This paper explores changes in the commissioning, contracting and provision of NHS-funded cataract surgery in England over the last decade, focusing on the growing role of independent sector providers (ISPs). In recent years, there has been a dramatic rise in NHS-funded cataract surgery (from almost 417,000 cases in 2018/19 to about 650,000 in 2023/24) with the ISP share increasing from 22 to 57 per cent. A mixed-methods approach was employed, combining quantitative analysis of over 4.6 million NHS-funded hospital admissions for cataract surgery (2013–2024) and qualitative interviews with senior NHS and ISP stakeholders. Interviews were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The shift to ISPs was largely unplanned, driven by long NHS waiting lists, favourable payment tariffs, and low barriers to entry for new providers. ISPs’ involvement has contributed to reduced waiting times and improved productivity, potentially due to specialised infrastructure and incentive structures. However, concerns exist about contract management, service quality, and value for money. The study highlights the need for improved service commissioning, tariff reform, stronger contractual oversight, and effective monitoring to ensure quality and value. These findings have broader implications for healthcare systems balancing competition, patient choice, and public–private delivery models in elective care.

Recent US policy changes, including abortion bans and reductions to social safety nets, have intensified structural pressures on reproductive decision-making. Research has examined interpersonal and clinical forms of reproductive coercion, but legal and policy forces remain undertheorized. This commentary introduces and defines sociolegal reproductive coercion as occurring when individuals feel pressured or constrained in their reproductive choices due to legal and policy landscapes that are reinforced and reified by social and cultural forces. These pressures operate collectively to make certain options, such as long-acting reversible contraception, feel obligatory even when undesired, by amplifying risks associated with pregnancy, abortion, and parenting. Sociolegal coercion interacts with clinical practice, shaping provider counseling and narrowing perceived options, and disproportionately affects marginalized communities already subject to systemic inequities. We situate this construct within existing scholarship on constrained choice and social control, propose a conceptual framework, and outline implications for research, clinical care, and policy. Recognizing sociolegal reproductive coercion is critical for understanding how health policy and sociocultural dynamics jointly constrain autonomy and for informing reforms that advance reproductive justice in a post-Roe landscape.

This article examines national human rights institutions (NHRIs) as part of the evolving fourth-branch considerations within contemporary constitutionalism. Critically engaging with recent scholarship on fourth-branch institutions, it argues that, in general, NHRIs satisfy the criteria of double constitutionalization – as constitutionally entrenched entities and as protectors of constitutional rights. Through comparative analysis of ombuds institutions and human rights commissions, the article evaluates their mandate and functions against the existing criteria for fourth-branch actorness, particularly focusing on determining norm breaches and interpreting norms. The article argues that while NHRIs’ constitutional design and unique international peer review accreditation suggest significant independence, their de facto performance often depends on volatile political and institutional environments. The empirical discussion in the article exposes how appointment procedures, budgetary control and political capture can undermine their constitutional promise. The article concludes that NHRIs occupy a liminal constitutional space – formally insulated from party politics but deeply implicated in high politics – and that their credibility rests on maintaining a precarious balance between independence and accountability. In doing so, it advances the theoretical and comparative understanding of NHRIs as core protectors of constitutional rights within the broader fourth-branch paradigm.

Pain is often portrayed as the guardian of life. Unpleasant sensations are undisputedly in the service of the self-preservation of living beings. However, it is questionable whether the first sensations in evolution must have been those of pain. The emergence of a new property cannot be derived from the function that the property has once it is there. In evolution, new properties are not produced by needs (this would be teleological thinking), but by mutations and selection. Accordingly, rather than pain, the first sensation of an early creature may just as well have been a neutral (or pleasant) sensation. Furthermore, it is conceivable that the self-preservation of early organisms and evolutionarily old and successful species (such as bacteria or jellyfish) is achieved by biochemical processes without the involvement of consciousness. The individuals of evolutionarily very old extant species may still have a kind of luxury primitive consciousness (restricted to neutral or pleasant sensations) hovering above organismal needs. This has ramifications as regards argumentative standards of antinatalist moral theory, for example.

In this study, we provide a first-of-its-kind exploration of how strategic messaging by U.S. Attorneys changes during a partisan transition. We leverage original data from United States Attorney’s Office press releases that are used to inform the public about important case developments, offering a window into federal prosecutorial priorities and narratives. Using textual analysis, we examine how these political communications changed in the turnover from the Biden administration to the second Trump administration. Then, we utilize criminal case processing data to evaluate whether the content of press releases tracks with U.S. Attorney charging decisions.

This article presents five arguments against the idea that non-sentience is a sufficient condition for not considering abortion an immoral act: the formal paradox argument, the third-person argument, the abortionist status argument, the implicit antinatalist premise argument, and the manipulation argument. These five arguments do not disqualify pro-abortion approaches that do not use the element of non-sentience but suggest that it would be appropriate for these approaches to also consider them. The existence of these other pro-abortion arguments shows that non-sentience is not a necessary condition either for trying to show that abortion is not immoral.

Collective crises – such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and pandemics – profoundly disrupt the symbolic and social frameworks that normally sustain everyday life. Sociological research has long shown that such crises often trigger waves of solidarity, communication, and collective mobilization. However, the psychological forces driving these social dynamics remain insufficiently understood. This article addresses this gap by proposing that anxiety and the social sharing of emotion constitute central psychosocial mechanisms underlying collective responses to crisis. Drawing on the theoretical framework of the social sharing of emotion and integrating empirical findings from studies conducted in interpersonal contexts, public gatherings, and digital communication environments, we examine how emotional responses shape the cognitive and social processes that unfold after disruptive events. We argue that the diffuse anxiety generated by collective crises stimulates rumination, information seeking, and extensive interpersonal communication. Through repeated social sharing, emotions propagate across social networks, synchronizing emotional experience and fostering social cohesion. Evidence from laboratory studies, field research, and large-scale analyses of digital communication demonstrates that these processes can reinforce collective beliefs, support social solidarity, and contribute to the reconstruction of meaning after disruption. In this perspective, emotional turbulence following collective crises, far from reflecting social disorganization, represents a fundamental mechanism through which societies transform emotional reactions into shared knowledge, collective memory, and renewed social cohesion.

This article examines how the identification and assessment (I&A) of adverse environmental impacts (AEI) within corporate value-chain due diligence (VCDD) norms under the Guidelines of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is normatively designed, and how it can be distinguished from similar legal requirements that already bind corporations to perform environmental impact assessments (EIAs). Through a systematic analysis of specific instances of National Contact Points (NCPs), the article investigates how these expectations have been interpreted and applied in practice in environmental disputes raising claims concerning the I&A due diligence stage. The findings highlight inconsistencies in how NCPs handle such claims and showcase the interpretative divergences concerning the ways in which they perceive the interplay between these VCDD expectations and other host-state legal requirements that bind corporations to conduct assessments of environmental impacts. Based on the analysis, the article then reflects on the specificities of I&A expectations, as well as on avenues for future research. The research argues that VCDD requirements for corporations to identify and assess adverse environmental impacts should be interpreted as setting independent normative commands that warrant a specific compliance assessment. The article concludes by issuing recommendations concerning the ways in which I&A expectations should be interpreted in practice to avoid blurring the boundaries between two distinct layers of home- and host-state regulation.

Revolving door research on government lawyers moving into the private sector shows multiple potential outcomes. Such lawyers may utilize connections in government to secure special favors for their new clients, in a manner consistent with regulatory capture (the Quid Pro Quo Hypothesis). Conversely, they may utilize their knowledge and expertise to improve the regulatory compliance of their clients (the Regulatory Schooling Hypothesis). I examine these hypotheses in the context of state attorneys general (state AGs) and multi-state litigation. Multi-state litigation is an important and prominent form of state and federal regulation. Law firms have responded by creating “State AG Practices,” which help companies cope with the regulatory threat presented by state AGs. I utilize sixteen semi-structured interviews, career data of 194 state AGs, and legal media secondary sources to analyze whether AGs move through the revolving door in order to improve regulatory compliance or facilitate regulatory capture. Contrary to some media accounts, former AGs primarily bring expertise, rather than government connections, to the private sector, but using this expertise is often easier when well-known former colleagues are across the negotiating table.

This study explores the concept of ‘destituent power’ and ‘recall procedures’, highlighting the relevance of philosophical thought for global constitutionalism and democratic oversight. Drawing on Paul Ricœur’s notions of ‘vigilance’ and the ‘political paradox’ (1957), I argue that destituent power offers an important mechanism for maintaining accountability within constitutional systems. The paper brings political philosophy into dialogue with an empirical constitutional study of three East Asian countries – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. These non-Western experiences clarify the practical dynamics of destituent power and bring to light innovative, yet little-known, recall mechanisms that carry significance for global constitutionalism.

This paper addresses a well-worn topic: originalism, the theory that judges should interpret the U.S. Constitution in a manner consistent with the intent of its framers. I am interested in the real-world effects of originalism. The primary effect advanced by originalists is the tendency of the approach to constrain the discretion of judges. However, I identify another effect of originalism: the creation of official histories, a practice that imposes a hidden tax on society. Another question I consider is whether originalism should be considered a methodology of analyzing the law or a perspective on the law; I argue that originalism is closer to a perspective than a methodology.

The use of restraint in hospital settings is divisive, and internationally there are calls for its elimination. However, this is at odds with the experience of many hospital staff, who consider restraint, at times, a “necessary evil”. In this paper, we explore the definition of restraint and potential ethical justifications for its use. We argue that the current ethical literature employs two definitions of restraint — outcome-oriented and intent-oriented — neither of which successfully captures all ethically relevant features of the practice. We propose a new conceptualization of restraint which centers on the number of individuals impacted by an act of patient restraint — a continuum between therapeutic restraint and public-safety restraint. Understood in this way, neither the principlist nor human rights frameworks that dominate the current literature are appropriate for assessing the ethical legitimacy of restraint. We suggest that, given the similarities between restraint and public health interventions, the use of public health ethics principles to consider the ethical justifiability of restraint in hospitals is a potentially productive way forward in this controversial area.

Initiatives protecting wild animal health, including vaccination campaigns, medical treatments, and parasite control programs, have been implemented for decades. Their goal has been to safeguard human well-being, as well as to further conservationist goals. This paper argues that the well-being of wild animals, considered as sentient individuals, should be another crucial reason to expand these measures. Rather than treating animal health in a purely instrumental manner, this perspective aligns more closely with the ethos of the One Health paradigm. The paper presents examples of existing programs that benefit wild animals and could be broadened based on this idea. Next, it explains the kind of cross-disciplinary research framework—integrating animal welfare science, ecology, and other disciplines—needed to successfully develop effective ways to help wild animals. It then argues that the reasons to protect wild animal health also apply in the case of other ways to help wild animals. This is relevant especially in light of the very large scale of wild animal suffering.

According to the Mental Capacity Act 2005, P’s family are to be afforded a consultee role in a best interests decision. That is, they are to be involved in decisions but are not empowered to act as a substitute decision maker. However, in practice, healthcare professionals can struggle to set clear boundaries where families are insistent on more active treatment. The Best Interests in Renal Dialysis Study explored the making of best interests decisions in the context of adult kidney care in England. Interviewing healthcare professionals – both doctors and nurses – we found that it is not uncommon for the ‘path of least resistance’ to be pursued in best interests decisions where the family takes a strong position. Out of a fear of legal action and a desire to maintain a working relationship, healthcare professionals will sometimes compromise in providing care that they do not consider to be in P’s best interests to appease the family. This is seemingly at odds with the requirements of the Mental Capacity Act 2005, particularly where it goes as far as to prove harmful to P. Drawing on Margalit’s conception of rotten compromise, we argue that this form of rotten medical compromise undermines the law’s recognised P-centricity.