This chapter concludes the historical story arc of the book by identifying the final surrender of the classical doctrine of civil war in international law during the twentieth century. First, it examines the rise of the concept of non-international armed conflicts in the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross and its breakthrough in the Geneva Conference of 1949. As the conference rejected the option of framing Common Article 3 in the conceptual language of the classical doctrine, it in fact abandoned the classical law of civil war by choice. The chapter then shows that many international lawyers soon realised the significance of the event, but notes how the classical concepts nevertheless continued to persist in academic writings, especially in Europe. Finally, the chapter discusses the meetings of the Institut de droit international in 1973 and 1975, where academic lawyers as well accepted the end of the classical doctrine.

From the founding of the Constitution, there has been a steady expansion of national power and an erosion of state powers. Notwithstanding the enumeration of its powers, Congress has enacted legislation impacting almost every aspect of American life. The Supreme Court has, with rare exceptions, accommodated the Congress’ intrusions on the powers of the state governments.

Supervised consumption sites (SCS) are spaces where people can use pre-acquired drugs under the supervision of trained staff who monitor for overdose and administer medical assistance, if necessary.1 By providing sterile drug use supplies, referrals to various services and education about safer injection practices, SCS function as harm reduction apparatuses for reducing overdose and the transmission of blood-borne infections like human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and hepatitis C (HCV) and other harms associated with drug use such as skin and soft tissue infections.2 While at least one unsanctioned SCS exists in the United States (Kral & Davidson, 2017), there are currently only three government-authorised sites in the country; two opened in 2021 in New York City and one opened in 2024 in Rhode Island. Another SCS was poised to open years earlier in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, until the US federal government sued Safehouse, the organisation set to manage the site, to prevent it from opening. The government argued that Safehouse would violate federal law if it opened an SCS because the US Controlled Substances Act (CSA) (1970) prohibits the operation of places where drugs are made or used illicitly.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into judicial decision-making presents both opportunities and challenges, particularly in balancing legal certainty and judicial discretion. While AI-driven tools are designed to enhance consistency and efficiency, their growing influence may subtly reshape judicial reasoning, potentially narrowing judicial discretion. This chapter examines how algorithmic recommendations – rather than merely assisting adjudication – can become dominant reference points, steering judicial outcomes toward standardisation over case-specific interpretation. Drawing on empirical psychological research, behavioural law, and economics, and the works of Richard Posner, Aharon Barak, and other legal theorists, the chapter explores the psychological mechanisms underlying this shift, particularly phenomena known as ‘automation bias’ and the ‘anchoring effect’, which may unconsciously influence judicial decision-making. The analysis highlights these psychological and structural challenges, inviting reflection on how AI-driven legal certainty impacts judicial discretion and the space for individualised legal reasoning in modern adjudication.

This article offers an assessment of the current state of scholarship on animal ethics in Islam. It first discusses a group of texts that share the preoccupation of demonstrating the superiority of Islam’s animal teachings, thus exhibiting a clearly apologetic tone. Then it turns to the debate on animal ethics in Western academia. By raising challenging questions, the latter holds the promise of delving deeper into the subject, but at its current stage much of it is still hampered by factual inaccuracies and methodological flaws. In conclusion, the article explains why the subject of animal ethics in Islam is particularly deserving of careful study.

The classical doctrine of civil war had a second coming in the scholarly writings of international lawyers. This began in the 1890s around the time of the Chilean and Brazilian naval revolts and the Spanish-American War of 1898. Members of the new cosmopolitan profession of international lawyers sought to formulate a branch of international law to manage the phenomenon of civil war, combining the elements of belligerent recognition, recognition of insurgency, the laws of war, intervention, and state responsibility. Doing so, they produced something of a francophone synthesis of the classical doctrine of civil war at the turn of the century. This chapter explores the gradual process of this synthesis, from the writings of Carlos Wiesse and Antoine Rougier to the work of the Institut de droit international. However, it then concludes with an overview of the great disillusionment of the 1930s and shows how the legal debates during the Spanish Civil War laid bare the bankruptcy of the classical doctrine.

This chapter on special topics in negligence will look at some examples where the High Court has justified either expanding or denying liability in negligence. Each section summarises the approaches that have emerged in each of these special areas and will alert you to the relevance of the civil liability legislation as enacted by states and territories in response to the Ipp Report. Before you begin this chapter, it may be useful to revisit Chapter 11, particularly the section on key salient features in negligence.

This chapter focuses on AI and its impact on transparency in judicial decision-making. Transparency is one of the core values of the rule of law, and essential for maintaining the trust and accountability of the judiciary and justice system as a whole. Drawing upon semi-structured expert interviews with members of judiciary and legal profession, case law and real-life examples of AI tools, the chapter considers four questions: why transparency matters in the context of judicial decision-making; the information that judges must have and communicate to satisfy the demands of transparency; whether they have access to this information; and, if not, what we might do about this deficit. We argue that two complementary solutions can strengthen judicial transparency in the age of AI: (1) a regulatory framework that mandates disclosure of specific information pertaining to the code and variables used in AI tools; and (2) robust use of the due process duty to provide adequate reasons for a judicial decision that depends upon the output of a predictive tool. These steps are essential to reconcile judicial use of AI with the need for transparency, as a foundational aspect of justice and rule of law.

The present volume focuses closely on the constituents of performing law in its transitive and mobile enactments both inside and outside the courthouses where trials are staged. Working with actors, dancers, musicians, and lawyers, Performing Law provides a novel approach to the dramatics of justice, the theatre of veridiction, through analysis of the elements of its manifestation in architectural, artistic, corporeal, choreographic, filmic, and dance modalities of relay of legal action in the public sphere. These include the stage directions that legal doctrine provides to legal actors, the masks worn, the affective spaces created, the phantasms of interior and exterior, desire and terror, resistance and laughter that perform the long neglected media of the auditory and visual transmission of law as a form of life.

As the Framers anticipated, factions remain a powerful force in American politics. The founding generation disagreed about much, but there was a broad consensus that factions, the inevitable companions of democracy, lead to democratic excess and the abuse of power. Ironically, the factor most responsible for the continued influence of factions and particularly for the dominant influence of majority faction has been the steady democratization of the American constitutional system. The Framers would not be surprised. The best prospects of constraining the negative influences of faction are restoration of the balance between state and national powers and acceptance of the need for constraints on simple majority-rules democracy.

International human rights courts and treaty bodies are increasingly turning to automated decision-making (ADM) technologies to expedite and improve their review of individual complaints. These tribunals have yet to consider many of the legal, normative, and practical issues raised by the use of different types of automation technologies for these purposes. This chapter offers an initial assessment of the benefits and challenges of introducing ADM into international human rights adjudication. We weigh up the benefits of introducing these tools to improve international human rights adjudication – which include greater speed and efficiency in processing and sorting cases, identifying patterns in jurisprudence, and enabling judges and staff to focus on more complex responsibilities – against two types of cognitive biases – biases inherent in the datasets on which ADM is trained, and biases arising from interactions between humans and machines. We also introduce a framework for enhancing the accountability of ADM tools that mitigates the potential harms caused by automation technologies in this context.

Chapter 15 provides a biographical analysis of Manley O. Hudson’s role as a networker between the League of Nations and American elites during the interwar period. As a professor at Harvard Law School, Hudson played a pivotal role in advancing the League’s agenda in the United States. Through his extensive travels and engagements with American elites, Hudson circulated information, offered advice, and forged connections that helped to shape the American perspective on international law. The chapter examines how Hudson’s life and profession shaped his development into a prominent figure in a transatlantic network formed around the League of Nations system. Drawing on Hudson’s private papers and other archives, the chapter situates his intellectual and professional work within its social and historical context. By exploring Hudson’s intersecting roles as practitioner, advocate, and academic, we gain insight into his evolution as a leading American international lawyer. This examination allows us to understand the self-perception and worldview of one of the key figures in the development of international law and the complex relationship between the League and the United States. The chapter contributes to the trend in international and transnational history that uses biography to portray transnational spaces and experiences beyond national frameworks.

Say an AI program passes a Turing test because it can converse in a way indistinguishable from a human. And say that its developers can then teach it to converse – and even present an extended persuasive argument – in a way indistinguishable from the sort of human we call a ‘lawyer’. The program could thus become an AI brief-writer, capable of regularly winning brief-writing competitions against human lawyers. If and when that happens, this chapter argues, the same technology can be used to create AI judges, judges that we should accept as no less reliable than human judges, and more cost-effective. If the software can create persuasive opinions, capable of regularly winning opinion-writing competitions against human judges, we should accept it as a judge, even if the opinions do not stem from human judgment.