This essay argues for a shift in sociolegal scholarship on lawyers’ careers from a framework centered on stratification to one attentive to reconfiguration under changing institutional conditions. Building on the findings of the After the JD project and related scholarship, we suggest that enduring hierarchies of race, gender, class, and professional prestige are increasingly reorganized through fragmentation of the professional field, technological change, shifting forms of capital, transformations in the social organization of legal work, and in politics and the economy. Rather than displacing earlier insights about inequality, we argue for extending them through a more dynamic account of careers, institutions, and professional change across time.

The International Law Commission’s (ILC) Draft Conclusions on Identification of Customary International Law represent an important attempt to provide organized doctrinal guidance on customary law-making. However, a conceptual issue figures prominently: the formation and development of custom are characterized in the Conclusions as distinct from the identification of custom, and the ILC offers little explanation as to why this must be the case. In essence, this distinction assumes that the formation of custom is an objective, spontaneous, and chronological process beyond the control of individual lawyers. Although seemingly innocuous, this assumption is directly responsible for various doctrinal problems, such as the relationship between the two traditional elements of custom, the requisite duration of its formation, and the ‘post-identification’ interpretation of custom. Drawing primarily on insights from historiography, this article explains why the formation and identification of custom should be understood as a single process, and why conceiving of it as a matter of narrative construction provides a better solution to the above-mentioned questions.

Enforcement is costly, so sometimes states choose not to enforce their laws. We study this choice under rules and under standards. We show that nonenforcement of rules sends a relatively clear signal about state capacity. Regulated parties can use this information and violate law to some extent with impunity. Nonenforcement of standards sends a noisier signal, and this uncertainty may cause regulated parties to comply with law even though the state lacks capacity to enforce, a surprising implication. According to conventional wisdom, standards are costlier to enforce than rules, meaning a switch from rules to standards should decrease compliance. However, we argue that standards, by obscuring the state’s capacity, can increase compliance. We identify the characteristics of standards that yield these effects, and we show that the logic generalizes to the complexity of law as well as its precision.

The European Union (EU) carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) has come under attack for its alleged incompatibility with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR-RC). This article provides a normatively informed analysis of the justification of the EU CBAM under the Chapeau of Article XX of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), as interpreted in light of CBDR-RC. The article builds on the principle’s capabilities limb to advocate a dynamic and forward-looking interpretative approach. As the article illustrates, this narrower interpretation is normatively desirable for several reasons. First, it safeguards and reinforces the environmental effectiveness of the CBAM’s arrangements. Second, it aligns more closely with the operationalization of the principle of CBDR-RC under the Paris Agreement. Third, it is more faithful to the WTO dispute settlement organs’ interpretation and application of the Chapeau.

As industrial policy and national security become increasingly integrated, the extent to which national security may be abused to foster select economic sectors requires more dedicated studies. We make two major contributions in this paper. First, we offer a critical analysis of China’s digital industrial policy, focusing on data security regulation and practices. We show that China has sought to maintain a balanced approach towards data liberalization and protection without compelling evidence to suggest abuses of national security to bolster its data sector. Yet, major loopholes remain in China’s regulatory framework leaving room for discretion and abuse in deploying data security measures. As geopolitical tensions and strategic rivalries intensify, a data trade war in the name of national security is not a remote possibility. Second, we argue that the security exceptions under existing trade or digital economy agreements can hardly strike a desirable balance between data liberalization and security. Governments should join forces to modernize these exceptions, ideally via multilateral venues, by deliberating on data security goals and regulatory practices to build transparency and trust and lay the groundwork for negotiating more detailed exceptions for data security.

This article examines how operational-level grievance mechanisms (OGMs) implemented by transnational mining companies in Africa entrench corporate control over victims’ access to remedy. Although OGMs are central to the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, their deployment in weak governance contexts often transforms them from early-warning tools into the sole avenue for redress. Through a comparative analysis of four different mines that reveal converging mining and business and human rights dynamics unique to Africa, this article considers how OGMs reproduce power asymmetries through opaque procedures, limited consultation, information imbalances, and unpredictable remedies. These dynamics undermine the UNGPs’ effectiveness criteria and reveal structural gaps within Pillar Three’s design. The article argues for alternatives, such as independent grievance mechanisms and additional guidance on implementing the UNGPs that guarantee legal representation, prohibit restrictive waivers, and introduce sector-specific recommendations. Without such changes, OGMs risk legitimising corporate abuses rather than remedying harm.

The interaction across law, rights and nature has led to a resurgence in the significance of sacred and natural sites to nature conservation. In Africa, this turn was marked by the adoption of the Resolution on the Protection of Sacred Natural Sites and Territories by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in 2017. However, this resolution remains entangled in the Anglo-German heritage of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Given the expansive mandate of the African Commission under the 1981 African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, this article argues that the African Commission might consider formulating an Africa-focused characterization of sacred and natural sites, away from its reference to the IUCN’s definition, and in accordance with Africa’s needs within the context of the leading role of the Charter and related Africa-centred nature-specific treaties.

The agency problem describes the information asymmetry where the agent knows more than the principal, who accordingly is vulnerable to the agent taking advantage. It is the central issue in the motor finance litigation, where the basic facts are that a consumer buys a car on credit from a dealer who takes a secret commission from the lender or hides other salient facts from the buyer.

Religious freedom in Japan is a legal transplant, introduced due to contact with Western legal systems in the 19th century and subsequently entrenched by article 20 of the current Constitution. This transplanted norm has operated within a complex religious landscape shaped by Shintō traditions alongside imported religions. Although challenges concerning religious freedom and the separation of religion and state persist, the Japanese experience demonstrates that this transplantation has produced tangible benefits. The constitutional framework has helped to clarify the relationship between religion and state, particularly with respect to Shintō, addressing entanglements that proved problematic in the pre-war period. Central to this development is a sophisticated body of jurisprudence developed by the Japanese Supreme Court, which has refined doctrinal tests attentive to Japan’s social and cultural context, evidencing the effective internalisation of transplanted norms. Constitutional protections have also safeguarded religious freedom, while permitting state intervention to restrict practices considered socially harmful. In this context, claims that the diffusion of religious freedom to Japan has failed are unpersuasive.

In 1964, in Rookes v Barnard, the House of Lords restated the law concerning aggravation of damages. Its effect was to dispel what had been described as its ‘Janus-like attitude’. This attitude was borne out by the historical common law’s tendency to allow two theoretically distinct elements – punishment and compensation – to intermingle in awards of what had hitherto been loosely labelled ‘exemplary’ damages. And yet the House’s restatement has proved controversial. This paper presents the first historical examination of the Janus-like attitude in which the pre-1964 law concerning aggravation of damages persisted in England. By shedding new light on the period from which this area of the law of civil damages immediately broke some six decades ago, it helps modern scholars and law reformers better understand the controversy in which it remains embroiled.

Viet Nam’s pursuit of data sovereignty is reshaping its digital governance, while its implications for individual rights and digital markets require more careful consideration. The transition from the 2018 Cyber Security Law to the 2025 consolidated Cyber Security Law raises an important questions: how can data sovereignty be advanced while preserving legal certainty, rights protection, and digital economic growth? This article applies doctrinal analysis and a regulatory rule-of-law framework to analyse the clarity of new obligations, the proportionality of enforcement powers and penalties, restorative and resilience measures supporting trust and business continuity; and the balance between certainty and adaptability in a rapidly evolving digital economy. It suggests that while consolidation has improved textual coherence and enhanced the State capacity, but may also give rise to broad technology-neutral duties and significant administrative discretions. Without more contestable standards and carefully calibrated safeguards, these developments may place additional compliance burdens on businesses and affect investment confidence and rights protections in Viet Nam.

Orthodox accounts of negligence liability for ‘pure psychiatric damage’ view it as protecting the claimants’ interest in their psychiatric health and often attack English law’s restrictive duty of care rules for inadequately safeguarding this right. This paper challenges this widespread consensus by presenting and evaluating an alternative explanatory rationale. Drawing an analogy between the ‘paradigm case’ of primary victims and the tort of assault, the crux of the argument is that the interest protected in ‘accident’ cases is in avoiding anticipated immediate physical violence but the law sometimes extends the protection of this right to secondary victims in order to preserve the law’s legitimacy. From this perspective, several intractable doctrinal problems that have long troubled adherents to the orthodox view become explicable.

This article examines how artificial intelligence (AI) impacts state sovereignty and the balance between innovation and control in AI governance through a case study of Türkiye. As AI technologies become increasingly sophisticated, they challenge traditional notions of sovereignty, creating tensions between fostering innovation and maintaining regulatory control. The concept of “AI sovereignty” encompasses a state’s ability to exercise meaningful control over AI infrastructure, data resources, regulatory frameworks, and technological capabilities. Türkiye’s AI strategy illustrates how “middle powers” navigate this balance, especially as it stands at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, requiring Türkiye to develop distinct approaches that reflect its unique geopolitical position. The analysis reveals that sovereignty in the AI domain encompasses multiple dimensions—technical capabilities, regulatory frameworks, and strategic positioning—requiring adaptable governance approaches. The findings offer insights for jurisdictions seeking to balance innovation imperatives with control mechanisms while maintaining strategic autonomy in an evolving global AI landscape.

Under English law, adoption permanently severs a child’s legal ties with their birth family, raising concerns about identity that sit uneasily with Islamic legal principles emphasising the preservation of lineage. These tensions are particularly acute for Muslim children, who are overrepresented in the English care system yet underrepresented in adoption. This paper argues that the resulting disparity derives in part from the tolerance of secrecy surrounding a child’s origins within English adoption law. Addressing the source of these tensions, the paper challenges the widespread assumption that adoption is prohibited in Islamic law. It examines recent legislative and judicial developments in Muslim-majority states that facilitate adoption-like arrangements while safeguarding children’s identity rights, highlighting that secrecy is the main source of religious concern. Against the policy context created by the 2022 Independent Review of Children’s Social Care and its call for a ‘radical reset’, the paper identifies secrecy within English adoption practice as a continuing barrier to legitimacy and permanence, and proposes a clear policy requiring early disclosure of adoptive status, before age seven and with local authority support, to strengthen children’s identity rights and permanence outcomes across the care system.

Modern legal understanding of command responsibility has been largely informed by the 1946 case of General Tomoyuki Yamashita in Manila, which established the rules that commanders are responsible for their troops’ crimes. This article shifts focus to a segment of war crimes trials held by the British military authorities in Hong Kong, to examine three trials in relation to the issue of command responsibility of the commanders of the Japanese military police for crimes perpetrated by the Kempeitai during the Japanese military occupation. By examining the court transcripts of these trials, this article explores the various arguments surrounding the criminal responsibility of the accused commanders and how wartime responsibilities were constructed after the war. This article argues that the British legal personnel moved beyond approaching civilian war crimes in terms of individual misconduct alone to hold commanders liable for crimes arising from organizational and command failures. These trials also offer an interesting example of the wider debates over the skewed application of law vis á vis the lack of procedural clarity, lax rules of evidence, inaccurate factual determinations, and the limits of postwar justice. As such, this article makes an original contribution to Hong Kong legal history and deepens our understanding of the British attempts to achieve colony-wide demand for retribution after WWII.

The article examines the state theory of French public lawyer Raymond Carrré de Malberg. It argues that he responds in a highly original way to a crisis of public law government that is tied to the emergence of the social sciences and to the democratization of society. The analysis ties Carré de Malberg’s attempt to salvage the idea of public law government to his reflections on the referendum, which he will reject as incompatible with the regime of the Third Republic, only to rehabilitate it in his late work. The analysis brings to light a depletion of the ideological resources of public law government, which speaks to a European-wide crisis of public law. As we shall show, it also speaks to an overarching crisis of a bourgeois society that had channeled its power through the legislature but realized that this organ of government would not continue to be the seat of power in society.