EU policy documents often present the green and digital transitions as “twinned” and mutually beneficial. However, it is now widely acknowledged that new technologies, such as AI, have significant environmental costs. This awareness has induced the EU to recalibrate its approach to the twin transition and prompted the elaboration of new soft-law principles of digital sustainability, an early form of “eco-digital constitutionalism” at EU level. This paper examines the national AI strategies of the twenty-seven Member States to assess the extent to which this revised approach of the EU is reflected at the national level. Our analysis reveals that the strategies in question often differ starkly in the manner in which they prioritise the various matters that pertain to the intersection of environment and AI. We argue that these inconsistencies, which are rooted in different attitudes to the economics of innovation, cannot be solved fully through soft-law harmonisation.

Neoliberalism, once an economic doctrine responding to the failures of liberalism, has become a widely used concept in sociolegal scholarship. Law and society scholars often invoke it to explain sociolegal and punitive phenomena such as mass incarceration, inequality, and state transformation. But the concept’s analytic power is undermined when scholars conflate neoliberalism as a sociohistorical process with neoliberalism as a universal cause. Drawing on an intellectual history of neoliberalism’s evolving meanings, I identify two problems – ubiquity and a lack of counterfactual imagination – that limit its theoretical utility in sociolegal research. I argue that neoliberalism should be theorized as a contingent, sociohistorical process; only then can it function as a theory with meaningful consequents.

What is adaptive regulation? Why does it matter? How can it be measured, and how can regulation be made more adaptive? I answer each of these four questions.

Sermons preached by clerics have been largely neglected by scholars as a resource for the study of the history of English ecclesiastical law since the Reformation. Needless to say, scholarship has focused on the substantive and procedural ecclesiastical law found in the ecclesiastical legislation of Parliament, the canons passed by the convocations, the case law of the spiritual and temporal courts and the treatises of the civilian commentators. However, some historians of early modern England have studied the sermons delivered at the Inns of Court; but these studies have little to say about their preachers’ portrayal of the ecclesiastical law and its jurisprudence.1 Nevertheless, as we shall demonstrate, in each century since the Reformation, clergy in their preaching commonly treated legal matters or else used legal materials, including ecclesiastical law. The eighteenth century is no exception – and Thomas Sherlock (1678–1761) is an excellent example, whose function included as Master of the Temple (1704–1753) preaching to the common lawyers of Inner and Middle Temple. What follows deals with his life and career, law in his sermons (including jurisprudential concepts common to both the temporal and the spiritual law), and his legal thought in wider context – all at a time when the law was an inescapable part of the religious landscape, the limits on toleration, the constraints on Roman Catholics, and the provision for occasional conformity.2

In core government and for public tasks hugely sensitive for citizens such as migration governance in Europe, the use of AI systems developed and provided under contract gives migration authorities and private providers the power to keep their deployment secret and to refuse access to their key components. This article explores the complex interplay between public and private drivers of secrecy surrounding procured AI technologies in European migration governance, demonstrating how these forces converge and reinforce one another. It examines AI secrecy as an institutional framework shaped by both public and private law forms of secrecy, applying the spectrum of secrecy from deep (unknown unknowns) to shallow secrecy (known unknowns). Specifically, the paper looks into the sources of ‘political secrecy’ in migration and security authorities, highlighting how migration agencies and authorities keep the existence and use of AI systems from civil society and affected persons (such as third country nationals). Next, it analyses the legal frameworks that sustain AI vendors’ private secrecy, such as trade secrecy, secrecy in procurement procedures and agreements. In examining the various secrecy points, it scrutinises the limited impact of the AI Act in addressing the entrenched secrecy of AI deployment and development in governing migration. Finally, we condense the main takeaways and examine the broader repercussions of AI secrecy beyond the context of border control, touching upon its implications for a new equilibrium transcending the conventional public/private divide.

This article examines how majoritarian domination—as a constitutive feature of global democratic decline—is produced and entrenched through everyday judicial practices. Focusing on Assam, India, where denationalisation policies threaten millions—particularly Bengali-origin Muslims—within a political climate saturated by suspicion and hostility, it draws on an unprecedented empirical study of more than 1200 rulings of Assam’s High Court since 2009. The article develops the theoretical prism of legal work to show how judges encode majoritarian domination through both the exercise and withdrawal of judicial labour. Exercised judicial labour produces suspicion, visible in doctrines of evidence, reliability, and juridical truth that construct minority identities as presumptively fraudulent and foreign. Withdrawn judicial labour produces silence, as courts refuse to record, engage, or reason, rendering minorities legally invisible. The article advances a novel methodological and theoretical framework for understanding how courts routinise hierarchy, making authoritarianism both durable and legally sanctioned.

The Local Government Pension Scheme (“LGPS”) is typically administered by local authorities. Somewhat incongruously with its localised nature, or even recent pooling measures, there are attempts by those campaigning for boycott, divestment and sanctions (“BDS”) against the State of Israel to extend the reach of the town hall into the geopolitical arena. The decision in R. (on the Application of Palestine Solidarity Campaign Ltd.) v Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government [2020] UKSC 16 is seen by those BDS activists as providing a self-contained roadmap for LGPS divestments and boycotts. They are mistaken. This article considers the questions that remain to be addressed and the need for local government lawyers to look beyond local government law to the rules of equity. When the principles and rules of equity are violated in adopting divestment or exclusion policies, a court of equity will not hesitate to intervene. This is not equity’s incursion into the local government arena. For insofar as the conduct of administering authorities as fiduciaries, or quasi-trustees, is concerned, it was always there.