Impartiality, broadly meaning the absence of bias and according equal treatment before the law, is a foundational element of judicial decision-making around the world. In this chapter, we consider how the goal of judicial impartiality may be either enhanced and supported or undermined by the use of artificial intelligence. Key developments in legal AI include innovations directed toward courts and decision- makers. These may be process-driven – for example, triaging or decision-supporting systems; in the case of pre-trial processes, judges may need to manage technology-facilitated document discovery. AI systems may also be involved in the production of evidence submitted to the court. Finally, courts and judges themselves may be the subjects of AI tools, such as those which identify patterns in decision-making. As this chapter explores, these different uses all have implications for the way that judicial impartiality is enacted and tested.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is influencing many fields around the world, including court practice and procedure. This chapter focuses on AI and the courts in Australia and New Zealand, examining both criminal and civil trial applications. The first section discusses generative AI, technology-assisted review, and automated decision- making; and the second considers the influence of AI on criminal cases, with a focus on child protection and sentencing. AI has many useful applications in this context, however, it should be carefully regulated. In relation to the development of policy and guidelines on AI, Australia and New Zealand courts are only beginning their implementation and may not be as advanced as other jurisdictions, but there is increasing recognition in government and by legal regulatory bodies, and this will be an area of significant policy development over the next decade.

One of the most significant innovations made by the League of Nations was its new disciplinary mechanism against violators of international peace: the instrument of economic sanctions. Instead of going to war to prevent more war, the League would summon the combined material force of its members to exert strong pressure against aggressors. But to implement this procedure, codified in the Covenant’s Article 16, a number of longstanding international legal norms had to be challenged and modified. This chapter examines the legal revolution constituted by the introduction of sanctions by examining debates surrounding C.241, a key League study about the legality of blockade, in 1927. It shows that justifying the use of crippling blockade-style pressure outside of war destabilized the existing laws of war and peace and was more controversial than is usually assumed.

This chapter explores the implications of AI for human judges through the lens of judicial professional competence. It draws on Australasian experience to make two universal arguments: to include competence on the front bench of judicial regulatory values, and to embed digital literacy in the definition and pursuit of judicial competence. There is a deep-rooted, but increasingly problematic, assumption in common law jurisdictions that judges emerge ready-made from the ranks of senior lawyers. The breadth and complexity of potential judicial engagement with AI poses a profound challenge to this assumption. Even in ‘career’ judiciaries, traditional markers of competence for judicial work do not reliably translate to competence for AI. While other dimensions of modern judicial competence, like cross-cultural skills, may be seen to raise similar concerns, AI-related risks and opportunities are proving unique in the speed at which they emerge and evolve. There is an urgent need for more open discussion about equipping future (and current) judicial cohorts to meet this challenge.

Literature in the legal humanities has begun to turn toward performance as a new site of analysis: as source, representation, and intervention. From Law and Performance (2018) to Law as Performance (2022), this belated comparison has garnered increasing traction. But methods from dance and performance studies, those wayward disciplines where corporeality supersedes the literary, still make only passing appearances. The repercussions, however, exceed the methodological toward the most material. This chapter underscores the consequences for this absence by centring the lone figure, “Naked Athena,” as a femme body in protest whose choreographic aesthetic of whiteness allowed particular flexibility under the law. Through her balletic performance of resistance, themes of discipline, elegance, and decorum swirl against the indecent, vulgar, and obscene labels afforded other protesters in the same scene. Motivated by this framing, I focus us toward identification of the publicly exposed body as righteously revealed or promiscuously pornographic, an aesthetic distinction theorized within art history as the difference between nakedness and nudity yet left ambiguous in legal terms.

Failure to adequately constrain factions is reflected most prominently in partisan gridlock in Congress, Congressional abdication of constitutional authorities and responsibilities, the political divide in the appointment of federal judges, the perception of partisan influence on judicial decisions, and the growth of the administrative state.

Efficiency is one of the most pervasive arguments in favour of implementing algorithms in courts of law. Across different legal contexts, many judiciaries find themselves pressured towards efficiency by growing caseloads and budgetary constraints. The purported speed of the use of AI can be seen as a solution to many existing problems, and even as a positive contribution to the value of access to justice. Through a case study of the Brazilian Judiciary’s strategy of the implementation of algorithms, the drive towards efficiency is examined and unpacked to reveal a series of tensions. First, there is a lack of conceptual clarity which leads to multiple, and sometimes competing, notions of efficiency, especially in light of the interpretation and interplay of legal principles. Moreover, the neutral appearance of efficiency can obscure political choices that cause substantive changes to the legal system without being submitted to democratic control. In this sense, a more nuanced view of efficiency as a judicial value is necessary, where it can be both contested and balanced against other core judicial values, and also seen as directional and at the service of specific ends of law.

The decline of the classical doctrine of civil war in state practice began right after the American Civil War, when the concept of belligerent recognition had barely been coined in the legal literature. There were several reasons for this. First, after the abolition of privateers in the 1856 Declaration of Paris, the maritime powers had essentially deprived future insurgents of their primary weapon at sea, the privateer. Second, developments in the law of neutrality after the Geneva arbitration raised the prospect of state responsibility towards belligerents for neutral states. Third, as indeterminate pragmatism became a diplomatic norm, new legal vocabularies began to develop that were seemingly independent of questions of formal recognition. New, deliberately ambiguous approaches to recognition emerged, especially in the Latin American insurgencies, such as the recognition of insurgency doctrine.

Nuisance is a tort that responds to interferences with the use and enjoyment of land, or with rights shared by the community at large. It is a flexible cause of action, capable of addressing diverse harms such as smoke, noise, odours and obstruction of access to public places. Although often categorised under tort law, nuisance has long straddled the boundaries between private law, public law and regulatory regimes.

In modern legal systems, the boundaries of nuisance are increasingly shaped by legislation. These types of legislative regime may limit the scope of nuisance by authorising certain conduct, prescribing alternative remedies or displacing common law actions altogether. As a result, the availability and utility of nuisance claims often depend on navigating the complex interface between common law and statutory regulation.

This chapter primarily focuses on the tort of private nuisance, but it also provides a brief overview of the tort of public nuisance.

The book develops the synergies between Islamic Law, Environmental Law, and Corporate Social Responsibility to situate the concern of environmental degradation looking at regional, transboundary and global disputes between the state, corporate actors, and stakeholders. This book will lay the foundations of Islamic thought related to environmental protection, air quality control, and water rights. Through the lens of environmental law, the work will broaden the framework for Islamic law and critique political and economic dynamics in Muslim-majority countries that give rise to increased levels of environmental toxicity, hazardous waste, water stress, and rampant extractivism. This collection examines these concerns in terms of rigidities and interdependencies, between competing claims to resources, rights and responsibilities, strategy and governance, between state and corporate actors, and the implications for equity and the common good over the long term. Islam and Environmental Law is simultaneously a classical legal framework and contemporary approach for environmental protection, human rights, and an earth-centered jurisprudence.

The day after launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, in a public speech addressed to multiple audiences, Putin called for the ‘overthrow’ of the Ukrainian government, which he labelled a ‘gang of narcomany (‘drug addicts’) and neo-Nazis’ (Roth, 2022). We will return to the significance of this speech later; here we would add to the picture that after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, in all territories under Russian occupation, opioid agonist therapy (OAT) programmes were immediately shut down, reflecting their status as being also banned in Russia.