Over the last half century, there have been developments within European human rights law which have afforded protection to those undergoing gender reassignment. This chapter traces this development, centred around what the law referred to as ‘transsexualism’, understood in distinctly medical terms. The first major development came with the expansion of sex-based discrimination protections to also protect those who were proposing to undergo, who were undergoing or who have undergone medical procedures related to gender reassignment. This expansion of anti-discrimination protections relied on comparators of the same biological sex not undergoing reassignment, rather than altering the core meaning of sex in domestic law. Eventually, however, human rights law developed to protect a right to gender recognition in the landmark case of Goodwin, where the European Court of Human Rights held that denial of legal gender recognition from post-operative transsexuals violated their right to private life. Parliament responded by enacting the Gender Recognition Act 2004, providing a mechanism to change one’s legal sex but also setting clear limits on the scope and extent of that change, including where it would conflict with the purposes of other legislation.

This chapter focuses on the policy impact of the judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union. It defines policy impact as the ability of the Court to produce change in the political domain. The chapter analyses this impact across two different dimensions: horizontal and vertical. The horizontal dimension looks at the impact of the Court’s rulings on European Union policies, that is, to what extent the judgments of the Court impact the policy output of the European Union legislator. The vertical dimension focuses on the impact of the Court’s judgments on Member States’ legal orders. This is understood broadly as encompassing change as showing through in legislation, case law, policies, and administrative decisions. The chapter begins by developing a conceptual framework to delimitate what we understand as policy impact. It then systematically reviews the existing literature in this area to systematise existing knowledge and identify lacunas, shortcomings and challenges. Finally, it proposes, based on the strengths and weaknesses of this literature, a new way for thinking about how to empirically study the policy impact of the Court.

This chapter offers an overview of the varieties of data that are used in EU law scholarship alongside an overview of the associate research methods employed to analyse it. Based on a systematic literature review of 248 academic articles in the area of EU law and EU courts specifically, it addresses two questions: first, what data sources and methods are the most prevalent in EU law? Second, what are the advantages and pitfalls of different data sources and research methods and how can an understanding of these improve the study of EU law? Finally, the chapter seeks to stimulate a critical discussion of the extent to which emerging and non-traditional data sources both complement and challenge the traditional understandings of what counts as law. The chapter starts with an overview of the most commonly used source of data in EU legal research on courts – courts’ case law – before turning to other, less traditional sources of data in EU law such as interview and survey data, and data based on official statistics, newspapers, and courts’ websites.

This Chapter explores how consent to sexual activity can be vitiated for the purposes of sexual offences where the defendant has engaged in an operative deception as to biological sex. It offers a defence of the current legal doctrine, drawing upon Chloë Kennedy’s theory of consent vitiation by identity non-recognition. The central argument is that the current law correctly identifies that homosexual sexual activity is of a different sexual nature to heterosexual activity and is of central importance to the formation of sexual orientation and sexual identity, particularly for lesbians and gay men. An operative deception as to biological sex is sufficiently proximate to the sexual nature of the activity in question that it is capable of vitiating consent. In contrast, Alex Sharpe argues that the privacy of transgender people should take precedence over the sexual integrity of others and that sexual boundaries based on biological sex are transphobic and prejudiced, equivalent to racism. For this reason, Sharpe argues that transgender people should be immune to the criminal law of sex by deception as to sex. The chapter concludes by critiquing this view and defending the importance of sexual orientation for the freedom and capacity of people to choose to engage in sexual activity.

The fifth chapter turns to war and peace. The role of England’s poor relief system in assisting war efforts has been suggested by scholars. This chapter argues that were it not for the development of settlement laws, one can only wonder whether the ‘fiscal-military state’ would have enjoyed such support. The chapter shows how the responsibilities of the parish officer expanded to assist the fiscal-military state, and the roles taken by the county administration. It also explains how the New Militia, established at the start of the Seven Years’ War, relied on the parish’s administrative apparatus and employed the settlement legislation in sophisticated ways. However, as time went by complexities arose. The greater the needs of recruitment and disbandment, the more the eighteenth-century state relied on the mechanisms of parish settlement; at the same time, military needs also led to partial suspension of the settlement laws.

Chapter 4 focuses on the impact of the settlement laws on local community life. A rare personal diary by a Sussex village shopkeeper (1754–1765) records his activity as a parish officer and helps to paint a detailed canvas, and to connect the history of parish administration with studies of gender and the social order. This chapter also returns to the legal framework to explore further the responsibilities of the overseer of the poor and the parish vestry.

Chapter 10 examines whether states bear duties of international cooperation with respect to forced migration, including the mass displacement caused by Myanmar’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against its Rohingya Muslim minority. It makes the case that the international community has accepted the protection of forced migrants as a common concern of humanity under the community’s joint stewardship.

This chapter explores how the law has identified the biological sex of an individual where it is indeterminate or contested. Legal systems with highly ridged sex-based rules developed social and legal mechanisms for authoritatively determining what sex a person was where this was unclear. The traditional approach of the law was to categorise the individual in question by reference to which sex was more ‘predominate’, following a crude assessment of physiology. The classification of sex has evolved significantly since then, with the House of Lords identifying a precise list of ‘indicia of human sex’. In determining biological sex, the law looks for congruence between a person’s chromosomes, gonads and genitals at birth. If there is congruence, then the law will treat that person as biologically male or female as the case may be. If there is incongruence between the physiological factors, that person is recognised as having a DSD and is subject to a separate legal analysis which looks to further factors to determine what sex an individual is classed as, including social upbringing and self-perception. Our law does not conflate issues of sexual development with issues of gender identity. The default position in our law is that a transgender person is legally recognised as being of their biological sex, regardless of medical intervention.

Chapter 6, “Envisioning a Pluriversal Governance: Scientific and Indigenous Ontologies in the Amazon”, examines the prospects for including scientific and indigenous ontologies in the international governance of the Amazon. The Chapter assesses the different governance models for enlarging ecological democracy and having nature’s interests represented in political spaces. For this aim, it analyzes the most prominent scientific bodies dealing with the climate emergency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), compared to the Science Panel for the Amazon (SPA), the first scientist platform dedicated to the largest rainforest in the world. The Chapter proposes enlarging ecological democracy under a pluriversal governance in which nation-states, scientists, and Indigenous peoples would share the political stage to negotiate their different worldviews and the authority to represent their own natural worlds. This might trigger ontological clashes, but also the possibility of creating ontological coalitions around indigenous rights, the protection of nature, and the appropriate means to deal with the climate crisis in the basin.