With the combined experience of an abuse of power by the British monarch and an absence of executive authority under the Articles of Confederation, the Framers faced the challenge of establishing an executive authority of effective, yet limited, powers. It was generally agreed that the role of the executive was limited to the execution of the laws enacted by Congress, but the number of executives, the manner of selection, and length of tenure in office were considered important to restraining factions.

This is the first of six chapters on Arendt’s contributions to international legal theory. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt called for “a new law on earth,” but she never explains its contents; these six chapters do so. The present chapter begins with the issue of statelessness, one of her central preoccupations. Arendt believed that human rights law offers no real protection to the stateless, because they lack “the right to have rights,” by which she means the legal right of membership in a political community that protects their human dignity. The chapter analyzes “the right to have rights” and Arendt’s relational conception of human dignity. It then unpacks her views on state sovereignty, arguing that they resemble contemporary theories of sovereignty as responsibility. It explains what Arendt means by the “idea of humanity” reflected in international law, and why that idea requires courts to pass judgment on crimes against humanity.

When inner dialogue concerns moral choices, we call it “conscience” – dialogue with an internalized other who witnesses what we do and judges us. The chapter elaborates on this theme. It then turns to Arendt’s concern that the quest for inner harmony the motivation of morality may lead us to withdraw from the messy fight against evil for fear of getting our hands dirty. This chapter rebuts this argument. In the penultimate section of the chapter, it analyzes a well-known letter Arendt wrote to Gershom Scholem about her shift from “radical evil” to “banality of evil.” Arendt invokes several different conceptions of radical evil without marking the differences; distinguishing them yields an explanation of her shift and an account of banality of evil. A postscript offers a reading of Eichmann’s prison memoir to ask whether he did think morally, as he claims. The answer is no; seeing why reinforces Arendt’s diagnosis of Eichmann’s banality.

Defences play a critical role in tort law by allowing courts to balance individual rights with broader considerations of justice and social policy. For example, a person who acts in self-defence or under necessity may interfere with another’s rights in a way that would ordinarily be unlawful, but their actions may be justified by the circumstances. Similarly, defences like consent or statutory authorisation reflect the idea that liability should not arise where the plaintiff has permitted the interference or where the defendant is acting in accordance with the law. Without defences, the law would be overly rigid, punishing conduct that, in context, may be entirely reasonable or socially acceptable.

In this chapter we begin by discussing the distinction between a denial of liability and a defence. A denial of liability challenges whether the plaintiff has proven the elements of the tort, whereas a defence assumes that the elements are satisfied but provides a justification or excuse for the defendant’s actions.

The role of the judiciary as a check on the legislative and executive branches was believed necessary to the effectiveness of the horizontal separation of powers as a check on political factions. The nature of the judicial power was generally agreed to include the power of judicial review, but selection and tenure in office were thought to be important to limiting abuses of power.

This chapter examines concerns that AI might replace human judges, potentially compromising the right to a fair trial and other fundamental rule of law values. Rather than dismissing these concerns, we present a balanced analysis of the opportunities and challenges posed by AI-enhanced judicial decision-making. We explore this issue through the lens of Article 6 ECHR, examining potential applications, including case management, evidence collection, and legal interpretation. We emphasise the critical need for transparency and robust safeguards to protect due process rights. Equally significant are questions surrounding perceptions of justice and the maintenance of public trust and legitimacy in judicial proceedings. Even sophisticated AI systems require continuous oversight and human interpretive expertise to ensure that litigants and the broader public perceive the technology and judicial role as efficient, fair, and reliable. The chapter concludes by developing a typology of AI in judiciary – from judicial clerks to bureaucratic judges to R. Dworkin’s idealised ‘Judge Hercules’ – examining how AI can enhance traditional judicial capabilities and improve overall judicial performance.

This concluding chapter affirms that the integration of AI into courts is no longer a question of if, but how. Courts, as constitutional institutions, face profound normative questions: how does AI affect transparency, impartiality, and public trust? While AI improves court operations in many jurisdictions, it also risks eroding judicial values and the rule of law. Global examples show diverse adoption paths, yet shared challenges, such as AI opacity, lack of judicial AI literacy, and accountability gaps, demand coordinated oversight. Ultimately, a human-centred approach to judicial AI is essential. Rather than rejecting AI or accepting it uncritically, the authors advocate a balanced path that preserves the human and interpretive role of judging.

Judicial systems, long considered the most tradition-bound of public institutions, are at a critical juncture. From Strasbourg to São Paulo, from Delhi to Wellington, courts around the globe confront a shared challenge: how to navigate justice in an era redefined by artificial intelligence (AI). The question is no longer whether courts will engage with AI – but how, and on whose terms. This Handbook is the first global and comparative volume that systematically examines the use of AI and digital technologies in courts. It provides an interdisciplinary and cross-jurisdictional perspective on how judicial institutions are responding to the opportunities and risks posed by AI – from e-filing systems and predictive tools to ‘robo-judging’ and AI- supported decision-making. The forty-five contributions of the Handbook are arranged across ‘Part I: AI and Courts: Context and Normative Positions’, ‘Part II: AI and Courts: Disciplinary Perspectives’, ‘Part III: AI & Tech Challenges to Judicial Values’, and ‘Part IV: AI in Courts across the Globe: Jurisdictional Perspectives’, with each part offering a distinct analytical lens on justice and judging in the age of AI. The Handbook examines not just what AI can do for courts, but also what courts must do to ensure AI enhances, rather than erodes, their fundamental role in democratic societies.

By design, the judiciary is meant to be independent from politics and thereby free from factional pressures. The power to review legislative and executive as well as state government actions for constitutionality is essential to controlling abuses of power and democratic excesses that infringe on individual rights. While the federal courts have generally performed these responsibilities well, the politization of judicial appointments combined with liberal standing requirements and reliance on an assortment of balancing tests that require policy judgments have invited factional pressures in the form of lawsuits. At the same time, a presumption of constitutionality has served to counter the Framers’ constraints on democratic excess and the abuse of power.

‘What is an e-cigarette?’ This ostensibly simple question is central to the classification and regulation of these popular and contested devices. From their first development, e-cigarettes, which deliver nicotine via vaporisation of a liquid solution, were marketed and presented as like conventional cigarettes in crucial ways. Not only were they called electronic cigarettes, that is, a type of cigarette, but early models were designed to look like conventional cigarettes, including a tip which lit up when inhaled (Ozga et al., 2022). Moreover, the clouds of vapour they produced resembled smoke. Public health and tobacco control organisations quickly identified e-cigarettes as a threat to individual and population health. They emphasised the devices’ capacity to produce nicotine addiction (just like cigarettes), to undermine the denormalisation of smoking and to enable tobacco industry expansion (Bell & Keane, 2012; Berridge et al., 2023). The rapid rise of e-cigarette use (or vaping as it is now known) among young people has solidified and intensified this emphasis on harm. In contrast, supporters of their harm reduction potential highlight the fundamental difference of e-cigarettes from cigarettes: there is no combustion of tobacco involved in their use.

Chapter 1 revisits the establishment of the League of Nations by providing an in-depth analysis of the Paris Peace Conference, with a particular focus on the negotiation of the Covenant. The chapter also explores alternative conceptualizations of order from the social sciences, law, and history. The chapter argues that the new international order constituted by the League exhibited three common characteristics. Firstly, the League was largely shaped by the dominance of the United States and Britain during the negotiations. Secondly, the core decisional logic of the League’s institutional system was political, not legal. Thirdly, the League constituted a dual international order. On the one hand, and despite its universal rhetoric, it reproduced an imperial logic by dividing countries into civilized and uncivilized ones in new ways. However, in an attempt to prevent another world war, it also sought to facilitate disarmament and collective security, primarily in Europe. In doing so, it helped stabilize the European state system by addressing several key challenges, such as the status of Danzig, the Saar and Upper Silesia, and the protection of national minorities.

Chapter 2 focuses on the early history of the League Secretariat’s Legal Section, offering a rich sociography of the first craftsmen and women responsible for the League’s legal affairs, including later famous personalities such as Åke Hammarskjöld and Georges Kaeckenbeeck. It uncovers attempts by the Dutch Director of the Legal Section, Joost van Hamel, to push for a strengthening of international law with the aim of consolidating the position and competences of the League of Nations. The Legal Section thus promoted the establishment of a Permanent Court of International Justice with compulsory jurisdiction that should be closely linked to the League, a comprehensive programme for the codification of international law, and the obligatory registration of international treaties. However, Van Hamel’s campaigns met with resistance from leadership of the League Secretariat in the shape of Secretary-General Eric Drummond, who, assisted by Under-Secretary-General Dionisio Anzilotti, focused on not antagonizing the great powers in a situation where the League Secretariat was still relatively weak.

In Chapter 5 we started our consideration of the trespass torts, examining the nature of those torts and focusing on the three forms of trespass to the person: battery, assault and false imprisonment. In this chapter we conclude our examination of the trespass torts, focusing on the torts of trespass to land and trespass to goods. We also consider two closely related torts that involve an interference with personal property: conversion and detinue.

These complicated and technical areas of tort law have a special relationship with the law of property, so before you study these four torts (and before you read the cases in the area) you need to become familiar with some new concepts (discussed in section 6.1). This area of the law also contains special and sometimes highly technical definitions, some of which can go beyond the ordinary everyday meanings of words (eg ‘land’) and others that you may never have heard of before (eg ‘bailment’). This chapter provides definitions of these and associated terms.

This chapter is the first of three on Arendt’s moral philosophy, which focuses on moral judgment and its connection to thinking from another’s point of view. Arendt draws central ideas about morality from Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment – not because morality is an aesthetic matter, but because logical features Kant identified in aesthetic judgments are properties of moral judgments as well. Kant argued that judgments of beauty are objective, even though they cannot be proven; that they concern particulars, without relying on general rules, what Arendt calls “banisters”; and that we form moral judgments in common with others. Arendt maintains that the same is true of moral and political judgments. However, she also believes that “the invocation of allegedly moral principles for matters of everyday conduct is usually a fraud”; morality matters only “in times of crises.” This chapter disagrees, and argues that moral judgments “without banisters” matter throughout our moral life.