concerned. I argue that the conceptual inadequacies in the explanations of law and legitimate authority offered by those such as H.L.A. Hart and Joseph Raz are most clearly exposed by post-colonial cases, such as Nigeria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals sometimes do things that they know will violate the terms of a statute. Most scholars deny that such actions are always morally wrong, but a coherent theoretical account of the relationships between 1) moral obligation, 2) legal obligation, and 3) criminal wrongdoing that can robustly classify hard cases has been elusive. This article starts with a Kantian account of the relationship between law and morality, and it proposes two closely related standards: one for legal obligation, and another for criminal wrongdoing. It then tests the plausibility and resilience of these standards by using them to generate illuminating new analyses of classic hypothetical cases involving alleged crimes committed under circumstances of necessity. These analyses offer reason to believe that the standards proposed in this article can anchor a Kantian theory of criminal responsibility that is simultaneously rigorous and humane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a conceptual prescription: it argues that judges and lawyers should adopt a positivist concept of law, on normative grounds. The positivist view, I will argue, is more consistent with reasonable disagreement and majority rule than nonpositivist views, offers a better view of law's moral standing, and is more consistent with what Dworkin called 'integrity' than non-positivism. As the paper explains, this is an argument about what I call the 'operative' concept of law. As such, the argument avoids potential problems for conceptual prescription, and shows why even those who adopt non-positivist views about the nature of law might accept it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first recapitulates the objections by H.L.A. Hart to the ways in which John Austin's command model of law obfuscated the importance and the very existence of power-conferring laws. Although those objections are familiar in the world of contemporary legal philosophy, their insightfulness is highlighted here because they contrast so sharply with Hart's own neglect of power-conferring laws at some key junctures in his theorizing. In the second half of this paper, I ponder a few of the junctures where Hart failed to heed the admonitions which he had so deftly leveled against Austin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2022, the CEDAW Committee issued an Individual Communication concerning Rosanna Flamer-Caldera, a lesbian woman, human rights defender, and Executive Director of the only organization in Sri Lanka advocating for the rights of the entire lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex community. To date, the CEDAW Committee has received extensive criticisms concerning its neglect of women from diverse gender identities and sexual orientations. In this Communication, the Committee found that Sri Lanka's criminalization of consensual same-sex relations among women violates Articles 2, 5, 15, and 16 of the Convention. Importantly, the Committee makes clear that non-heterosexual relations fall within the right to marriage and family relations, enshrined in the Convention. With numerous States Parties in the region retaining criminalization, this article analyses the implications of this decision for States Parties in Asia and grapples with the question, "Is this Communication ground-breaking?" and if so, how. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are reasons to believe that conventional obligations are impossible. Thus, it could be argued that for me to have an obligation to Φ in virtue of the fact that a convention so requires, it must be the case that I have a convention-independent obligation to do something else such that, given the existence of the convention, Φing is a way of doing just that. But, then, my obligation to Φ would not really be conventional at all. On closer inspection, so-called conventional obligations turn out to be no more than a specification of what our nonconventional obligations require given the circumstances. In this paper, I shall argue that contra to what this argument suggests, there can be genuinely conventional obligations. To do so, I develop a second-personal account of conventional obligations, according to which obligations are grounded by conventions in virtue of an explanation that does not follow the indicated pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I survey several counterexamples (by Raz and MacCormick) to Hohfeld's conjecture that a claim-right is correlative to a directed duty and (by Cornell and Frick) to Bentham's suggestion that a claim-right is correlative to a wronging. We can vindicate these claims of correlativity if we acknowledge that entitlements like claim-rights and directed duties admit of degrees of abstraction: that they may be general rather than specific, unspecified rather than specified, or indefinite rather than definite. I provide an error theory consisting in linguistic and practical reasons for why we articulate normative incidents in ways that threaten correlativity. And I deny that abstraction imposes a heavy metaphysical cost on rights theory, though I leave open whether abstraction excludes certain explanatory accounts of rights such as the interest theory or will theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the UK left the European Union, a new body of UK law, labelled 'retained EU law', was introduced to save and convert certain parts of EU law into UK statutes. This paper explores the impact of Brexit on statutory interpretation in the UK in the context of VAT. In particular, it looks at whether, and the manner in which, UK courts and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) will move in different directions when interpreting what is essentially the same law. The paper predicts the post-Brexit evolution of statutory interpretation in UK courts based on an empirical study of cases concerning VAT referred by UK courts to the CJEU between 1973 and 2020, augmented by a doctrinal analysis of selected cases. The methodology is built on the premise that past case decisions may provide an indication of the nature of possible future divergence. A case study of VAT may offer wider implications as to departure from the CJEU jurisprudence in other legal areas in the coming years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A body of jurisprudence is emerging in Africa's most active regional courts on the independence of national judiciaries. This article reveals that while regional case law relevantly echoes efforts by municipal courts to safeguard themselves, circumstances demonstrate that such case law requires greater contextualization across systems. In this regard, the traditional paradigm of linking independence to executive appointments does not empirically stand the test of the multiplicity of independence factors, executive-free regimes have not proved effective in safeguarding independence, and legal traditions or judicial systems have increasingly become irrelevant to the effectiveness of any independence regime. Factors that transcend the traditional determinants of executive control include the nature and functions of the court involved, and the history and background of the judicial structure of the country or region. Notably, the discussion also reveals the need to strike a critical balance between individual rights to a fair trial and inter-state directive policy towards judicial independence as set out in the African Charter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the traditional limitations of the concept of bailment at common law. It argues that, although possession is a critical element, in modern commerce, a bailment relationship should be capable of being created without actual physical possession and control, but through constructive possession, which is as effective as physical possession and control. With this adjustment to the interpretation of the element of possession, bailment could then apply to intangible property, such as intellectual property. With the support of evidence from other progressive common law jurisdictions and inroads from the tort of conversion and criminal theft, the article argues that this new bailment jurisprudence is beginning to emerge. It then recommends that, in deserving circumstances, the courts should not hesitate to find that a bailment relationship exists, notwithstanding the absence of physical control and possession, at least pending legislative intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an account of the work of the American constitutional law scholar, Paul W. Kahn, by situating it within a European tradition of political jurisprudence. After introducing certain basic features of this school of political jurisprudence, it proceeds to examine and evaluate Kahn's work relating to the political, the state, sovereignty, collective identity and constitution within the framework of that distinctive worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research of judges and courts traditionally centers on judgments, treating each judgment as a unit of observation. However, judgments often address multiple distinct and more or less unrelated issues. Studying judicial behavior on a judgment level therefore loses potentially important details and risks drawing false conclusions from the data. We present a method to assist researchers with splitting judgments by issues using a supervised machine learning classifier. Applying our approach to splitting judgments by the Court of Justice of the European Union into issues, we show that this approach is practically feasible and provides benefits for text-based analysis of judicial behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prison-industrial complex has historically operated as a mechanism for social control generally and as a tool to restrict women's reproductive capacities specifically. Reproductive justice is a domain within the practice of health law. However, health law as currently practiced is ill-equipped to understand how the carceral state functions as a structural determinant of health or how legacies of oppression have facilitated the abridgment of incarcerated women's reproductive capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Positivists and interpretivists (Dworkinians) might accept that conceptual facts about the law—facts about the content of the concept of law—can obtain in the absence of communities with law practices. But they would deny that legal facts can obtain in such communities' absence. Under the moral impact theory, by contrast, legal facts can precede all communities with law practices. I identify a set of legal facts in private international law— the law of jurisdiction —that concerns when a community's law practices can, and cannot, have the legal effects that the practices claim to have. This law is noncommunitarian, in the sense that it precedes the communities to which it applies. In this law's light, the legal effects of communities' law practices are legally coordinated (or, at the very least, can be shown to legally conflict). Although interest in, and even commitment to, a noncommunitarian law of jurisdiction has receded among private international law theorists, I argue that some well-placed questions can elicit from all of us a commitment to this law. And this commitment is a reason to believe that the moral impact theory is correct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authority is a normative power to create duties in others. The most plausible accounts of this general power relate it to existing reasons the subjects of authority have with which authoritative directives can help them comply. Such accounts lead some theorists to ascribe a morally ambitious function to political institutions. This article argues against such theories. It defends political authority as a modest normative power, constrained by the type of reasons with which it can help its subjects comply. This modest account differs from other liberal views in the limits it imposes on the exercise of political authority. It casts doubt on familiar limits that protect an individual private sphere. Instead, it imposes a condition of moderation. It suggests that legitimate exercises of political authority should leave space for individuals to be motivated by reasons that political institutions do not and should not mediate for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article discusses Emilios Christodoulidis's The Redress of Law as a major contribution to contemporary critical constitutional theory, with a focus on its relationship with other lines of critical thought; with systems theory and societal constitutionalism; and with legal pluralism and the global constitutionalism discourses. It argues that the most valuable contribution of The Redress of Law lies in its capacity to innovate current theoretical discourses, too often closed in on their conceptual assumptions, in turn modelled on liberal political theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the grappling of modern positivists with the question of legal unity. It presents and contrasts two antagonistic positivist strands—naturalist and normativist—epitomized in the works of Austin and Kelsen, respectively. The two strands correspond to two contrasting models of legal authority—criterial and coherence-based—and they accordingly diverge on the proper explanation of unity. Naturalist, criterial models purport to explain the unity of law based on extra-legal facts alone; normativist, coherence-based models resort strictly to the interrelation of legal elements themselves. Against this backdrop, the article argues that Raz's work on the subject is torn between Austin and Kelsen: While his naturalist ancestors accounted for legal unity externally, Raz's prominent works are captivated by the Kelsenian realization that the unity of law must be accounted for internally. Two central upshots follow. First, the analysis provides a litmus test for the (in)ability of naturalist positivism to explain legal unity. Second, Raz's strategic reliance on Kelsen distorts his work: Both the Grundnorm and validity chains are upended to fit Raz's naturalist commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been considerable debate in legal philosophy about how to attribute purposes to rules. Separately, within cognitive science, there has been a growing body of research concerned with questions about how people ordinarily attribute purposes. Here, we argue that these two separate fields might be connected by experimental jurisprudence. Across four studies, we find evidence for the claim that people use the same criteria to attribute purposes to physical objects and to rules. In both cases, purpose attributions appear to be governed not so much by original intention or by moral value as by current practice. We argue that these findings in the cognitive science of purpose attribution have implications for jurisprudential questions involving purposivist legal interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racially disparate policing, prosecution, and punishment harm individuals, families, and communities. These practices must be understood within the context of the development of the criminal legal system as a means of racialized social control. This context permits a critical examination of the way criminalization has been and is still deployed to subject poor and racialized communities to systemic injustices. This commentary frames a call for interventions to integrate a health justice approach to ensure that they advance racial and health equity to promote the well-being of individuals, families, and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a taxonomy of the different kinds of theory that may be offered of an area of law. We distinguish two basic types of philosophical accounts in special jurisprudence: nonnormative accounts and normative accounts. Section II explains the two central subspecies of nonnormative accounts of areas of law: (i) conceptual and ontological theories and (ii) reason-tracking causal theories. Section III explores normative theories of areas of law. Normative accounts subdivide into detached and committed normative accounts. Detached or committed normative accounts can be subdivided further into the following cross-cutting categories: (i) pro tanto or all-things-considered, (ii) hyper-reformist or practice-dependent, (iii) taxonomical or substantive. Section IV shows that our taxonomy does not presume a prior commitment to any particular school in general jurisprudence. This paper clarifies methodological confusion that exists in theorizing about areas of law, and contributes to the subfield of thinking generally about special jurisprudence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a historical contextual pedagogy for private international, which helps students reflect on the impact of the field's legal techniques in different historical contexts. To emphasise the richness of a historical lens, the paper reflects on the development and use of private international law tort rules in a colonial, intellectual and gender historical context. By taking Phillips v. Eyre as a reference, the goal is to illustrate how the canonical cases in private international law can serve as entry points towards a broader historical contextualisation of private international law, beyond the doctrine, though inspired by it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an introduction to the Special Issue on 'Contextual Legal Pedagogy'. It introduces the themes of the Special Issue and offers summaries of the papers in the collection. The introduction considers whether, and how, contextual legal pedagogy can still be radical, and how addressing pedagogical issues also necessarily involves addressing vital theoretical issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal theory must not merely describe our world; it must also assist us acting in it. In this paper, I argue that teaching legal theory should show law students how to do things with legal theory. My pedagogical approach is contextual and historical. Students learn how to use theory by seeing how past jurists acted in their particular worlds by changing dominant concepts of law. Most introductory legal theory courses are organised by what I will call the usual story of jurisprudence. In this story, great thinkers in rival schools of legal thought attempt to answer perennial questions about the nature of (the concept of) law. In this story, the thick context of our world recedes beyond the horizon of theory. I argue that critical genealogy can let us critique this usual story and its unspoken assumptions of morality, politics and history. Amia Srinivasan's account of 'worldmaking' is especially compelling in its emphasis on critical genealogies' capacity to transform our representational practices (and thus open up new possibilities for action). Critical genealogy also has certain pedagogical 'uses and advantages' for teaching legal theory in law schools. Here, context is method. The teacher must defend their political choices of context – choices that are naturalised and so beyond critique in the usual story of jurisprudence. By making these choices explicit, students are invited to both challenge the teacher's choices of context and critique their own common law education. This pedagogical approach also encourages students to experiment in 'worldmaking' themselves, and so cultivate a creative capacity to use legal theory to change the world through transforming their representations of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the devastating second wave of the pandemic in India, I taught an elective subject called 'A Politics of Frivolity? Feminism, Law and Humour'. I offered a subject that intellectually embraced frivolity, precisely for the purpose of responding to the serious anguish and hopelessness of the pandemic. That the study of law is serious business works as (almost) a truism. Understandably, laughter seldom goes with it. Feminists, and feminisms, have also attained a similar reputation or stereotype of being humourless and killjoys. Given this antithetical relationship that humour and laughter shared with both law and feminism, their friendship was not easily foreseeable, working to infuse their combined study with an element of surprise and incongruity. This essay offers an account of my experience of teaching the subject during these dark times. It is a reconstruction partly from my class notes and partly from scribblings and memory. I reflect on a selected set of materials that I taught in the class, how these were received, the questions they raised and how the context enlivened the materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]