The discipline of law is unique as a body of knowledge. It is both theoretical and applied. Abstract and concrete. Moral and amoral. Just and cruel. And at its heart is a moment in which the abstract is translated into concrete action, a process that depends on theoretical application to the physical world. That application is linked to the art of problem solving. Human beings are problem-solving animals. All of us possess skills and experiences that enable us to engage with obstacles and problems in life. A problem is characterised by some event, experience or situation where our usual methods of operating and achieving desired ends are slowed down, prevented from operating or simply no longer work in that environment. Failure to successfully navigate a problem creates a crisis, during which we engage in different forms of conduct and thinking to find a resolution. Crises operate on a spectrum. Some are life- threatening. Some are innocuous. But the underlying dynamic is much the same. Problem solving is an adaptive and evolved trait that humans share with other animals and that enables us to survive in changing environments.

This chapter systematizes the argument that the Court should and can calibrate its proportionality test to the infrastructural dimension of the populist attack on democratic and rule of law provisions – and, as such, operate the test as ‘anti-populist detector and responder’. While the general argument is all stages of proportionality aims at enhancing deliberation, representation and the rule of law in populist context, the specific argument is Court should revise its approach to the second stage of the proportionality assessment, the purpose or ‘legitimate aim’ of the interference, by holistically inferentially screening a wider spectrum of potential infrastructural erosion.

In 1981, Britain’s Conservative government endorsed the execution of Seymour Thomas in Belize, shortly before the nation’s independence. This decision was consistent with support among sections of the Conservative Party for the resumption of hanging in the UK, but Thomas would be the last person executed in a British Dependent Territory. This chapter explores the reasons why Britain’s tolerance of the Dependent Territories death penalty became difficult to sustain over subsequent years. They included calls for abolition from governors who were uncomfortable administering the prerogative of mercy; an increasingly interventionist British approach to Dependent Territories governance in response to drug trafficking and corruption; abolitionist trends in international law and European allies’ foreign policies and repeated votes by MPs against the reintroduction of the death penalty in Britain. An increase in violent crime, coupled with the Caribbean’s booming tourist industry, also increased the likelihood of foreign nationals’ involvement in capital cases and threatened to cast an unflattering international spotlight on British complicity in capital punishment.

The integration of technology into human rights practice in Latin America has been marked by scepticism and practical challenges. This chapter traces the origins of technology’s intersection with human rights in the region, beginning in the late 1980s in the Southern Cone, as grassroots actors responded to state repression and creatively used technology to document violations. It explores the bundle of risks and opportunities that human rights practitioners faced when using technology in creative ways to confront human rights challenges. It identifies three main obstacles to integration: a legal-centric approach to human rights, a language barrier given the English-language predominance in the tech sector, and wariness of technology. The text highlights some breakthroughs, deriving from bottom-up adoption of technology, and provides discrete examples of local innovation. The chapter concludes by stressing the ongoing need to adapt and better harness technological advances in Latin America while also learning from local experiences.

While victim participation in transitional justice has often been subject to critique, victim movements have also actively expanded and reshaped the field, using its framework to advance increasingly diverse justice struggles. This introductory chapter adopts the lens of ‘victims-as-protagonists’, emphasizing the central role that victim-survivors have played in shaping transitional justice from its inception. It explores the macro-level dynamics that have amplified focus on victims’ roles in scholarship and policy, and maps key strands of existing literature. Against this backdrop, the chapter introduces a new conceptual framework of ‘generations of victim participation’, offering a more comprehensive account of how victims’ agency has shifted throughout three discernible phases: from grassroots activism, to institutional participation, and multi-faceted forms of resistance. Rather than presenting a linear progression, this framework foregrounds the overlapping and intersecting strategies through which victims pursue justice today, and how this calls for a rethinking of transitional justice’s boundaries and methodologies.

The most significant late twentieth-century executions in a British Dependent Territory occurred in 1977 when Erskine Burrows and Larry Tacklyn were hanged in Bermuda for a series of politically motivated murders. While previous studies have argued that British ministers could readily have dispensed with the Creech Jones doctrine and prevented these executions, Chapter 5 makes the case that, for political and constitutional reasons, this was not a straightforward proposition, but nor was abandoning Creech Jones a necessary precondition for commuting the death sentences. It further argues that from a long-term perspective, the Bermuda executions were an anomaly rather than a turning point in British death penalty policy. Colonial capital punishment continued to operate into the 1980s much as it had since British abolition, with the British government working behind the scenes to prevent most executions and tolerating periodic political crises over controversial death sentences for fear that advocating abolition would have still more damaging repercussions.

Writing up your answer is shaped by context. As a student, you are often called upon to answer a problem question in a specific format, such as a memorandum or letter of advice, with the added complication of a word limit. Students are often not aware that the requirement to write in a particular manner, with specific limits, is a pedagogical tool intended to reflect the kinds of documents used in practice, along with the need to strike a balance between accuracy and brevity. Being able to write sharply is an important skill in practice. Practitioners are also restricted by context. By now you should have a sense that the process is a complex one, and part of the art of lawyering is being able to translate complexity in ways that different audiences need to understand the situation. A person without legal training needs to have things explained as simply as possible. A practitioner will need the necessary detail, but keep in mind that time is money, and verbose correspondence is unnecessary and not appreciated. A barrister will need all the relevant information presented in such a way that the issues and complexities are clear and sharply identified.

The Directive on Takeover Bids was almost not adopted and has since not been subject to reform, despite not having produced the harmonisation it intended. The chapter contends that this is because the Directive covers very different areas of law, where only some are suitable for harmonisation. The chapter analyses these differences to suggest a possible route for a reformed Directive that may provide actual harmonisation of the areas where such harmonisation is required.

This concluding chapter brings the separate lines of inquiry developed throughout this book together to present a holistic analytical framework for analysing the relationship between market regulation and private law within the EU multilevel system of governance and beyond. This novel framework sets out three main models of this relationship – separation, substitution, and complementarity – and elucidates their key strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on these findings, the chapter shows how regulatory discourse and traditional private law discourse can mutually influence each other in a way that enables reconciliation between them, and provides a road map to such reconciliation in standard-setting and enforcement. It suggests that public regulation of private law relationships and traditional private law should be seen as two sides of the same coin that can be aligned with each other. To reconcile those two forms of legal discourse is to enable them to work in tandem, while acknowledging their distinctive characteristics and, where necessary, making trade-offs between the competing values that underpin them. While private law discourse should be receptive to the public interest–driven logic of market regulation, regulatory discourse should be receptive to the relational logic of traditional private law.

This chapter explores how Estonia’s self-perception evolved in relation to Europe during the Soviet years and the re-establishment of its independence. It focuses on co-articulating the ‘Soviet question’ with the ‘European question’, examining how decades of Soviet rule impacted the understanding of Europe and Europeanness in Estonian national imaginaries. This analysis considers various factors, including the understanding of Europeanness before the Soviet era, the Soviet colonial matrix of power, changes within the USSR, the orientalization of Eastern Europe in West-European imaginaries and the influence of Soviet state-promoted ideologies on local cultural imaginaries. To address these complex issues, a multi-scalar understanding of social phenomena is employed. From this perspective, Estonia’s geopolitical shift from the Soviet West to the European East during its re-establishment can be seen as a shift in the geopolitical scale-system. Generally, attention to scale as a ‘tool for bounding space at different geographical resolutions’ allows us to perceive historical conditions as complexly multiscalar. A multiscalar approach reveals how meaning-making unfolds through interactions across different scales of sociopolitical realities and imaginaries, showing how local, regional and global scales formed complex and dynamic systems of interdependency in Soviet-era Estonia.

The subject of this chapter is takeover bids on firms with share classes with different voting rights or loyalty shares. In the chapter we first describe the general development regarding such structures, as well as the current understanding of multiple-vote share structures in corporate governance and economic research. We then present an overview of the particular takeover issues arising when the target company has a multiple-vote share or loyalty structure drawing on national experiences, including whether a premium should be allowed for multiple-vote shares, whether different forms of considerations should be allowed for different share classes, whether a partial bid should be allowed on a single share class, and whether the effects of vote changes in a firm with MV or loyalty shares could trigger the duty to launch a mandatory bid.

This chapter analyzes two countries where criminal economies have thrived in marginalized urban communities, yet only Brazil experiences localized criminal wars while Argentina faces limited violence. The chapter explains how the Brazilian military dictatorship developed a counterinsurgent state with an extensive intelligence and repressive apparatus that allowed its specialists in violence’s involvement in illicit economies. The first democratic government failed to hold authoritarian specialists in violence accountable, and validated a military-era amnesty law, enabling the survival of the counterinsurgent state. Authoritarian security forces adapted counterinsurgency practices to launch wars on crime, sold protection to gangs, or controlled illicit markets, turning Brazil into one of the world’s most violent democracies. The chapter then discusses the development of Argentina’s counterinsurgent state. It analyzes the role of the security apparatus in developing a clandestine carceral system to perpetrate gross human right violations and the participation of authoritarian specialists in violence in illicit markets in dictatorship. After transitioning to democracy, Argentina’s first administration initiated a robust truth commission and the historic trial of the military juntas, unlocking Latin America’s most powerful accountability shock. Multiple truth and justice “boosters” contributed to dismantle the counterinsurgent state, to deflate criminal markets, and to put the country on a path of relative peaceful development.

The chapter examines the Saturday Mothers, a long-standing intergenerational movement in Turkey advocating for justice for families of the disappeared. Through a relational lens, it explores how the movement constructs a social network that fosters solidarity, collective agency, and transformative personal and political identities. The Saturday Mothers, operating as a ‘political family’, challenge conventional definitions of family by creating a space of care, empathy, and shared grief. Their horizontal and transparent structure sustains their activism across diverse political, social, and economic backgrounds. The movement’s practices address the impact of ambiguous loss, enabling families to cope with psychological isolation and social marginalisation. By reclaiming public spaces such as Galatasaray Square as symbolic sites of truth and memory, they demand holistic justice. The chapter highlights how the Saturday Mothers’ grassroots mobilisation practises a relational agency, redefining victim participation and creating a social space for truth-telling and healing beyond the limitations of formal transitional justice mechanisms.