Processes of repression, criminalization and penalization were importantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Mobilizing data produced through an ethnographic study of plea courts in Ottawa, this article reports on the ways in which lower criminal courts administered what judges described as “COVID justice.” In this transitory form of justice, we observed a) a dilated reward system for guilty pleas; b) the work of the virtual resolution team, a workgroup dedicated to unburdening the courts from backlogs attributed to the pandemic; c) requests to increase the credits granted for time served in locked-down, noxious prisons, and; d) the diversion of sentenced individuals from prison on the grounds of the primacy of public health over criminal justice.

Survival sex is prevalent in conflict-affected settings, yet humanitarian actors’ understanding of the structural inequalities driving such exchanges remains limited. Stigma and discriminatory attitudes among practitioners continue to shape humanitarian responses, resulting in the exclusion of those engaged in survival sex from assistance and protection. This article examines how prevailing narratives have reduced survival sex to dichotomous categories of sex work or sexual violence, overlooking the systemic dimensions of what is best described as a coping mechanism. After defining survival sex, it analyzes the root causes of the phenomenon through wider scholarship on transactional sex. Based on secondary sources and the author’s operational experience addressing gendered harm in humanitarian settings, the article examines how survival sex impacts individuals, families and communities. The author concludes by providing recommendations for how humanitarian actors can enhance protection for persons engaged in survival sex through broader stigma reduction efforts.

Legal jurisprudence is widely debated but rarely measured. We present the first comprehensive measure of jurisprudence in U.S. Supreme Court opinions from 1870 to 2024. Building on qualitative studies of legal reasoning, we classify court opinions into two contrasting types: “formal” reasoning and anti-formal or “grand” reasoning. The foundation of this measurement dataset is a smaller, hand-annotated dataset created by a team of domain experts. Using this annotated dataset, we fine-tune and evaluate a foundational large language model, which is then employed to predict legal reasoning across all opinions in the full dataset. We demonstrate the potential of this new measure for applications in empirical research, enabling analyses of shifts in jurisprudence over time, the reasoning styles of individual justices, and the relationship between legal reasoning and other judicial features, such as ideology. To support further research, we release the annotated dataset, the fine-tuned model, and the final measures, offering a resource for both studying legal reasoning and judicial behavior and evaluating language models in the legal domain.

Despite his support for the creation of the West Indies Federation in the late 1950s, the anticolonial activist and political thinker CLR James expressed severe reservations regarding the process that led to its creation. While his criticisms are brief, this paper reconstructs a Jamesian critique of the plebiscite as a means of anticolonial self-determination. Situating his discussion of the plebiscite in the broader arc of his political thought from the 1930s to the 1960s, I identify three lines of critique that revolve around broad questions of mass leadership and the reproduction of colonial domination. First, drawing on his discussion of the tragic flaw of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s leadership during the Haitian Revolution, James argued that the plebiscite enabled popular leaders to skirt their responsibility to effectively communicate with the revolutionary masses. Second, James feared that the plebiscite fixed the principle of territorial sovereignty in place in advance of the process of decolonization by tethering popular authority to clearly bound territorial constituencies. Third, by giving the people a simple choice between two options, James worried that the plebiscite would undermine radical processes of democratic self-constitution. Against conventional critiques of the plebiscite as a means of consolidating dictatorial power under the guise of vox populi, James reveals how ostensibly popular political forms, such as the plebiscite, undercut the enactment of popular agency in colonial contexts.

This is a commentary on von Bogdandy’s article ‘On the Meaning and Promise of European Society’. It attempts to outline what an account of European society might look like if it were formulated from a more straightforward Hegelian perspective.

Lyndwood’s Provinciale (c. 1433) contains the ecclesiastical legislation, and a gloss on it, of the Province of Canterbury. The York Provinciale (c. 1518), issued by Wolsey, Archbishop of York, contains the legislation of that province, but with no gloss. The Canterbury Provinciale is well known, and dominates in the works of ecclesiastical lawyers and in the church courts after the Reformation. The York Provinciale is little known, and much neglected after the Reformation by the ecclesiastical lawyers, and today by historians of canon law. The two Provinciales have never been compared. What follows remedies this neglect and compares these two legal entities, in terms of ten matters, namely, their: authors; sources; purposes; internal structure; authority (the Canterbury Provinciale was never ratified legislatively, the York one was, arguably as a legatine constitution and so superior in status to Canterbury’s); geographical applicability (including York’s adoption of Canterbury’s provincial law in 1462 subject to its consistency with York law); position in historic debates; editions; use by the post-Reformation ecclesiastical lawyers; and use by modern scholars. It is time, therefore, for Canterbury’s laws to share the limelight with the York Provinciale.

Federal prosecutors regularly transition to private practice, where they often defend the same types of cases and clients they once prosecuted. This may be particularly true for Assistant U.S. Attorneys (AUSAs) in white-collar cases. Here, using data linking career trajectories to case outcomes, we examine whether AUSAs who depart for private practice treat corporate defendants differently than those who remain in government. We find “revolving” prosecutors exhibit greater leniency toward corporate defendants than their counterparts; this is clearest in cases involving big law firms. The findings speak to the revolving door’s impact on corporate accountability and career-duty tensions for prosecutors.

Courts that wish to avoid the effect of a binding precedent sometimes do so by reinterpreting the precedent so that its application depends on underlying facts of the case that were not invoked by the precedent court in the formulation of their reasons for decision. This article considers the implications of this practice, which I call “restrictive reinterpretation,” for the popular reason model of precedential constraint. The practice of restrictively reinterpreting precedent exposes the reason model to criticism on two opposing fronts. On one hand, it threatens the distinction between distinguishing and rule-modification that underlies the reason model. On the other hand, it provides a basis for challenging the view that courts’ formulations of their reasons for judgment have constraining effect. The article presents these challenges within an extended formal framework, before offering a qualified defense of the reason model.