Inadequate or ineffective health financing poses a significant challenge to the Government of Lao People’s Democratic Republic’s goal of achieving universal health coverage by 2030. Here we explore possible application in the Lao context of the Center for Global Development’s New Compact approach, including locally-led evidence-informed prioritisation, domestic financing and consolidated supplementary aid. Using WHO’s political economy analysis guide we identify opportunities and barriers and propose a road map towards implementation of the New Compact. This includes firstly, increasing local capacity and systems to generate and use evidence in policy and resource allocation decisions, starting with specific use cases related to the Essential Services Health Package and vaccines portfolio. Secondly, shifting available domestic resources to highest priority services, including at the primary health care level, based on deeper understanding of existing funding and where efficiency, cost-effectiveness and equity can be optimised. Thirdly, improving government and donor coordination aligned to national priorities and gradually increasing funds pooling as feasible.

What is unprincipled adjudication and when, if ever, is it justified? In addressing those questions, this essay attempts to complete a project begun with Professor Fred Schauer.

This article argues that modern trust law has undergone a radical global transformation while remaining largely absent from democratic debate, a condition the article terms trust law’s ‘permissive invisibility’. The article traces how trust law’s origins in equity entrenched a judge-centric, normatively charged but socially insulated doctrinal culture, which proved increasingly permissive as trusts were repurposed for regulatory arbitrage in an era of transnational financial capitalism. The article then shows how legislative reform was critically enabled by trust law’s particularly low public salience but inverted, high salience among the owners and operators of concentrated capital. The recursive force of this judicial and legislative permissiveness has now normalised antisocial innovations such as perpetual and massively discretionary trusts. The article concludes by calling for empirically grounded, critical socio-legal study in the tradition articulated by Roger Cotterrell as a necessary precondition for any democratically credible trust law reform agenda.

One of the most striking developments in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights Court over the past decade is the development a new doctrine of subsidiarity that has been presented as democracy-enhancing. This article explores this turn to subsidiarity in European human rights to assess the extent to which it is positively contributing to democracy. The article does so by first unpacking the notion of subsidiarity, arguing that it is a composite notion that has organisational, legal and democratic elements. Against this background, the article examines the place and space of subsidiarity in the European human rights system, finding that subsidiarity is overwhelmingly concerned with organisational matters. It does speak to democracy but only in a small subset of cases, which typically involve well-functioning democracies. This also means that the new democracy-enhancing doctrine does very little work in the context of democratically backsliding member states.