The creation of a federal structure in which sovereignty is divided between the state and national governments was generally agreed to be a significant constraint on political factions. The lawmaking authority of the national government was conferred on a Congress of enumerated powers, leaving all other inherent powers of government in the states. Factional efforts would be fragmented across multiple and overlapping seats of power.

A juridical commentary to this provision further states: ‘[t]hat which is protected is to be worth more than that which is harmed and the danger is not to be avoidable through any other means’ (Anonymous, 2025, see: https://lagen.nu/1962:700#K24).

The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the potential contributions of Islamic finance as an important faith-based approach for financing environmental policies and programs in Islamic countries. While the need for environmental protection and sustainable development have been recognized in the laws of virtually every country on earth, countries often struggle to mobilize environmental finance, i.e the financial resources and tools needed to implement environmental protection programs. The global rise of green or environmental finance as an approach to meet climate change mitigation and adaption financing has highlighted the nexus between environmental finance and Islamic finance as both share similar underlying ethical principles and social and environmental objectives. In this regard, Islamic finance has recently witnessed the development of green sukuk, a new asset class targeting projects that address climate change. The chapter discusses the potential of Islamic finance as a viable environmental finance alternative. In so doing, it will first discuss the ethical and legal principles underpinning Islamic environmental finance. Second, it will discuss the legal and institutional gaps that currently hinder the wide scale integration of Islamic finance into environmental law in Islamic countries.

Chapter 19 explores the legal and political constraints to finding a systemic answer to collective security and general disarmament by delving into three aspects: first, the legal and political gaps and inconsistencies left by the League of Nations Covenant; second, the fast-moving geopolitical and multilateral context that hindered a fruitful connection between collective security and general disarmament during the 1920s and early 1930s; and third, the increasing, and by the mid-1930s openly frustrated, legal bewilderment around core concepts of the existing collective security system: how should it be enforced? And how should it be revised? The study zeroes in on key moments in the League’s existence, and important protagonists of its functioning – the Secretary-General, the leading international lawyers of the time – and draws the conclusion that the League of Nations was too consumed by upholding its fragile and always-contested order to pursue collective security and general disarmament in a systematic, comprehensive, and connected manner.

Causation is arguably the most complex of the elements of negligence. It is covered in three sections in this chapter. Section 13.1 covers the criteria for identifying a recognisable harm and the nature of causation in tort law – what type of explanation does it look for? Section 13.2 covers the evolution of the methods adopted by Australian courts to identify factual causation. Section 13.3 discusses the difficult normative challenge of putting a limit on the extent (or ‘scope’) of a defendant’s liability.

Because this area of the law of negligence is extremely complex, the chapter includes two sets of ‘Summary points’ and two ‘Test your understanding’ features. At the end of the chapter, you will find an appendix with the provisions on causation adopted in the civil liability legislation in each state and territory.

This chapter examines a series of court cases in Hong Kong in which a number of newly elected legislators were disqualified from taking office in part because the ways in which they took their oaths during the swearing-in ceremony were deemed too flamboyant, too extravagant and too theatrical to be taken seriously. Implicit in the legal and political objections to their oath taking is the view that theatre has no place in the hallowed chambers of the law courts or the legislature, a view that is all the more surprising given the intertwined histories and representational strategies between law and theatre. Taking these cases as a starting point, I explore what may be at stake in this legal anti-theatricality, and argue that law’s determination to expurgate the theatrical could be read as part of an attempt to render invisible its own performative nature.

Through a new account of three early disputes, Chapter 16 revisits the novel role of the League Council in interstate dispute settlement. This role was delimited by a legal threshold: the question of whether disputes arose out of a matter purely within a state party’s national jurisdiction or domaine réservé. Application of this test, nominally left to the Council, prompted considerable experimentation with institutional forms, and particularly recourse to ‘committees of jurists’, an understudied, flexible, and protean mechanism which would go on to be deployed in many spheres of League activity. Drawing on contemporaneous legal scholarship and a range of archival materials, the chapter sketches the Council’s procedural management of three key disputes, redirecting focus to the larger landscape of institutionalized dispute settlement beyond the Permanent Court of International Justice. In this larger landscape, the chapter teases out the diverse characteristics associated with recourse to avowedly ‘legal’ expertise and reasoning. This close reading of varied ‘legal’ deliberations recovers the multifaceted relationship between institutionalization and legalization of dispute settlement – and suggests the complexity of relations between legal reasoning and peaceful ordering, both for contemporaries and for us.

A popular belief in democracy as the core value of the Constitution has contributed to several innovations that circumvent the Framers’ constraints on democracy. Primary elections for selecting candidates including for the president have empowered the political parties and their core constituencies. The Supreme Court’s one-person-one-vote mandate for all state legislative elections has disempowered local communities, gerrymandering has become the norm for the creation of representative districts, and the 17th Amendment has diminished the influence of states as distinct political entities. Direct democracy in the form of referenda and initiative has compromised the filtering benefits of representation.

This chapter examines a landmark constitutional petition that challenges governmental inaction on forest conservation in Pakistan, situating the case within broader discourses of environmental justice, constitutional rights, and the public trust doctrine. The petitioner, a practicing advocate, brings a critical legal challenge invoking fundamental constitutional rights, including the right to life (Article 9), human dignity (Article 14), access to public spaces (Article 26), and state obligations for leisure provision (Article 38(b)).

Central to the petition is the alarming statistic of Pakistan’s rapidly diminishing forest cover, which has decreased to a mere 1.9% of the national territory. The legal action seeks a writ of mandamus compelling government implementation of multiple environmental policies and laws, including the Forest Act, Trees Act, National Climate Change Policy (2012), National Forest Policy (2015), Forest Policy Statement (1999), and Punjab Forestry Sector Policy (1999).

The case represents a significant judicial intervention that mobilizes the public trust doctrine to reframe environmental resources as collective heritage rather than objects of private ownership or commercial exploitation. By challenging the commodification of natural resources, the petition articulates a constitutional framework for environmental protection that prioritizes public interest, ecological sustainability, and intergenerational environmental justice.