What is adaptive regulation? Why does it matter? How can it be measured, and how can regulation be made more adaptive? I answer each of these four questions.

Poor public understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) systems has become a matter of acute concern. Even when lacking expert technical knowledge, there are good democratic, economic and other societal reasons for ensuring that the public right to know operates effectively in the AI era. Yet, the trade-secret claims of AI providers and deployers are widely seen as a potential barrier to information disclosure rights and duties, which has provoked calls for areas of significant public interest to be carved out from the protections of trade-secrets law. Such transparency carve-outs are, however, likely to lead to uncertainty, over-inclusion and ineffectiveness. In this article, we argue that the dynamic, public-driven character of the right to know can be better secured through third-party participation and public-interest stewardship innovations in AI transparency.

Sermons preached by clerics have been largely neglected by scholars as a resource for the study of the history of English ecclesiastical law since the Reformation. Needless to say, scholarship has focused on the substantive and procedural ecclesiastical law found in the ecclesiastical legislation of Parliament, the canons passed by the convocations, the case law of the spiritual and temporal courts and the treatises of the civilian commentators. However, some historians of early modern England have studied the sermons delivered at the Inns of Court; but these studies have little to say about their preachers’ portrayal of the ecclesiastical law and its jurisprudence.1 Nevertheless, as we shall demonstrate, in each century since the Reformation, clergy in their preaching commonly treated legal matters or else used legal materials, including ecclesiastical law. The eighteenth century is no exception – and Thomas Sherlock (1678–1761) is an excellent example, whose function included as Master of the Temple (1704–1753) preaching to the common lawyers of Inner and Middle Temple. What follows deals with his life and career, law in his sermons (including jurisprudential concepts common to both the temporal and the spiritual law), and his legal thought in wider context – all at a time when the law was an inescapable part of the religious landscape, the limits on toleration, the constraints on Roman Catholics, and the provision for occasional conformity.2

In core government and for public tasks hugely sensitive for citizens such as migration governance in Europe, the use of AI systems developed and provided under contract gives migration authorities and private providers the power to keep their deployment secret and to refuse access to their key components. This article explores the complex interplay between public and private drivers of secrecy surrounding procured AI technologies in European migration governance, demonstrating how these forces converge and reinforce one another. It examines AI secrecy as an institutional framework shaped by both public and private law forms of secrecy, applying the spectrum of secrecy from deep (unknown unknowns) to shallow secrecy (known unknowns). Specifically, the paper looks into the sources of ‘political secrecy’ in migration and security authorities, highlighting how migration agencies and authorities keep the existence and use of AI systems from civil society and affected persons (such as third country nationals). Next, it analyses the legal frameworks that sustain AI vendors’ private secrecy, such as trade secrecy, secrecy in procurement procedures and agreements. In examining the various secrecy points, it scrutinises the limited impact of the AI Act in addressing the entrenched secrecy of AI deployment and development in governing migration. Finally, we condense the main takeaways and examine the broader repercussions of AI secrecy beyond the context of border control, touching upon its implications for a new equilibrium transcending the conventional public/private divide.

This article examines how majoritarian domination—as a constitutive feature of global democratic decline—is produced and entrenched through everyday judicial practices. Focusing on Assam, India, where denationalisation policies threaten millions—particularly Bengali-origin Muslims—within a political climate saturated by suspicion and hostility, it draws on an unprecedented empirical study of more than 1200 rulings of Assam’s High Court since 2009. The article develops the theoretical prism of legal work to show how judges encode majoritarian domination through both the exercise and withdrawal of judicial labour. Exercised judicial labour produces suspicion, visible in doctrines of evidence, reliability, and juridical truth that construct minority identities as presumptively fraudulent and foreign. Withdrawn judicial labour produces silence, as courts refuse to record, engage, or reason, rendering minorities legally invisible. The article advances a novel methodological and theoretical framework for understanding how courts routinise hierarchy, making authoritarianism both durable and legally sanctioned.

The Local Government Pension Scheme (“LGPS”) is typically administered by local authorities. Somewhat incongruously with its localised nature, or even recent pooling measures, there are attempts by those campaigning for boycott, divestment and sanctions (“BDS”) against the State of Israel to extend the reach of the town hall into the geopolitical arena. The decision in R. (on the Application of Palestine Solidarity Campaign Ltd.) v Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government [2020] UKSC 16 is seen by those BDS activists as providing a self-contained roadmap for LGPS divestments and boycotts. They are mistaken. This article considers the questions that remain to be addressed and the need for local government lawyers to look beyond local government law to the rules of equity. When the principles and rules of equity are violated in adopting divestment or exclusion policies, a court of equity will not hesitate to intervene. This is not equity’s incursion into the local government arena. For insofar as the conduct of administering authorities as fiduciaries, or quasi-trustees, is concerned, it was always there.