Chapter 5 addresses the German–Polish Convention of 15 May 1922, a legal instrument that was negotiated with the direct participation of the League Secretariat and whose aim was the smooth partition of the multi-ethnic industrial region of Upper Silesia. It shows that while this treaty provided opportunities for ‘peace through law’, it ultimately failed to meet this expectation. After providing an overview of the Convention’s drafting process and its key features, notably its reliance on international procedural avenues to guarantee individual rights, the chapter examines these guarantees and how they came into being. It then focusses on the role of the president of the Mixed Commission for Upper Silesia, Felix Calonder, a vocal proponent of ‘peace through law’. In his role as local guarantor of minority rights, Calonder developed a systematic case law that was unequalled before the advent of the international human rights law bodies after the Second World War and foreshadowed some of the principles adopted by them. It concludes by reflecting on the various limitations that this law shared with other attempts to use legal techniques to solve interstate conflicts of the interwar period.

What prompted Arendt’s investigations of moral and legal judgment was the trial of Adolf Eichmann for crimes of the Holocaust. Her controversial view is that Eichmann represented the “banality of evil,” by which she means “the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness.” This chapter explains what Arendt means by “banality of evil” and why it led to confusions. It reviews the evidence by which she supported her thesis of Eichmann’s banality. The chapter points out several large and challenging philosophical questions the thesis raises. The chapter’s final section connects her concept of the banality of evil to her reflections on kitsch in aesthetics, as well as to Kant’s “maxims of common human understanding.” Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment turns out to be central to Arendt’s approach to moral judgment.

A tort is a special kind of wrongdoing. ‘Tort’ is a legal term that describes a particular category of interpersonal wrongdoing dealt with by the civil justice system. The law of torts covers a wide range of different types of misconduct, including many torts with well-known names like ‘assault’, ‘battery’, ‘trespass to land’, ‘defamation’ and ‘negligence’. The task of defining the word ‘tort’ is notoriously difficult, given that more than 70 torts are known to the common law world, each with a different focus and a distinctive set of elements to protect different personal interests.

Curiously, there does not appear to be any shared identifying characteristic nor any unified set of interests that the law of torts seeks to protect to the exclusion of any other area of the law. The search for a clear definition is further complicated by the constant state of development of the law of torts. Some torts are outdated and no longer recognised in Australia, while others that have existed in other common law jurisdictions for many years have not yet been widely accepted here.

Religious codes possess social control effects that can potentially change the behaviour of their adherents towards becoming pro-environment. In the case of Islam, Muslim-majority states since the time of the Prophet Muhammad have implemented Islamic environmental law to this effect. Unfortunately, accounts of its implementation today in the legal literature are scant, thereby requiring fresh insights that consider changes in the application of Islamic law in modern states. Generally, this article observes that the implementation of Islamic environmental law today takes two forms: first, implementation through constitutions; and, second, implementation through non-binding religio-legal instruments. Focusing on the second form, application in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia is analysed and evaluated. In these three Southeast Asian states non-binding religious rulings (fatwa) and mosque sermons (khutbah) have been used to implement Islamic environmental law. There are two key factors which contribute to ensuring that these non-binding instruments achieve their social control objectives: first, local legal and political contexts shaped by religion-state relations that help their implementation and legitimation; and, second, the pursuit of post-fatwa/khutbah follow-up action by religious authorities to put Islamic environmental law into actual practice.

A hima is a reserved pasture, where trees and grazing lands are protected from indiscriminate harvest on a temporary or permanent basis. It existed in the Middle East before Islam; it was treated as a private reserve for powerful chieftains who were said to have used it as a tool of oppression. With the emergence of Islam, its function changed; it became a property dedicated to the well-being of the whole community around it. Tribes had their own himas with the permission of the state, and acted as self-government in the absence of state control. This institution flourished through the first half of the 20th century, when major political, economical, and social changes took place in the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula. The paper reviews the changes that have taken place in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen with regard to the himā. Modern researchers and consultants of governments in the region still recommend using this traditional institution, because they believe that its revival and extension for land improvement based on cultural principles would be successful; it would not require the introduction of alien social institutions or values. This paper recommends some modifications required to adopt this traditional system in the current societies of the region.

The principle of popular sovereignty allows for only democracy as a form of government. But democracy produces the political factions that can corrupt government unless constrained. Beginning with the corrupting influence of factions in the state governments after the Revolution, the chapter discusses the Framers’ understanding of why human nature leads to factions.

This chapter offers a historical and legal reinterpretation of the minority protection clauses of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, with a particular focus on their implications for the Kurds living in Turkey. While the treaty is often cited as excluding the Kurds from formal minority status, on the one hand, this chapter argues that Articles 38 and 39 of Lausanne nevertheless extended certain rights and protections to all inhabitants of Turkey, including the Kurds. Drawing on the treaty’s drafting history, diplomatic correspondence, and international jurisprudence this article demonstrates that Turkey’s subsequent denial of Kurdish rights therefore constitutes a breach of its treaty obligations. On the other hand, it further explores how Ankara, through military leverage, strategic ambiguity, and political assurances, succeeded in “de-internationalising” Kurdish claims, effectively shielding its domestic policies from external scrutiny. The article concludes by highlighting the shared responsibility of the Allied Powers and the League of Nations in allowing these violations to go unchallenged, and calls for renewed scholarly attention to Lausanne’s unfulfilled Kurdish question.

How should criminal law come to grips with the banality of evil – the phenomenon of a normal person who is unable to tell right from wrong, and who commits grave crimes under circumstances that make it hard for him to know or feel that he is doing wrong? Those circumstances include not only the enthusiasm of Eichmann’s superiors” to “In Eichmann’s case, those circumstances include not only the enthusiasm of his superiors for the Final Solution but also the very nature of Nazi legality, which the chapter analyzes through Ernst Fraenkel’s concept of the “dual state,” where the law in books forbids murder but the dictator’s will supersedes the law in books without repealing it. The problem that preoccupies Arendt is that under these circumstances Eichmann and his ilk lack the subjective mens rea that “civilized jurisprudence” demands to justify punishment. At times she flirts with the idea that unforgivable crimes cannot be punished; the criminals can only be “eliminated.” The chapter argues that this is a mistake. That leaves the question of how to justify punishing criminals who lack subjective mens rea. The chapter concludes with a proposal that thoughtlessness, abdication of judgment, and culpable credulousness are a sufficient mens rea – and thus that the solution to Arendt’s problem is the banality of evil itself.

In this chapter, the element of breach is covered in four sections. Section 12.1 discusses the nature of breach as an element of the tort of negligence – what it is there for and what it covers. Section 12.2 discusses the standard of care – a question of law. Section 12.3 explains what courts take into account to assess the conduct of a defendant – a question of fact. Section 12.4 discusses the ways in which breach of duty can be proved.

Two sets of ‘Summary points’ summarise the matters that you should take into account when approaching a problem question. They appear at the end of the discussion of the nature and role of breach (section 12.1) and again at the end of the chapter.

Note that these ‘Summary points’ ask you to engage in an active reading exercise: your task is to link each of the summary points with a case in the section.

Marleen Gorris’s feminist classic A Question of Silence (1982) features what may be one of the most memorable court scenes ever filmed: an extended scene of wild laughter that grows and grows to eventually engulf all the women in the courtroom. The scene offers an occasion to think through modes and gestures of feminist refusal. There are other scenes: a fifteenth-century image depicting Calefurnia as it pops up in Julie Stone Peters’ Law as Performance; the bacchants in ecstasy tearing apart the son/king as figured in Bonnie Honig’s reading of Euripides’ play in A Feminist Theory of Refusal; Nancy Spero’s Sheela na gigs… Juxtaposing these and yet other scenes, this chapter returns to critical legal themes of rupture and minor jurisprudence in an attempt to further populate the feminist heterotopia that is the elsewhere of law’s mediation.

Adjudication in the various courts in Nigeria has been struggling to break through the jinx of case backlogs, slow legal service delivery, limited access to justice, particularly in rural areas, overburdened courts, and insufficient legal resources. However, Covid-19 led to the adoption of digital technology in the filing, service of court processes, and speedy dispensation of justice through virtual court sittings. Technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) are the driving force behind the digital administration of law and justice, and courts in Nigeria stand at the precipice of a potential technological breakthrough. However, this is not without challenges, such as inadequate infrastructure, poor funding, and lack of capacity building for the judges to understand the complexities. This chapter examines the development of the AI-driven court system and attempts to put in place a national AI policy for the justice sector in Nigeria.