On 27 April 2015, Jamie Maynard and Courtney Penix met in a strip mall parking lot in Columbus, Ohio, a city in the Midwestern United States (US). Earlier that day, Courtney had sent Jamie a series of text messages asking if she could get her $150 worth of heroin. Jamie said that she could, plus two ‘rigs’ (equipment to inject the drug), for $175 total. They arranged to meet that evening to make the trade before Jamie headed to work at a local casino. Jamie and Courtney, both White women in their mid twenties, met earlier that spring through a friend-of-a-friend. They initially connected to exchange drugs: heroin, to which both had developed habits, and the pharmaceuticals Suboxone, used to ease painful opioid withdrawal symptoms, and Xanax, used to ease anxiety and sometimes used in combination with opioids to amplify the effects of the drugs. They quickly developed a casual friendship, communicating regularly by text messages and phone calls. They vented about their jobs, shared stories about their struggles to maintain their drug habits, and offered drugs to one another to keep each other ‘well’ (i.e., to stave off withdrawal) (Williams, 2020).

Arendt’s engagement with the Eichmann trial raises questions that lie at the theoretical heart of international criminal justice. Do criminal trials of atrocity crimes (“core crimes”) differ in their aims from trials for ordinary domestic law crimes? Does it even make sense to try individuals for collective crimes? What is the point of courts jumping into the political maelstrom of mass violence? This chapter addresses these questions. It examines Arendt’s defense of the Eichmann trial against charges of unfairness and illegitimacy. It addresses Antony Duff’s argument that the moral community of “humanity” has no authority to stage criminal trials, as well as Martti Koskenniemi’s critique of Arendt’s individualist focus. Arendt rejected the concept of collective criminal guilt, although she endorsed a concept of collective political responsibility; the chapter analyzes this distinction. An additional question is whether Arendt’s thinking sheds light on the modern practices of international criminal law. Here, the verdict is mixed. Arendt strongly objected to the political and pedagogical aims of criminal trials, which I argue is a mistake on her part, even on her own terms. The radical ambitions of international criminal justice – to save history against inevitable future denialism, and to demystify extreme political violence – are actually Arendt’s as well, whether or not she recognized it.

The challenges courts face in dealing with the demand for justice in the digital age have increased considerably in the last thirty years. These actors have always been under the spotlight as the traditional institutional mechanism to protect rights and ensure the rule of law, but have been increasingly confronted with limited resources and expertise, and an overwhelming amount of judicial workload. Digitalisation and automation have been seen as a possibility for political decision-makers to sort out new strategies and tools that ease judicial activity. This chapter argues that the increasing digitalisation of justice has resulted in two constitutional trends, respectively towards an increasing internalisation of AI and digital technologies into the judicial field, and externalisation of judicial functions to private actors and administrative authorities which also implement AI technologies. Both internalisation and externalisation raise constitutional challenges for judicial activities, touching the core of digital constitutionalism, primarily the protection of rights and the limits of power in the digital age.

This chapter analyses a decision of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, which devises a regulatory framework for judicial use of AI. I claim that as long as AI tools are responsive to legal queries, judges will continue to use them. This has significant consequences for the legal profession. Using AI for judicial decision-making prevents important discussions within the profession, which provide cohesiveness, certainty, and legitimacy to legal outcomes. Reliance on AI may undermine the role of professional socialisation in fostering convergent, predictable, and legitimate legal outcomes. Instead, it can facilitate the ‘colonisation’ of the legal field by a disembodied and unaccountable universe of programmers and training dataset authors from outside the (national) legal field. To fully illustrate the magnitude of AI’s effect on the profession, this chapter outlines the Constitutional Court’s decision and its limitations in effectively regulating AI. I then discuss the role of professional socialisation and how AI can displace it. The chapter concludes by suggesting that built-in restrictions in the algorithm itself should be the focus of any regulation of the judicial use of AI.

This chapter introduces the main themes of the book: Hannah Arendt’s investigations of moral judgment and legal accountability. In 1933, she watched moral judgment collapse on a massive scale in Germany. Multitudes were swept away by conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific ideologies; Nazi morality swiftly upended traditional standards of moral decency. What could account for it? And how do some people keep their judgment intact in a corrupted culture? Understanding the nature of moral judgment became a central question of Arendt’s moral philosophy. Beyond this, she asks how the law should judge perpetrators who commit crimes against humanity, not out of greed or malice but because their leaders tell them it is the right thing to do, and their larger society seems to agree. The book analyzes these and other questions of moral and legal theory. This introduction provides a roadmap to the chapters that follow.

The epilogue to this book is a brief reflection on the relevance of Arendt’s moral philosophy to the current slide toward autocracy in many countries, including my own. Unlike the other chapters of this book, the epilogue is “time-stamped” to the moment of its writing: the first year of a US administration that openly aims to dismantle liberal institutions and inflate the president’s prerogative powers. It describes a set of events that poses moral problems resembling those that preoccupied Arendt in her “emergency ethics.”

Accountability is a foundational judicial value and a tenet of the rule of law. Drawing on contemporary examples from the UK, EU, USA, Latin America, Taiwan, and China, this chapter examines how artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to assist judicial decision-making at varying stages – ranging from case-sorting tools and legal research aids to fully automated ‘smart courts’. By categorising these judicial uses by level of AI intervention, the chapter interrogates two common claims: (1) that greater AI involvement increases threats to judicial accountability, and (2) that judicial oversight ensures such accountability is preserved. Contrary to these common claims, we argue that accountability is compromised at all levels of AI integration. This occurs because AI systems: (1) obscure transparency and open justice; (2) erode judicial independence and reasoning by amplifying cognitive biases; and (3) hinder appellate review, thus limiting opportunities to contest decisions. While governments often assert that judicial supervision and discretion are sufficient safeguards, the chapter argues that such protections are increasingly ineffective amid pervasive and elusive AI systems.

The control of alcohol and other drugs (AOD) is an important feature of the global public policy landscape. There is widespread recognition that the ‘war on drugs’, rooted in international systems of drug control, has failed both on its own terms and because of the harms it has visited upon users and their communities. Although some states have moved towards liberalisation, the vast majority continue to heavily invest in punitive measures. Importantly, however, key ideas about drugs are coming under sustained pressure, and in some instances, beginning to break down, including the idea that drugs inevitably produce harms, including illness, injury and death, or that they produce other predictable, stable and consistent ‘effects’ (Fraser and Moore, 2011). There is evidence of this change in specific contexts including drug policy, health promotion and service provision. But what is happening in law courts? How are drugs being conceptualised in legal cases around the world? Scholars from a variety of disciplines have taken a keen interest in the ‘drug problem’, but there has been little scrutiny of how key cases in different jurisdictions have influenced the ways in which we understand, respond to and punish the use of various substances. The importance of such decisions extends beyond criminal matters and affects outcomes in a variety of legal spheres including immigration, welfare, family justice, education and employment law. Judging Drugs is the first book to chart the impact and significance of those cases in different parts of the world, and to consider how ideas about drugs are (or might be) changing across our courts. It thus comprises an important and distinctive addition to a body of scholarship that has sought to understand the ways in which drugs and ‘addiction’ have been subject to varying degrees of control and opprobrium. Importantly, contributors to this edited collection do not simply identify and summarise important legal cases from around the world. In this sense, the collection is not a ‘textbook’ of important case law. It is also not a textbook of cases with apparent precedent value.

AI applications are increasingly deployed in the judiciary for a wide array of tasks, denoted as ‘judicial AI’. The implications for the legal system are vast. In this chapter, I focus on the effects of judicial AI on the rule of law, given the judiciary’s essential role in safeguarding this value. After examining what is meant by the rule of law, three sets of questions guide my analysis. First, how does the turn from text-driven to code- and data-driven legal interpretation affect the nature of law? Is there a risk that instead of fostering the rule of law, this leads to algorithmic rule by law? Second, since AI applications are designed by human beings, delegating judicial tasks to AI implies a delegation to the coders developing it. To what extent can this result in a rule of coders? And last, what impact does judicial AI have on the separation of powers, given that the executive and legislative branch of power control the judiciary’s resources? Can it undermine the judiciary’s ability to check and balance the other branches of power? The answers to these questions force me to conclude that many concerns must be addressed prior to judicial AI’s wide-scale adoption.

Drawing from the archives of the League of Nations as well as those of the French Foreign Ministry, supplemented by press sources and official reports of the parliamentary debates, this chapter traces the essential role played by France in the development of compulsory arbitration and legal methods of settling international disputes, from the Geneva Protocol (1924) to the adoption of the General Act of Arbitration by the Ninth Assembly of the League of Nations in 1928 and its ratification by the French Parliament, almost unanimously, in 1931. France’s engagement in favour of compulsory arbitration for all conflicts was above all dictated by security concerns. Feeling exposed and vulnerable to an unstable and potentially revanchist Germany, France expected arbitration to provoke the implementation of the mechanisms of collective security provided for in the League of Nations Covenant, since it made it possible to identify the party that refused to submit the conflict to arbitration procedure as the aggressor. But whereas the Geneva Protocol had clearly established the close link desired by France between ‘arbitration’ and ‘security’ – a prelude to ‘disarmament’ – the General Act of 1928, for its part, failed to reproduce this link, and did not organize any system of sanctions.

The criminal justice system is becoming automated. At every stage, from policing to evidence to parole, AI tools and other technologies guide outcomes. Debates over the pros and cons of these technologies have overlooked a crucial issue: ownership. Developers often claim that details about how their tools work are trade secrets and refuse to disclose that information to criminal defendants or their attorneys. The introduction of intellectual property claims into the criminal justice system raises under-theorised tensions between life, liberty, and property interests. This chapter argues that trade secrets should not be privileged in criminal proceedings. A criminal trade secret privilege is ahistorical, harmful to defendants, and unnecessary to protect the interests of the secret holder. Meanwhile, compared to substantive trade secret law, the privilege overprotects intellectual property. Further, privileging trade secrets in criminal proceedings fails to serve the theoretical purpose of either trade secret law or privilege law. The trade secret inquiry sheds new light on how evidence rules do, and should, function differently in civil and criminal cases.

This concluding chapter addresses the urgent imperative to establish Islamic environmental law as a formal discipline capable of responding to unprecedented planetary crisis. Drawing on insights from 26 chapters examining the intersection of Islamic jurisprudence and environmental governance, this conclusion argues that Islamic environmental law offers transformative frameworks for addressing climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse, and ecological injustice through principles of khilafah (stewardship), mizan (balance), and maslaha (public interest). The chapter outlines comprehensive strategies for institutionalizing Islamic environmental law as an academic discipline, including curriculum development, research infrastructure, and methodological innovations that integrate environmental science with traditional Islamic legal reasoning. It examines critical research priorities spanning climate jurisprudence, Islamic environmental finance, and environmental justice frameworks that connect ecological protection to human dignity. Recognizing the scale of environmental crisis, the chapter proposes institutional innovations including Islamic environmental courts, shariah-compliant regulatory mechanisms, and revitalized traditional institutions like waqf and hima adapted for contemporary conservation needs.