What does it mean to think about trust as a legal scholar? From one perspective, there comes the broad question of why people trust or mistrust the law as it pertains to their lives and communities. Although there is no shortage of analytical angles from which to examine this question, to configure trust in relation to the lives of people and their communities is to broadly think about trust as a broad social phenomenon. That is because law is all-pervasive in structuring the social relations that shape the lives of individuals and their communities. On this basis, the multi-faceted traditions of ‘law and society’ and ‘socio-legal studies’ must become relevant for selecting the appropriate methods for exploring trust and trusting in relation to the law.

The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession, by Robert L. Nelson, Ronit Dinovitzer, Bryant G. Garth, Joyce S. Sterling, David B. Wilkins, Meghan Dawe, and Ethan Michelson, is an exhaustive, rigorous, and defining study of the US legal profession in the early twenty-first century. Like the profession itself during this period, its primary focus is on corporate practice and the ripple and sequencing effects of beginning a career in a corporate law firm. This review essay examines the takeaways from the questions that animate the book and considers how populism and rising autocracy will shape future research on lawyers’ careers.

The paper introduces the concept of ‘eco-digital constitutionalism’ to denote one of the latest offsprings of digital constitutionalism that, building on environmental constitutionalism, articulates rights and principles to face the ecological challenges of the digital revolution. We propose this concept as an analytical lens synthesising digital and environmental dimensions to study the response to the specific constitutional challenges of the twin transition: a convergence often overlooked by environmental or digital constitutionalism in isolation. In particular, the article leverages this new concept to investigate the emergence of digital sustainability principles within the EU, positioning the Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles as a catalytic normative blueprint. To contrast the Declaration’s fragmented structure, we develop a typology of three digital sustainability principles. We employ this categorisation as a parameter to conduct a socio-legal study of constitutionalisation of digital sustainability principles across EU member states. By examining a spectrum of sources, including constitutions, ordinary laws, policy documents and digital charters, our empirical findings reveal a process in its infancy, with no formal constitutional recognition and relegated to isolated pieces of legislation. On the contrary, policy documents remain the laboratory of digital sustainability principles, and digital charters display an effort to shift from principles to rights.

Along with “authenticity,” the criterion of “integrity” is used to evaluate and inscribe all World Cultural and Natural Heritage sites. However, ongoing debates in scholarly, organisational, and political circles reveal much confusion in the interpretation and application of integrity. This confusion is compounded by its common reference as “visual integrity” in World Heritage Committee discussions and inscriptions, despite the absence of this term in the Operational Guidelines that govern these matters. The studyis uncovering the historical connection between integrity and theories on the unity of a work of art, rooted in normative and homogenizing aesthetics. Furthermore, this paper analyzes two exemplary applications of integrity in the inscriptions of two World Cultural Heritage sites: Mbanza Kongo in Angola and Writing-on-Stone in Canada. Through analysis, the current application of integrity is associated with the perpetuation of a homogenizing lens through which heritage sites are visualized.

On October 6, 2025, Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court convicted Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, also known as “Ali Kushayb,” of twenty-seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity arising from the 2003–2004 attacks on the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa communities of West Darfur. The judgment is the first conviction in the Darfur situation, the first in any situation referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council, and the Court’s first conviction for gender-based persecution—on the novel basis that Fur men of fighting age were targeted because of a “perceived gender role” associating masculinity with combatant status. The decision confronts three doctrinal questions: Article 22(1) legality for nationals of non-states parties reached by Security Council referral; intersectionality of gender, ethnicity, and political identity under Article 7(1)(h); and fair trial guarantees under territorial-state non-cooperation. The judgment is nevertheless not final; the defence appealed on November 6, 2025; the reparations phase opened on December 9, 2025, the same day the twenty-year sentence was issued.

After collective violence, states often work to rebuild and repair the social fabric by promoting legal institutions and fostering peaceful relationships. The case of legal aid in post-genocide Rwanda provides insight into how legal aid providers manage cases in the context of overburdened courts and the state’s prioritization of reconciliation. This study relies on ethnographic and interview data with legal aid providers at legal aid centers throughout Rwanda to show how legal aid providers communicate the state’s moral vision of social cohesion to manage an overburdened court system through two interconnected strategies. First, legal aid providers orient people to moral beliefs about ways of being through community awareness-raising initiatives and extra-legal obligations that promote peaceful relations. Second, legal aid providers stall cases from going to court by counseling through narratives of forgiveness and reconciliation. These strategies prevent cases from reaching the courts by managing emotional expectations about the law’s limitations and reminding people of their societal obligations. Building on the law and culture literature, these findings highlight how social actors charged with interacting with vulnerable people creatively navigate the lasting ramifications of collective violence in everyday dispute resolution and conflict mediation.

This case note examines the most recent ruling of the District Court of Limassol, delivered on 4 March 2025, in the long-running litigation arising from the seizure of underwater cultural heritage by Cypriot authorities in December 2015. After outlining the factual background of the dispute, the claims advanced by the parties and the court’s reasoning and decision, the note proceeds to a critical assessment of the judgment. Particular attention is paid to the broader legal and practical implications of the ruling and to the extent to which it may inform approaches to the protection of underwater cultural heritage not only in Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean Sea but also in a wider international context.

Unlike the dispersed-ownership systems common in Western markets, corporate governance in China, South Korea, and Japan is distinctively characterised by insider control exercised through Party-state influence, family control, and cross-shareholding networks. These structures strongly shape how sustainability is implemented at the firm level. Although all three jurisdictions have adopted Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reforms, their effectiveness has been constrained by concentrated decision-making and limited opportunities for stakeholder influence, particularly for institutional investors. This article challenges assumptions of global convergence in corporate governance by showing that ESG initiatives often coexist with entrenched insider control, resulting in only partial or symbolic adoption. Drawing on agency cost theory and case studies of major firms, this article demonstrates how region-specific insider control structures constrain the effectiveness of investor-led sustainability efforts. To address these challenges, the article advances two avenues for reform: incentivising insider controllers to internalise sustainability and gradually reducing their dominance by diluting entrenched control and strengthening the role of non-controlling shareholders. The article also contributes to comparative corporate governance scholarship by conceptualising how insider control shapes ESG trajectories in East Asia and by identifying alternative pathways towards long-term corporate accountability and sustainability.

The legal appraisal of civilian mental harm amounting to trauma is something that has been discussed by international scholars when it comes to warfare and its aftermath, but no discussion has taken place on how such civilian war trauma can be compensated for. The question becomes even starker in cases of cumulative war trauma, where the trauma incurred appears as an externality of warfare and as a natural repercussion stemming from the latter. Along these lines and drawing from climate change litigation that has taken place before international courts and tribunals over the last few years, this article details how arguments derived from that litigation scheme can present prospects as well as limitations with regard to how cumulative war trauma, caused by States as well as by non-State actors, can be subject to compensation.

This article addresses the challenges in formulating data-sharing regulations by proposing a systematic regulatory matrix based on data characteristics. While data-driven innovation drives economic growth, existing legal frameworks in the EU are incoherent and often tend towards data propertisation, even if indirectly, which may lead to data underutilisation. The matrix is built on varied data characteristics, and it aims to foster access to data and data sharing as a fundamental general principle underpinning the data-driven innovation market. This framework offers a balanced regulatory scheme ranging from open access to proprietary models, aiming to maximise innovation and public good in the emerging field of data law.

This article argues that civil liability in EU digital regulation does more than enforce regulatory duties or compensate damage arising from regulatory breaches: it also produces governance effects by specifying regulatory duties and (re)allocating regulatory risks between market actors. Drawing on regulatory theory and examples from the case law of the Court of Justice and national courts in the fields of data protection, online platform regulation and competition law, the article demonstrates how these duty-specifying and risk-allocating effects emerge through the very structure of compensation claims: damage, unlawfulness and causation.

The commercialisation of ‘payment-like’ digital currencies in the financial system challenges our pre-existing state-centric legal conception of money due to their self-governing and decentralised nature. Stablecoins – particularly those which are backed by reserves and pegged to a single fiat currency on a 1:1 basis (SCS) – have the potential to reduce the transaction costs of cross-border payments. By drawing insights from a comparison of the Singapore and United Kingdom regulatory approaches towards facilitating SCS as a means of payment, the objective of this article is to consider how the legal characterisation of money under the common law should respond to, and facilitate the increasing use of, such digital currencies as a means of payment. It proposes a substance over form approach towards the characterisation of ‘money’. Under this proposed characterisation, the legal form or origin of an instrument should not be determinative of its monetary status; instead, the touchstone of the monetary status of an instrument is whether it serves as an effective means of the transfer of monetary value between parties, regardless of its underlying technology. On this basis, ‘payment-like’ digital currencies which bear these functional characteristics, such as SCS, may be recognised as money and the functional equivalent of fiat currency, subject to the appropriate regulatory safeguards that enable them to serve this monetary function.

Research that assesses individual judges’ ability to shape decisions typically focuses on courts that publish separate votes and opinions. Yet, many courts issue per curiam judgments that do not permit public dissent. To overcome this limitation, we use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to model the variation in judges’ expressed preferences from language in aggregated judgments. Specifically, we construct a CNN to analyze the written judgments of judge-rapporteurs and opinions of advocates-general from the Court of Justice of the European Union. Along a pro-/anti-EU dimension, we estimate how judgments differ within (1) each case relative to the advocate-general’s opinion, and (2) each judge-rapporteur, which captures how judges alter their writing across cases. Our results provide novel empirical support for theoretical models of European judicial decision-making: more pro-EU opinions driven by the Court, not the advocate-general or the judge-rapporteur, are associated with larger chambers and stronger external signals of compliance.