Biological differences between the sexes are perhaps at their most obvious when considering sporting competition. This chapter considers the law in relation to sporting competition from two distinct perspectives. The first looks at the case law of the European Court of Human Rights as it relates to the participation of athletes with DSDs in the female category. A central theme in this analysis is the importance of understanding the precise nature of a particular DSD before legal analysis can be conducted. The second part looks at the domestic law in relation to sporting competitions and takes the opportunity to examine the first case to apply the Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland v. The Scottish Ministers and provide detailed reasons. This is a convenient opportunity to restate the key implications of the case and to address, as the court did, some common arguments advanced to criticise or narrowly interpret the Supreme Court judgment.

In the summer of 1776, at least 14,000 overseers of the poor in England and Wales had to put pen to paper: a deadline was approaching, and information had to be gathered and returned. Only around April of that year had these men taken up their office, following a procedure set in the Elizabethan poor law. They would serve for one year, until the next Easter nomination, and during the previous few months they had no doubt been busy. Parish rates were to be collected; orphans, widows, and the infirm required pensions; pauper children had to be clothed and bound as apprentices; and actual and potential paupers had to be examined and sometimes removed. Every penny spent needed to be recorded, the magistrate and parish vestry had to be satisfied, county and state taxation required attention, and new cases had to be assessed. With an increasing population and mounting grain prices, even hard-working householders turned to the overseer of the poor. Women were reported for carrying illegitimate children – it was the overseer of the poor who had to chase the reputed fathers to extract the lying-in and maintenance costs.

When it became clear that gender critical belief is protected in our anti-discrimination law, it was often said that, while such views were protected, manifesting or expressing them was not. This is simply not true. Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects both the absolute right to hold a belief and the qualified right to manifest a belief. The manifestation of protected beliefs is also protected under Article 10, which protects the right to freedom of expression. Because these are qualified rights, it may be permissible to interfere with them where proportionate. Where discrimination or harassment arises because someone holds gender critical views, this will be unlawful. However, where the treatment complained of is a genuine response to the fact or manner of manifestation of a protected belief, the legal situation becomes more complex. In assessing the extent to which is it permissible for an employer or other duty-bearer to interfere with the fact or manner of manifestation of a protected belief, the central importance of freedom of expression must be recognised as the background context of any analysis.

Chapter 4 focuses on the impact of the settlement laws on local community life. A rare personal diary by a Sussex village shopkeeper (1754–1765), records his activity as a parish officer and helps to paint a detailed canvas and to connect the history of parish administration with studies of gender and the social order. This chapter also returns to the legal framework to explore further the responsibilities of the overseer of the poor and the parish vestry.

Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Baha’i religious minority in Iran has been persecuted by the Iranian government, with varying degrees of intensity. In 2011, former UNAMIR Commander Romeo Dallaire recognised their vulnerability in a speech to the Canadian Senate. ‘The similarities with what I saw in Rwanda are absolutely unquestionable’, he opined, ‘we know the genocidal intent of the Iranian state.’ This chapter will examine the plight of the Baha’i between the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and 2024. During this period, the Baha'i community has experienced ongoing and at times severe risk of genocide. Yet various factors have contributed to preventing the ongoing vulnerability from escalating. This chapter examines persecution of the Iranian Baha’i minority, and the domestic and international response. It examines the interplay of risk and resilience factors that have shaped their experience. The chapter concludes by reflecting on what can be learned about resilience from this case study of the presence of long-term risk.

This chapter explores the application of large language models (LLMs) in empirical legal studies, with a focus on their potential to advance research on EU law at scale. The chapter provides a non-technical introduction to LLMs and the role they can play in legal information retrieval, including the classification of case characteristics and outcomes, which constitutes one of the most common research tasks in legal scholarship. The chapter stresses the importance of validation – researchers cannot treat the output of LLMs as automatically correct and instead must demonstrate the relevance and reliability of measures and results obtained through the use of LLMs in the context of their research topic. While LLMs are capable of significantly reducing the cost of doing legal research, their use will place growing demands on scholars to ensure the integrity of their findings. The chapter also reflects on the distinction between closed- and open-source models and how ethical and replicability imperatives might influence model choices in an increasingly crowded field.

Chapter 4 considers how duties of international cooperation safeguard sovereign equality by reconciling the territorial sovereignty of coastal states with landlocked states’ rights to access the oceans through negotiation or binding arbitration.

Chapter 5 demonstrates that states have accepted obligations of mandatory cooperation with respect to a variety of other transboundary harms, including piracy, terrorism, and at least some cyberattacks.

Chapter 13 concludes by recapping the book’s key themes, considering potential obstacles to mandatory cooperation, and identifying other matters of international concern, such as pandemics, that are good candidates for mandatory cooperation under the equitable conception of sovereign equality.

Chapter 5, “Envisioning a Plurinational Governance”, analyzes the role and aspirations of Indigenous peoples in the international governance of the Amazon. Based on the analysis of COICA international politics and ACTO strategies and actions regarding Indigenous peoples, the Chapter argues that the international governance of the Amazon has excluded Indigenous peoples by recognizing a limited version of self-determination with no political rights. Many ACTO officials reject the possibility of having the representativeness of Indigenous peoples in the deliberative processes of the organization. However, the continued indigenous activism has opened new opportunities for institutionalizing their participation within ACTO. Despite ACTO’s political weakness and the different institutional challenges of COICA, Indigenous peoples struggle to decolonize the international governance of the Amazon and enact what would be a plurinational international governance.