Judicial rulings on expert evidence determine which specialized knowledge enters the courtroom and, in doing so, shape the credibility of litigants and the legitimacy of their claims. This article examines how disparities in litigant status shape the judicial gatekeeping of expert evidence and how this process relates to the ideological context of the legal forum. Using data from a probability sample of 811 Daubert rulings from United States District Courts, our multinomial logistic regression models show that, overall, higher status litigants are more successful in excluding opposing evidence and in overcoming exclusionary motions. However, this aggregate relationship masks a pronounced ideological divide. Specifically, higher status litigants tend to be more successful in cases assigned to conservative judges while lower status litigants tend to be more successful in cases assigned to liberal judges. These findings illustrate how trial court decisions reflect broader institutional and ideological forces and suggest that ideological contexts can either amplify or temper structural inequalities in the courtroom.

This festschrift essay honors the academic life and work of Douglas Laycock, one of the most important scholars and advocates in American law and religion. This essay offers tribute to a mentor from whom I took three classes and an independent study in law school, for whom I worked as a research assistant, and with whom I have remained in close conversation during my two decades in the academy. It also offers an insider’s account of Laycock’s intellectual project and influence—punctuated with stories, observations, and nuggets of wisdom drawn from a close reading of his scholarship and briefs. This essay traces Laycock’s career from his early academic work to his later role in landmark Supreme Court litigation, ultimately seeing Laycock’s deepest legacy as lying not only in the doctrines he helped shape, but in a model of intellectually serious, cross-ideological engagement that both inspires us and calls us to account.

Occupational accidents impose devastating human and economic costs worldwide, yet evidence on how judicial decisions affect workplace safety remains scarce. This study provides the first causal evidence on this relationship by examining Argentina’s landmark Aquino ruling (2004), which eliminated employers’ exemption from civil liability for workplace accidents. Using an event study design with provincial panel data (1997–2021), we exploit the differential impact of increased employer liability on workplace accidents versus commuting accidents (in itinere) as our identification strategy. Results show that workplace accidents decreased significantly by 16–27% following the judicial decision, with larger reductions in provinces with higher initial number of accidents. Importantly, we find no evidence of moral hazard effects when examining accidents that are difficult to detect and verify. The findings demonstrate that judicial decisions creating immediate economic liability can generate substantial behavioral responses even in developing country contexts with limited enforcement capacity, suggesting that liability-based approaches may effectively complement traditional regulatory strategies for improving workplace safety.

The mood amongst workers in Western Europe as the 1960s ended was one of frustration and anticipation. From the streets of Paris in May 1968 to the factory floors of Turin in the autumn of 1969, social movements of workers and students demanded a real say over their daily lives and the institutions that shaped them. These calls for economic democracy were picked up by trade unions, national politicians and, eventually, the European Commission. In 1973, having published proposals that included plans for ‘worker participation’, the Commission wrote that if employees did not have a voice, the Commission’s proposals would not ‘satisfy the requirements of society today’. However, the Commission’s interpretation of industrial democracy was criticised by trade unions and socialist politicians, buoyed by the militancy of the workers, for not going far enough. As the Commission tried to persuade labour representatives that the European project was taking their demands seriously, another critique of worker participation crystallised on the right. As Keynesianism lost credibility in Member States, and a neoliberal discourse emerged around the need for Europe to be ‘competitive’ and ‘flexible’, employer groups pushed back against worker participation and undermined a labour movement that had posed a genuine threat to capital’s interests. This paper tells the story of one component of the Commission’s plans: the proposed Fifth Company Law Directive. Using archival material from EC institutions and employer lobby groups, it argues for an understanding of company and labour law harmonisation that takes seriously the political economy of Western Europe during the ‘Long 1970s’.

This paper analyses the General Court’s judgments of 25 June 2025 (RWE and Uniper) regarding the reviewability of ACER regulatory acts. The General Court endorsed a “hybrid approach,” excluding acts of general application from the jurisdiction of the Board of Appeal and subjecting them solely to judicial review under Article 263(4) TFEU. The study highlights how this interpretation creates significant procedural gaps and bureaucratic burdens for private parties. By contrasting these rulings with the more flexible standing criteria recently adopted by the Court of Justice (e.g., Nicoventures Case), the paper argues that the current framework fragments the EU system of judicial protection and undermines the principle of procedural economy in highly technical sectors.

From the World Bank’s ‘Climate-Smart Mining’ initiative or ‘Resilient and Inclusive Supply-Chain Enhancement’ program to the IMF’s ‘Energy Transition Strategies’, international development institutions have plenty to say about the role of the supply chain in securing critical minerals for green energy technologies.1 This article forms part of a bigger project that examines how the form of the supply chain, in the context of the contemporary energy transition, entrenches the patterns of distribution and accumulation that we often associate with the fossil fuel economy. In this way, I argue that the supply chain contributes to suppressing alternative legal forms of decarbonization.2 Multiple international legal practices and modes of thought are involved in this suppression. In this article, I offer an account of how logistics, as a practice, discipline of supply chain management, and form of governance or jurisdiction contribute to foreclosing possibilities for alternative forms of decarbonization in ways that both implicate international law and point to possibilities for contestation.

This paper examines the regulatory challenges and opportunities surrounding the introduction of autonomous inland shipping in Europe. As regulators navigate this shift, they must strike a balance between innovation, safety, legal certainty and private actors’ interests. Drawing on principles guiding innovation, such as outcome-based, risk-based and adaptive regulation, as well as the precautionary, proportionality and technological neutrality principles, the paper proposes a framework for developing regulatory responses. It also analyses the relevance of EU horizontal digital regulations, including the AI Act and the Data Act, in shaping the governance of autonomous systems in inland waterways. The paper explores how the existing divisions of regulatory competence between European institutions and river commissions may hinder harmonisation, and proposes mechanisms to improve regulatory and judicial coherence in a multilevel governance context.

Scientific discoveries and precision medicine research, especially efforts to identify individually tailored approaches to healthcare considering individual variability in genetics, environmental, and lifestyle factors, have the potential to transform health. This goal is especially critical for those who experience social injustices and substantial health disparities. Yet the inclusion of adults with intellectual disability in precision medicine research, a growing field in clinical and translational genomic research, raises ethical, social, and legal concerns about their ability to make informed decisions to participate, and subsequently whether this population should be excluded altogether or enrolled only via proxy consent. Both practices demand scrutiny and are sometimes without legal or ethical justification. Supported decision-making, a reasonable accommodation and relatively recent legal and ethical construct, can facilitate first-person consent and maintain the prospective participant’s position as the decision-maker. As such, supported decision-making is a promising development with critical implications for consent to precision medicine research. Using findings from our national survey with adults with intellectual disability and a legal analysis, our academic-community research partnership developed recommendations and a tool for using supported decision-making for enrollment in precision medicine research. We conclude with persistent challenges that need resolving to ensure the responsible inclusion of adults with intellectual disability in precision medicine research, and clinical research more generally.

Too often, conflict-related detainees are ill-treated or killed, go missing, or are held in inhumane conditions of detention. Detention occurs in all armed conflicts, including those that involve Muslim-majority States and Islamic non-State armed groups. In 2024, a substantial percentage of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s visits to detention/internment places were in Muslim-majority contexts.

While the humane treatment of detainees is the responsibility of the detaining authorities, third actors, including humanitarian organizations, can and should work with those authorities with a view to making sure that they respect their obligations. To facilitate such dialogue, this article analyzes the protection of detainees under international humanitarian law (IHL) and Islamic law. As the vast majority of today’s armed conflicts are non-international in nature, the article focuses on IHL rules applicable in non-international armed conflicts (NIACs), discussing key rules of IHL and Islamic law on the protection of detainees. The selection of rules presented in this article reflects IHL rules applicable in NIACs, based on Article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions, Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions, and customary IHL rules. The article provides an issue-by-issue analysis that allows the reader to easily understand how IHL and Islamic law address specific issues on the protection of detainees in NIACs.

International access to and sharing of biospecimens is critical to answer important questions about complex diseases, and to ensure the diversity in biospecimen collection necessary to advance science and develop therapies that benefit all. However, many challenges exist. These include the lack of harmonized ethical, legal, and policy frameworks regarding secondary uses of biospecimens and associated data; regulatory and policy hurdles; and differences in cultural perspectives and practices across regional and national jurisdictions.

In this manuscript, a set of ethical principles is presented with the intent to address some of these challenges by ensuring better alignment in ethical practices related to biobanking and the global use of human biospecimens. In addition, these principles could serve as a basis for promoting more consistency among national regulations and policies. The ultimate goal is to develop an international framework for global biospecimen and data sharing.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ambiguous institutional position—insulated from external pressures yet retaining important linkages with elected officials—complicates how the public assigns responsibility for its decisions. Using a survey experiment that shows respondents information about Dobbs, we explore how messages that politicize or depoliticize the Court affect responsibility attribution for Court decisions. We find that politicizing the Court increases responsibility attribution towards President Trump, and that this effect is conditioned by party cues. We explore downstream effects on evaluations of political actors, but do not find conclusive evidence. We argue that these findings have important implications for democratic accountability.

Academic and judicial discussions about the preparatory works of treaties are usually focused on the definition of travaux and the circumstances in which such materials may be relied upon to interpret an international agreement. By contrast, little has been said about how the travaux themselves should be interpreted. This article attempts to fill this gap, through an analysis of international case law and scholarship from which a list of seven relevant factors to elucidate travaux can be drawn.

There is something utopian about constituent power, whether this is the unrealisable idea of “the people” or the world-building nature of constitutional change. However, in contemporary constitutional scholarship “utopia” is more often used as a pejorative critique of reform projects that are seen as idealistic ambitious calls for constitutional change, which might fail for being “too utopian”, “too idealistic”, “too unrealistic”. In an attempt to move beyond this critique, this article draws on alternative approaches to utopianism to uncover the temporal assumptions underpinning contemporary approaches to constituent power and highlights the different approaches that can be exposed if theories of utopian-thinking are foregrounded. Both utopia and constituent power are closely aligned with visions of alternative futures, and constitutional scholars agree that there is an intersection between utopian thinking and the subjectivities, temporalities and operationalisation of constituent power. Moving away from utilising utopia as a pejorative label and engaging instead with what it can expose about temporalities, offers alternative approaches to the study of constituent power.

Since the Global Financial Crisis, the European Union (EU) has gone from crisis to crisis. The chronic growth and productivity problems have been compounded by the poor management of the Eurozone crisis, by the no-longer postponable green and digital transitions, and by the changing geopolitical environment, with the end of the old multilateral order. The European institutions still embed the principles of an old consensus based on market efficiency, and do not allow for macroeconomic and industrial policies for the structural transformation. We discuss possible reforms to realign the EU institutions with the needs and the challenges the bloc faces.

The label ‘populist’ has been used in recent years by scholars and journalists to describe judicial behavior in a diverse set of countries. Yet judicial populism has to date not been the subject of comparative scholarly inquiry. This symposium aims to launch just such a comparative analysis, bringing together work by scholars with diverse disciplinary and geographic expertise to grapple critically with the phenomenon of judicial populism. In this introductory article, symposium organizers Lisa Hilbink and Yasser Kureshi distill and synthesize the findings and arguments from the four individual articles in the symposium to address three main questions: (1) What is judicial populism? (2) Where does judicial populism come from? and (3) Do populist courts benefit or undermine democracy? They discuss how the contributions to the symposium speak to each of these questions, in turn, generating a scholarly discussion, across disciplines and contexts, with which others can engage moving forward. To this end, they cap the introduction with some suggestions for future research.