The growing involvement of private health insurers within universal health systems has intensified debate over their effects on access, equity, and long-term system sustainability. This paper examines the role of private insurers in the United Kingdom (UK) and South Africa through a case study of the Discovery Group, operating across both settings. We explore how private sector engagement shapes health financing, workforce dynamics, service delivery, digital infrastructure, and governance. Our analysis reveals that the impact of private health insurance on universal health systems is fundamentally context-dependent, mediated by institutional frameworks, regulatory environments, and the stage of universal coverage development. We find that private insurers can contribute meaningfully to digital health innovation and behavioural health interventions. However, expansion also introduces significant risks concerning workforce distribution, financing sustainability, and equity of access. These dynamics manifest differently across contexts. In the UK’s mature universal system, private insurance plays a supplementary role offering expedited access to care for members. In South Africa’s transitional dual system, private insurers more fundamentally shape whether quality care is accessible at all. As health systems evolve, the central challenge lies in developing governance frameworks that enable beneficial private sector contributions while safeguarding equitable access and national health system priorities.

Cultural heritage plays a central role in shaping history, identity, and power relations, and it is particularly vital for Indigenous peoples, for whom heritage is integral to cultural survival. In Indigenous contexts, colonial histories and enduring power imbalances have normalized practices of cultural appropriation through which dominant cultural groups exploit Indigenous heritage. While Indigenous peoples have long mobilized against appropriation, sometimes succeeding in claims to have their appropriated heritage returned to them, discussions on restitution have largely focused on tangible heritage. By contrast, the restitution of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), despite its importance and vulnerability to misappropriation, remains underexplored. This article addresses this gap by reappraising restitution and expanding its scope to encompass ICH. Acknowledging the nonexclusionary and nonrivalrous nature of intangible heritage, it argues that restitution can operate through the return of control over appropriated heritage rather than its impossible physical return. The article conceptualizes restitution of control across three interrelated dimensions: participation in heritage decision-making, stewardship and assurance of respect, and voice in shaping heritage narratives. It contends that restitution of control offers a viable and culturally appropriate form of redress for the harms of appropriation and a means of addressing the structural imbalances that enable it.

Digital policymaking in the European Union (EU), once seen as an internal market concern, is increasingly shaped by non-economic aims, such as the pursuit of security and the protection of fundamental rights. Recent pieces of legislation, such as the AI Act or the Cyber Resilience Act, have nominally acknowledged the relevance of such factors, but serious concerns have been raised about security considerations de facto trumping all others. In this article, we argue that, despite its predominance, security does not displace fundamental rights or the internal market as the foundations of EU digital law. Instead, we propose a framework to explain how the interaction among rationales for security promotion, rights protection, and market-making goes beyond mere opposition. Applying this framework to three case studies of post-GDPR regulation, we show that the deepening of fundamental rights safeguards in digital regulatory instruments offers, at most, a limited check to creeping securitisation – and sometimes even allows the EU legislator to extend the reach of security measures in the name of protecting certain rights. Understanding the logics and actors that shape the triple helix of markets, rights, and security is therefore crucial for properly understanding – and responding to – security overreach in cyberspace.

On December 11, 2025, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights delivered a landmark judgment in Tsaava and Others v. Georgia. The case arose from the Georgian authorities’ forceful dispersal of major public protests outside the Georgian Parliament in Tbilisi on the night of June 20–21, 2019, also known as “Gavrilov’s night.” Thousands of people gathered to protest the authorities’ invitation to Sergei Gavrilov, an outspoken member of the Russian Duma, to sit in the chair reserved for the Speaker of the Georgian Parliament. The Grand Chamber found extensive violations of the European Convention on Human Rights stemming from the state’s violent dispersal of the protest and the excessive and indiscriminate use of “less-lethal” weapons, specifically kinetic impact projectiles and rubber bullets, against demonstrators and journalists. Beyond vindicating individual applicants, the Grand Chamber directed Georgia to take specific measures to conduct an effective investigation into the events and to put in place domestic regulations on crowd control and the limits of police force.

The present article articulates and defends a version of constitutionalism that is only present in a few jurisdictions around the world: unwritten constitutionalism. Far from being irrelevant or unconnected, however, the operation of constitutionalism within unwritten constitutional settings has a great deal to offer to the theory and practice of constitutional studies. In doing so, we uphold the use of ‘written’ and ‘unwritten’ terminology, differentiate unwritten constitutionalism from other types of constitutionalism and argue that the insights of unwritten constitutionalism are crucial given the global turn to more authoritarian types of government. Examining some of the indicative features of unwritten constitutionalism, the article goes on to explore what lessons unwritten constitutionalism may be able to bring to written settings. By further unpacking the mystery of the unwritten constitution, we hope to make this unique form of constitutionalism more accessible and relevant to those that acknowledge constitutional text is not the end of the story.

A new study of the trial of Jesus of Nazareth urges that we turn our attention to the broader imperial context of the trial. Jesus made the local elites in charge of the Roman Empire deeply uncomfortable, and their status as elites - rather than their religion - best explains their response to his ministry.

Democracy today means liberal democracy. Exclusively. And ‘the crisis of liberal democracy is not necessarily a crisis of democracy as such’. This is the starting point of Philip Manow’s new book, Unter Beobachtung. Die Bestimmung der liberalen Demokratie und ihrer Freunde (‘Under Surveillance. Defining liberal democracy and its friends’). The German political scientist contends that through the new, exclusive understanding of democracy as liberal democracy, politics has been ‘suffocated’, and this largely contributed to the success of populism. In this review I argue that the populist promise for the rebirth of politics is dishonest, and I point to an underestimated consequence of liberal depoliticisation: rights inflation.

The COVID-19 pandemic unfolded alongside an unprecedented ‘infodemic’ that reshaped public engagement with science, health, and authority. This study examines how online infodemics translated into collective resistance and influenced population health through political mobilisation. Using structural equation models across six European countries, I conceptualise resistance as a latent construct – captured by residential mobility and protests opposing vaccines, lockdowns, and public health measures linked to populist radical right (PRR) movements – acting as a behavioural bridge between digital information environments and epidemic outcomes. The findings reveal a robust infodemic–resistance–epidemic pathway: greater exposure to infodemic content consistently predicts stronger opposition to non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and vaccination. This effect is strongest in Germany and Italy, where PRR networks amplified narratives of ‘elite overreach’ and ‘freedom under threat’, transforming online discontent into organised mobilisation. In other countries, resistance appears weaker and more pandemic-specific. By integrating informational, political, and epidemiological processes, the analysis shows how epidemics can evolve into politicised collective behaviour that undermines compliance and sustains transmission. The results highlight populist mobilisation as a key amplifier of epidemic risk and suggest that effective responses must rebuild trust, depoliticise health communication, and address structural sources of grievance.

Hogg and Bushell’s “The Charter Dialogue between Courts and Legislatures” sparked a debate concerning the extent to which legislatures respond to the Supreme Court of Canada’s decisions in which the judges invalidate laws under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. After constructing and coding a dataset of all relevant Charter cases between 2010 and 2023, this paper finds that the legislatures complied with rulings made by the Court in 93.3 per cent (or 28 out of 30) of the cases. It nevertheless demonstrates how the two non-compliant replies (to Bedford on sex work and to Carter on medical assistance in dying) are exceptional in that they featured strong interest-group support for upholding the constitutionality of the challenged provisions and thus straying from the Court’s rulings that invalidated them. This paper argues that while legislatures overwhelmingly comply with Charter rulings, interest-group support may help explain rare instances of legislative noncompliance.

This case note critically analyses Justice Malek Mathiang Malek v The Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, a case that challenged President Mayardit’s dismissal of 14 judges in the East African Court of Justice as unlawful under South Sudan’s Transitional Constitution and the Treaty for the Establishment of the East African Community. The court upheld the challenge and ordered the president to reinstate the judges to their previous positions. However, instead of reinstating them, the judges were asked to reapply, which they refused to do, saying that they should be reinstated automatically. The case is a significant development for at least two reasons: 1) it is the first ever case to overrule President Mayardit’s Republican Decree; 2) it is a triumph for the rule of law in that the court declared that the president and his government are subject to the law – like all the governments of the partner states.

The advancement of AI relies on text and data mining (TDM) to acquire training data, yet its large-scale algorithmic crawling activities fundamentally conflict with copyright regimes. Through comparative legal research, this article reveals the divergent governance approaches and efficacy deficiencies within the three major jurisdictions of the European Union, the United States and China. We argue that the current regulatory model adopted by the EU may adversely affect the dynamism of Europe’s AI industry. At the policy level, the EU should construct a synergistic “Cost-Benefit-Governance” framework, reducing compliance costs through differentiated regulation, collective licensing, and fiscal support measures. It should also leverage unified internal rules and international multilateral platforms to foster governance consensus. In legal practice, the EU should advance the clarification and tiered application of copyright exceptions. This can be achieved by refining rules, implementing data classification governance and innovating safe harbour liability mechanisms to enhance legal predictability, thereby balancing technological innovation and copyright protection. This framework aims to mitigate the inhibitory effect of current systems on AI innovation and address jurisdictional barriers through international cooperation.

Cet article présente les diverses configurations de crédit offertes par les magasins à rayons canadiens au cours du 20e siècle, en s’attardant au développement du crédit variable dans la période de l’après-guerre. Il démontre que les diverses formes de « comptes budgétaires » identifiées dans la littérature américaine étaient aussi offertes au Québec, en s’appuyant sur deux corpus d’archives. Il argue aussi que les transformations apportées au compte courant pour le rendre similaire à la vente à tempérament ont servi à transformer un contrat basé sur une relation humaine en contrat d’adhésion. Il fait ainsi une double contribution à la littérature : enrichissant d’une part les discussions théoriques des juristes sur le contrat d’adhésion de réflexions pertinentes tirées de la littérature sociologique sur le crédit à la consommation, et contribuant d’autre part à la littérature historique « fragmentée » sur le crédit à la consommation dans le siècle dernier.