Literature in the legal humanities has begun to turn toward performance as a new site of analysis: as source, representation, and intervention. From Law and Performance (2018) to Law as Performance (2022), this belated comparison has garnered increasing traction. But methods from dance and performance studies, those wayward disciplines where corporeality supersedes the literary, still make only passing appearances. The repercussions, however, exceed the methodological toward the most material. This chapter underscores the consequences for this absence by centring the lone figure, “Naked Athena,” as a femme body in protest whose choreographic aesthetic of whiteness allowed particular flexibility under the law. Through her balletic performance of resistance, themes of discipline, elegance, and decorum swirl against the indecent, vulgar, and obscene labels afforded other protesters in the same scene. Motivated by this framing, I focus us toward identification of the publicly exposed body as righteously revealed or promiscuously pornographic, an aesthetic distinction theorized within art history as the difference between nakedness and nudity yet left ambiguous in legal terms.

Failure to adequately constrain factions is reflected most prominently in partisan gridlock in Congress, Congressional abdication of constitutional authorities and responsibilities, the political divide in the appointment of federal judges, the perception of partisan influence on judicial decisions, and the growth of the administrative state.

Efficiency is one of the most pervasive arguments in favour of implementing algorithms in courts of law. Across different legal contexts, many judiciaries find themselves pressured towards efficiency by growing caseloads and budgetary constraints. The purported speed of the use of AI can be seen as a solution to many existing problems, and even as a positive contribution to the value of access to justice. Through a case study of the Brazilian Judiciary’s strategy of the implementation of algorithms, the drive towards efficiency is examined and unpacked to reveal a series of tensions. First, there is a lack of conceptual clarity which leads to multiple, and sometimes competing, notions of efficiency, especially in light of the interpretation and interplay of legal principles. Moreover, the neutral appearance of efficiency can obscure political choices that cause substantive changes to the legal system without being submitted to democratic control. In this sense, a more nuanced view of efficiency as a judicial value is necessary, where it can be both contested and balanced against other core judicial values, and also seen as directional and at the service of specific ends of law.

The decline of the classical doctrine of civil war in state practice began right after the American Civil War, when the concept of belligerent recognition had barely been coined in the legal literature. There were several reasons for this. First, after the abolition of privateers in the 1856 Declaration of Paris, the maritime powers had essentially deprived future insurgents of their primary weapon at sea, the privateer. Second, developments in the law of neutrality after the Geneva arbitration raised the prospect of state responsibility towards belligerents for neutral states. Third, as indeterminate pragmatism became a diplomatic norm, new legal vocabularies began to develop that were seemingly independent of questions of formal recognition. New, deliberately ambiguous approaches to recognition emerged, especially in the Latin American insurgencies, such as the recognition of insurgency doctrine.

Nuisance is a tort that responds to interferences with the use and enjoyment of land, or with rights shared by the community at large. It is a flexible cause of action, capable of addressing diverse harms such as smoke, noise, odours and obstruction of access to public places. Although often categorised under tort law, nuisance has long straddled the boundaries between private law, public law and regulatory regimes.

In modern legal systems, the boundaries of nuisance are increasingly shaped by legislation. These types of legislative regime may limit the scope of nuisance by authorising certain conduct, prescribing alternative remedies or displacing common law actions altogether. As a result, the availability and utility of nuisance claims often depend on navigating the complex interface between common law and statutory regulation.

This chapter primarily focuses on the tort of private nuisance, but it also provides a brief overview of the tort of public nuisance.

The book develops the synergies between Islamic Law, Environmental Law, and Corporate Social Responsibility to situate the concern of environmental degradation looking at regional, transboundary and global disputes between the state, corporate actors, and stakeholders. This book will lay the foundations of Islamic thought related to environmental protection, air quality control, and water rights. Through the lens of environmental law, the work will broaden the framework for Islamic law and critique political and economic dynamics in Muslim-majority countries that give rise to increased levels of environmental toxicity, hazardous waste, water stress, and rampant extractivism. This collection examines these concerns in terms of rigidities and interdependencies, between competing claims to resources, rights and responsibilities, strategy and governance, between state and corporate actors, and the implications for equity and the common good over the long term. Islam and Environmental Law is simultaneously a classical legal framework and contemporary approach for environmental protection, human rights, and an earth-centered jurisprudence.

The day after launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, in a public speech addressed to multiple audiences, Putin called for the ‘overthrow’ of the Ukrainian government, which he labelled a ‘gang of narcomany (‘drug addicts’) and neo-Nazis’ (Roth, 2022). We will return to the significance of this speech later; here we would add to the picture that after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, in all territories under Russian occupation, opioid agonist therapy (OAT) programmes were immediately shut down, reflecting their status as being also banned in Russia.

Research on judicial use of AI has mainly focused on general attitudes toward algorithmic decision-making, leaving open the question of how policy choices shape public perceptions of the courts. This chapter addresses this gap through a comparative analysis of judicial AI policies across four major jurisdictions: the EU, UK, US, and China. We identify three key dimensions along which these approaches differ: the choice between hard and soft law, transparency requirements, and restrictions on substantive versus administrative use. Drawing on insights from rational choice theory and behavioural economics, we analyse how each regulatory choice might influence public trust and legitimacy. Our analysis suggests that the effectiveness of different approaches likely depends on institutional fit, including the pre-existing legal culture, levels of trust in courts and technology, and broader societal attitudes toward automation. These findings help explain the emergence of divergent regulatory approaches across jurisdictions and offer insights for policy-makers seeking to maintain public confidence in the courts while integrating AI into judicial systems.

Law, with its seemingly endless paperwork, is almost overwhelmingly textual. From contracts to briefs to opinions to treatises, law lives in its texts. Simultaneously, law requires performances to produce authenticity and authority. Witness testimonies, pleadings, and trials all enact the law through participants’ bodies. There is no law without text. There is no law without performance. Legal texts and performances produce and reproduce each other: Legal texts record or script legal performances; legal performances generate or stage legal texts. Because law entwines text and performance, this chapter considers the law’s material textuality and its theatricality in tandem by probing how law brings performance to book. Drawing on theater studies and the history of dramatic texts, I offer methods for reading legal texts as scripts that precede or follow legal performances. Examples from Anglo-American law reveal that legal documents’ typographical conventions uncover law’s reliance on performance and its anxiety about deviating from textuality. More sophisticated legal attention to the relationship between text and performance would better serve law and, more importantly, justice.

Technology has been the bedrock of human existence from time immemorial as every aspect of human life is dependent on one form of technology or the other for their satisfaction. The desire to improve the quality of life and living had induced man to continually invent and innovate. The global economy has become a knowledge economy and the bedrock on which the river of the knowledge economy flows is intellectual property and allied rights. A country’s actualisation of its vision of industrialisation and attendant sustainable development changes as the role of man changes in every era and stage of technology based on such country’s efforts at a particular period to develop its frontiers of intellectual property towards meeting the dynamics of technology. With increased technology and innovation employed in manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation comes environmental pollution and degradation. Many traditional societies in Nigeria fostered strong belief systems and social norms which encouraged or even enforced limits to exploitation of biological resources. These traditional practices are being eroded by several factors. This chapter appraises the IPR, traditional knowledge systems and Islamic law perspective in the protection and preservation of the environment.

The American Civil War (1861–1865) represents the high-water mark in the history of the classical doctrine of civil war. The war was fought on an unprecedented scale on land and at sea, and its global repercussions led to unavoidable diplomatic confrontations between the belligerents and neutral foreign powers unlike ever before. Through the key documents and cases of the conflict, this chapter illustrates how the thoroughly legalistic civil war came to be the culmination of the classical doctrine, and how it led to the coining of ‘recognition of belligerency’, a core concept of the mature doctrine of civil war. The chapter also explores the final breakthrough of international arbitration and state responsibility as a response to disputes raised by civil wars in this period, and traces the canonisation of these new developments in jurisprudence in America and in Europe.

There is a deep scepticism concerning the idea that AI should be used in the making of judicial decisions. There are normative risks such as inaccuracy and a lack of explainability and accountability, and there are sociological risks to public trust in the judicial system. Prominent legal instruments such as the EU AI Act, Vilnius Convention, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) seek to set some clear guardrails around the use of AI in judicial decision-making, but face two problems. First, they underappreciate the Collingridge dilemma, in which premature intervention risks over-regulation, while belated intervention risks under-regulation. Second, there is a misplaced faith in the power of legal obligations to provide sufficient (and enforceable) guidance. This chapter asks what model of governance should be adopted for the use of AI in courts. In doing so, it undertakes a survey of the current status and evolution of AI technology in courts, examines how we should evaluate risks, and considers competing governance models. It argues that a model of anticipatory governance, often suitable for long and complex problems, should be adopted, and some of the implications are discussed.

Chapter 10 demonstrates that a Latin American regional bloc with a common agenda focused on international legal reform emerged in the League of Nations during the 1920s and that the origins of this bloc can be traced to an important but little-known campaign spearheaded by the Uruguayan diplomat Enrique Buero. Correspondence from Buero’s recently uncovered private archives reveals the domestic, international, and bureaucratic political obstacles that had to be overcome in order to forge a coalition in Geneva. Ultimately, Uruguay and Latin America’s pivot to the League created leverage for legal reform regarding the use of force and diplomatic protection across multiple international organizations.

Arendt asks, “Is our ability to judge, to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly, dependent upon our faculty of thought?” Her answer is yes, and this chapter argues that this thinking–judging connection is central to her moral philosophy. She derives the connection indirectly, by reflecting on three Socratic propositions: that thinking consists in the back and forth of inner dialogue; that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it; and that wrongdoing leads to inner disharmony. The chapter examines these, and from this examination it reconstructs Arendt’s argument for the thinking–judging connection. The chapter connects Arendt's and Kant's conception of “enlarged thinking” with Adam Smith’s sympathy-based moral theory. It spells out additional implications that Arendt never drew explicitly, and concludes by comparing Arendt’s views with those of Stuart Hampshire, who believes that inner conflict is in fact “the best condition of mankind,” contrary to the Socratic and Aristotelian moral psychology – an important corrective that requires modification to Arendt’s view.