An increasing number of jurisdictions have incorporated references to animals into their constitutions, granting non-humans some degree of constitutional relevance. This article examines the global trend of recognising animals in constitutions through a temporal lens. It distinguishes three temporal dimensions of animal constitutionalism: a symbolic rupture with a past of purely instrumental protection; a potential standstill effect that stabilises present levels of protection and a future-oriented shift towards recognising animals as constitutional subjects. By analysing these dimensions, the article reflects on how the constitutional recognition of animals unsettles conventional constitutional theory and signals a broader transformation of constitutionalism beyond anthropocentrism, drawing from recent theoretical developments in the field.

This paper contributes to this special issue by exploring the act of capitulation to populist authoritarianism, focusing on American universities under Donald Trump’s second administration. Despite threats to funding and autonomy, especially around health-related issues, many universities capitulated. Yet, while universities might be seen as especially vulnerable due to their dependence on federal funds and international students, we show that actors with far greater power exhibited similar behaviour. Elements of the legal profession enabled authoritarian legalism, while corporations, once defenders of democratic norms, largely retreated into silence or complicity. Drawing on contemporary and historical examples, we situate these responses within broader patterns of democratic backsliding. Institutions are shown to be vulnerable to legal manipulation, financial coercion, and ideological alignment. Yet, resistance persists. Some universities have fought back through litigation, and judges have blocked unconstitutional orders despite personal risk. The paper reframes institutions not as passive structures but as active agents that can either resist or enable authoritarianism. It argues that democratic commitment is not inherent but must be cultivated and defended. Ultimately, democracy requires ongoing engagement, ethical leadership, and a willingness to bear short-term costs for long-term preservation.

This study examines prosecutorial resistance to democratic backsliding in Poland (2016–23) using Šipulová’s three-dimensional analytical framework. Despite facing greater structural vulnerabilities than judges – hierarchical subordination, immediate retaliation risks and weaker formal protections – Polish prosecutors developed sophisticated resistance strategies combining on-bench actions (challenging illegitimate orders, refusing transfers) with off-bench mobilisation (professional associations, media engagement, coalition-building with judges and civil society). Based on interviews with eleven prosecutors, the research reveals a paradoxical effectiveness pattern: minimal immediate political impact coupled with significant long-term achievements. While unable to prevent institutional capture, prosecutors elevated their professional standing, fostered unprecedented interprofessional solidarity and raised societal awareness about prosecutorial independence. The study demonstrates that prosecutorial resistance functions as democratic preservation rather than immediate political opposition, maintaining institutional memory and professional standards crucial for future democratic reconstruction.

Through a qualitative analysis of case studies from Boston in the 1970s and 1980s, this article explores how police officers exploited sex workers in pursuit of department goals and personal desires, all while attracting opposition from sex workers and their allies, who likened cops to pimps. Examining police-sex worker interactions documented in the commercial press, alternative media, appellate court rulings, and police documents, this article incorporates the police-as-pimp metaphor to elucidate the nature of police discretion in the context of sex work. When dealing with sex workers, officers proved willing to choose lawlessness if it helped them accomplish other personal and professional goals. Yet this article goes beyond condemning individual police officers as pimp like. Rather, the metaphor applies to entire law enforcement institutions, whose structures and norms facilitated state exploitation of sex workers.

Since the 1970s the EU has expressed its continuous commitment to contributing to the resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict. This commitment, which is increasingly linked to its obligation to advance the rule of international law, is manifested in its support for the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel (the two-state solution). The article contributes to the literature on the EU’s efforts in conflict resolution in the context of the Conflict, and it does so in the scholarly contexts of international law, EU law, international relations, and European integration. Firstly, it identifies a dissonance between, on the one hand, the EU’s strong interest in the resolution of the Conflict and its firm commitment to such resolution and its long-standing engagement in promoting such resolution; and, on the other hand, its actual, ineffective contribution to achieving that goal. Secondly, it analyses the two principal instruments adopted by the EU towards Israel: (i) the linkage between the upgrading of EU–Israel relations and advancement towards the resolution of the Conflict (the linkage instrument), and (ii) the policy of granting trade and trade-related benefits to entities and products situated within the recognised borders of the State of Israel, while withholding the benefits of EU–Israeli cooperation from entities and products in the Occupied Territories (the differentiation instrument). The article represents the first attempt to analyse these instruments together, and to do so within the overarching theoretical framework of the EU’s actorness and effectiveness in its external relations. It concludes that the ineffectiveness of these instruments renders the EU’s involvement itself ineffective, thereby preventing the EU from contributing meaningfully to the resolution of the Conflict. The analysis of the article focuses on EU efforts over the last 30 years, and its conclusions are examined against the developments in the Middle East since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023.

This Article argues that the classic “what is law” question deserves more attention in EU legal studies. First, it shows that questions about the nature and concept of law are of great practical relevance for EU law. Second, the Article endorses a distinctively realist outlook on EU law. This analysis concludes that a realist(ic) concept of EU law cannot be distilled from legal realism as a theory of adjudication. What is needed instead is a theory of law that can account for the social reality of EU law by weaving together law’s ideational and material dimensions. From the realist perspective, EU law is neither autonomous nor singular. This inquiry into the nature of EU law illustrates why different variants of legal and constitutional pluralism and inter-legality provide insufficient tools for theorizing EU law. Moreover, it challenges the EU’s current “politics of legality” and problematizes the law-power relationship in EU law, depicting the concept of law as key to the EU’s prolonged authority crisis.

Royal commissions are the most prestigious form of Australian public enquiry with important investigative, fact-finding, policy-making and truth-telling functions. It is no coincidence that Australia has had three royal commissions in the last five years into the care and support sector. This ground-breaking article is the first to compare the final reports of the Victorian Mental Health and Commonwealth Aged Care and Disability Royal Commissions to analyse the systemic problems in each sector and the recommended reforms. It provides a useful overview of each commission and how the three reports intersect with each other. The article identifies seven interconnected themes which recur across the three commissions: (i) difficulty accessing services and supports; (ii) a lack of choice and control; (iii) negative social attitudes and discrimination; (iv) the overuse of restrictive practices; (v) an undertrained and underpaid workforce; (vi) problems with oversight and complaints processes; and (vii) chronic under-funding. It also sets out the different approaches to reform in each report which should arguably be adopted across all three sectors. Finally, it provides an update about government implementation of each report. Given the dire state of the care and support sector, the problems highlighted by the seven themes require urgent attention.

Lawyers instruct their clients to make performative and fleeting modifications in comportment to appease judges or officers. But how do they guide their clients to routinize everyday behaviors and lifestyles seen as desirable and respectable by the state? Expanding on theories of social control, nonstate governance, and lawyering, this paper considers the role of lawyers who guide mixed-status couples applying for marriage-based green card and naturalization petitions in the United States. Interviews with immigration attorneys, paralegals, and nonprofit advocates reveal their three-step strategy to shape intimate dimensions of mixed-status couples’ lives that connote marital legitimacy. First, lawyers translate immigration law into personalized checklists that function as the blueprint of marriage that couples must follow. Then, lawyers instruct and correct their clients’ family behaviors so that they are enacted and documented in compliance with vague immigration law as interpreted by the archetypal immigration officer. Crucially, lawyers help couples routinize and painstakingly archive these curated lifestyles for ongoing adjudication. Findings suggest that nonstate actors like immigration lawyers are more than intermediaries who broker and coach; they become domestic counselors who, as indirect agents of the state, coerce subjects toward acculturation.

The regulation of emerging technologies often involves prolonged legislative processes that demand significant attention and resources. Setting a future-proof framework is therefore imperative: not only to accommodate innovation, but to hedge against the uncertainties that render detailed legislation obsolete. The drafting of legal frameworks to regulate emerging technologies increasingly engages a variety of future-proofing techniques.

Surveillance laws are more susceptible to the need for future-proofing. The nature of intelligence agencies and their operational need to remain secretive provide powerful incentives to prevent their governing legal framework from undergoing frequent legislative revision. Accordingly, surveillance laws are often drafted in a manner catering to these constraints.

This article maps and assesses the principal future-proofing strategies available to legislators. It then examines Israeli surveillance law as a test case. The article analyses the Israel Security Agency (ISA) Law, which, inter alia, governs the online surveillance activities of Israel’s domestic security agency, the ISA. The article examines the language of the ISA Law currently in force. It explores a past expansion of its purposive domain through the deployment of ISA surveillance for COVID-19 contact-tracing, and the subsequent judicial narrowing of the statutory provision enabling this deployment. The article then discusses in detail the future of ISA surveillance powers and their future-proofing mechanisms pursuant to the recently published ISA Amendment Memorandum.