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There is a growing importance of understanding the connection between sustainability and justice. We have conducted the first robust mixed-methods review of the burgeoning academic literature on sustainability justice. Our analysis spans literature from 2013 to 2023, drawn from the databases of Web of Science and Scopus. We use a scientometric approach to identify key literature for a more detailed qualitative analysis. This dual approach uncovers key trends and themes in sustainability justice. The review identifies works that delve into the themes of environmental, social, and economic justice, pinpointing a need to amplify Global South voices, narratives, and insights for a comprehensive understanding of sustainability justice. The findings indicate a pressing need for integrating economic aspects with social and environmental factors, advocating for more focus on transformative justice.

This paper discusses the accountability gap problem posed by artificial intelligence. After sketching out the accountability gap problem we turn to ancient Roman law and scrutinise how slave-run businesses dealt with the accountability gap through an indirect agency of slaves. Our analysis shows that Roman law developed a heterogeneous framework in which multiple legal remedies coexist to accommodate the various competing interests of owners and contracting third parties. Moreover, Roman law shows that addressing the various emerging interests had been a continuous and gradual process of allocating risks among different stakeholders. The paper concludes that these two findings are key for contemporary discussions on how to regulate artificial intelligence.

This article develops a framework to guide the EU in the choice of legal form for the regulation of eco-innovation. The framework distinguishes between uncertain and risky applications of eco-innovation. An uncertain eco-innovation, which poses an incalculable risk, is more difficult to regulate because the EU legislator needs to accumulate information in order to plug gaps in knowledge. In that context, directives are superior to regulations because they are conducive to experimentation and information accumulation. Risky eco-innovations, conversely, should be covered by regulations; otherwise, the cost of legal heterogeneity would outweigh the benefits of information accumulation. We also show that there are ways of conceptualising the choice between directives and regulations that are more productive than the sovereignty-versus-competition model that predominates in current legal thinking.

The connection between the timing and the locus of a regulatory intervention should excite considerable interest in the study of ex ante regulation. To illustrate this argument, we draw on the example of the precautionary principle. It emerges that timing is important when legislation is being drafted. However, time is not the only relevant variable in decision-making. When it is ripe for application, both temporal and locus-of-regulation considerations matter. For instance, a question that policymakers should address is when it is the right time to regulate new or emerging technologies and at which governance level. Addressing such questions would allow them to strike a balance between facilitating the development of new technologies and addressing the legitimate concerns of their citizens.

This article aims to test whether human rights have an indivisible nature. To do that, we perform correlation analysis and Granger causality tests to test 1) the relationship within socio-economic rights and 2) between socio-economic rights and civil-political rights. The results show that certain socio-economic rights have mutual reinforcing relationships, lending support to the existence of widespread indivisibility. This finding yields relevant policy implications. Given their financial constraints, states could make use of the existence of widespread indivisibility, in combination with the progressive implementation clause, to foster the efficient allocation of resources for human rights implementation. Furthermore, this article shows that the intensity of indivisibility varies depending on the income category of states: the indivisible nature of socio-economic rights is more intense in low-income countries while seems to achieve a saturation point at the highest levels of human rights compliance. We, thus, propose to define this phenomenon as ‘indivisibility saturation’. Lastly, our findings detect a more complex picture for the indivisibility principle between the two classes of human rights. While widespread indivisibility does not follow from the tests, important unidirectional relationships between different human rights exist and are equally important for human rights policy-making purposes.

This article addresses the discourse on the prospective human right to energy and assesses challenges to its full recognition, drawing on an analogy to the human right to water. Initially, we offer a bird’s eye view of the normative framework that governs the human right to energy by discussing its development. Our discussion is based on the issue of energy access, and is supported by the concepts of sustainable development and energy justice. Subsequently, we argue that the intractability of the challenges associated with the recognition of a right to energy are more apparent than real. Finally, to facilitate the recognition of the human right to energy, we suggest making the inherent link between energy services and human dignity more explicit.

The last two decades have been incremental for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven technologies. AI is increasingly being applied to all facets of life. Much research has been conducted on AI and its interplay with human rights in general, yet, little research is available on AI’s impact on LGBTQ+ rights and the queer community in particular (though many of the general human rights concerns are also valid for the LGBTQ+ community). While the LGBTQ+ community has benefitted from certain forms of AI, there are also discernible risks involved in AI’s application in terms of privacy, health, safety, employment, censorship, discrimination etc. Weighed against each other, the pertinent question is whether AI is to be considered a friend or a foe for the LGBTQ+ community. This chapter aims to answer that question and fill the gap in the literature. It discusses some of the positive aspects of AI applications that have improved the lives of LGBTQ+ people and advanced or promoted the protection of LGBTQ+ rights, as well as the negative risks and the ethical implications of this ever-evolving technology that need to be addressed for a fairer future application. It furthermore elaborates on what queer theory is and how its application from the beginning stages of AI-development on could take away some of the concerns that are prevalent. It presents three case studies to illustrate how an actual queerification of AI could lead it to being more inclusive, diverse and fair for the queer community.

This article reviews the manner in which two types of legislation in the Netherlands, namely laws on foreign direct investment and laws on network and information security, address the risks that arise from changes in control over companies in the cybernetwork. It also identifies the potential vulnerabilities of the existing regulatory framework, which are due to the failure to adopt a sufficiently ecosystemic approach. While the EU legislation on network and information security contains appropriate and proportionate risk-management measures that ensure the security of supply chains, the Union regulation of foreign-direct-investment screening instruments appears to neglect direct suppliers and service providers.

Is there a relationship between the conceptualisation of water and its regulation? There is no simple or obvious answer to this question. This paper contends that the Roman regulatory framework mirrored the fragmented conceptualisation of water that was dominant in pre-modern times. The paper aimsto show that water regulation is sensitive to the particular conceptualisation of water that a society adopts, which in turn reflects the specific historical period in which it is embedded. It also aims to show that there may be a way to deal with local hydrography differently from the paradigm currently promoted by the integrated water resource management framework. These considerations are not moot in today’s discussions on water resource management.

Legal change is usually seen as aprocess exogenous to law. In this article, we argue that laws, even if left untouched by the politicalprocess, decay of their own accord. The first part develops the argument in conceptual form. The second illustrates it through an example from European Union law. Specifically, it shows that the Court of ustice of the European Union's 'mandatory requirements'doctrine was gradually hollowed out.

In this article, we study spillovers in political trust between the national parliaments of 15 Member States and the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Central Bank in the period 2000–2015. We show that in most instances spillovers between the national parliaments and the European Commission and the European Parliament are bidirectional, asymmetric, and change over time and place. A corollary of these findings is that simultaneously achieving high level of trust in institutions at different levels of governance may require a deeper understanding of the complex inter-institutional relationships that exist in the EU multilevel governance setting.

In times of water shortage, it becomes increasingly relevant for policymakers to understand the existing relationships between different types of water use, so as to encourage efficient water management. This article makes use of yearly data on agricultural, industrial, and household water use in the Balkan countries of Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia. It does so to identify the potential interactions among these three categories of water use. Using a deterministic model based on differential equations, we provide an analysis of the interactions among these different sectors of water use for the period between 2008 and 2017. Results show that interactions among these different categories do not remain constant over periods of time, either across or within the countries analysed. We find that, for most countries, industrial and household water uses are more likely to be characterised by mutualism and competition, instead of a predator-prey relationship. Agricultural water use, on the other hand, takes on the role of predator against the other two.

In this article, we study spillovers in political trust between the national parliaments of 15 Member States and the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Central Bank in the period 2000–2015. We show that in most instances spillovers between the national parliaments and the European Commission and the European Parliament are bidirectional, asymmetric, and change over time and place. A corollary of these findings is that simultaneously achieving high level of trust in institutions at different levels of governance may require a deeper understanding of the complex inter-institutional relationships that exist in the EU multilevel governance setting.