States are increasingly thought to have a duty to enable convicted persons’ rehabilitation, with some seeing this duty as grounded in convicted persons’ right to rehabilitation. This rights-based argument for rehabilitation emerged alongside the increase in rights litigation for carceral populations within the United States in the 1970s, and the contemporaneous development of the idea of imprisoned persons as “Rechtsburgers” or rights bearers in Europe.

Admittedly, legal recognition of a right to rehabilitation is not universal. Many countries present rehabilitation as a “guiding concept” rather than a right that can be enforced against the state. The United States had also considered it necessary to re-emphasise the importance its criminal justice system attaches to the goals of retribution, deterrence and incapacitation, following their ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) – which highlights the need for rehabilitative treatment within prison settings in Article 10 ICCPR.

This chapter examines how international relations (IR) scholarship has approached two central questions concerning international law and legalisation: why do states create international law, and what makes a particular norm ‘legal’ in nature? It then outlines the concept of legalisation as described in Abbott et al.’s well-known article of the same name. Under the classic legalisation framework, legalisation has three components: obligation, precision and delegation. The chapter argues that the classic OPD framework cannot fully capture the expanding role of non-state actors or conceptualise law as a process. It therefore proposes an adapted model for the transnational legal system that incorporates a crucial omitted dimension – implementation. Implementation refers to the concrete actions taken by agents to translate legal or law-like principles into practical, workable instructions for courts, governments, companies, and other non-state actors.

Abstract: This chapter explores the dynamics of international law within a horizontal legal order, characterised by the absence of a central enforcement mechanism and the layered system of compliance that emerges. It conceptualises international law as a normative framework shaped by interactions rather than hierarchy, examining how states are induced to comply with legal norms despite the lack of centralised coercive sanctions. The chapter develops a five-layer model of compliance control, ranging from voluntary internal compliance to institutionally authorised sanctions, highlighting the interplay between internal state mechanisms, bilateral enforcement, collective responses, and institutional determinations. It examines how a horizontal normative order can operate under realist and rationalist assumptions about state behaviour, while showing that insights from behavioural theory, two-level analysis of state conduct, and constructivism enhance the understanding of state compliance with norms. International law operates by facilitating interaction, shaping expectations, and leveraging decentralised enforcement mechanisms to influence state behaviour.

On December 6, 2023, the Indonesian Parliament passed Indonesia’s Criminal Code. The new Criminal Code replaces the Dutch-language colonial-era Penal Code and after fifty years of debate marks a milestone in Indonesian law. However, the new Code is controversial. It continues to criminalize interpersonal relations such as adultery and cohabitation. The framing of those offences is an accommodation of conflicting preferences among a wide range of domestic and international actors including those from the Islamic world, notably Saudi Arabia. This chapter examines the new Code as an arena of contestation, among inter-regional influences and between secular and religious actors seeking to shape Indonesian state law. It highlights three under-studied phenomena in Asia: inter-regional religious networks; their intersection with colonial legal legacies; and the migration of legal values, not only geographically or jurisdictionally, but also across internal domains within pluralist legal systems.

In this chapter, we explore how Israel approaches its protection from cyber threats with a focus on disinformation. The chapter relies on primary source material in English and Hebrew and interviews with Israeli researchers and disinformation experts. This chapter outlines the overview of the disinformation threats Israel has been facing in the recent past and present, diagnoses the presence and absence in legislative policy concerning disinformation, and analyzes Israel’s private industry efforts to bolster cyber security defense. Finally, our conclusion considers a variety of overarching outlooks on the future of countering internal disinformation in Israel.

The success of the development project of the twentieth century relied on economic growth to lift incomes, and on a tax-and-welfare state to share the wealth. It also relied fundamentally on an unequal and gendered care economy, primarily focused on care of children, in which women bore much of the cost of care. Today, economic and demographic conditions are increasingly unlike conditions of the mid-twentieth century. Population ageing increases care needs, but also contributes to higher wealth inequality and slower economic growth. Most governments have failed to address the tensions in the gendered distribution of work, care, and wealth. Tax and welfare policies must adjust in the context of these changing conditions to enable a more equal distribution of the cost of care and economic returns, so that we can live long and well in the next 100 years.

This chapter considers the potential of neurorehabilitation to interfere with a person’s identity, and hence its potential to infringe human rights that protect (different aspects of) personal identity. It builds upon previous arguments and suggestions in the literature that some forms of interference with the brain, such as the use of brain stimulation techniques, can cause psychological changes that disrupt a person’s identity. Until now, this debate has focused strongly on the side effects of brain stimulation for therapeutic purposes, such as DBS in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. We extrapolate this discussion to the context of criminal justice. In addition to earlier ethical evaluations of brain stimulation vis-à-vis personal identity, scholars are now considering the legal protection that should be offered to personal identity in this context, particularly through human rights. Some have argued for the introduction of a specific human right for this purpose: a right to psychological continuity.

The book begins by situating my key phrase ‘making-good-again’ through contrasting the history of the terms Wiedergutmachung and restitution. I give a brief history of understandings of responsibility and introduce my argument regarding material practice. Part two gives a brief overview of the methods used in the book, situating my approach in relation to jurisprudence and current approaches in law, humanities and their intersections.

This chapter explores how judicial mechanisms employed by apex courts have migrated across South Asia and Southeast Asia, using India, Pakistan, and Malaysia as examples. The chapter focuses on two case studies – Pakistan and Malaysia – to examine how judicial mechanisms, like the basic structure doctrine articulated by the Indian Supreme Court, have been strategically adapted by courts in Pakistan and Malaysia to strengthen their institutional power. This chapter considers the use of judicial rhetoric and constitutional comparativism in crafting opinions of popular salience by examining the distinct ways in which these Asian courts have engaged with foreign and comparative case law.