There has been a recent turn toward a new form of nonpositivism in Anglo-American jurisprudence. This paper focuses on the theories articulated by Mark Greenberg and Scott Hershovitz (I label their views as the “New Legal Anti-Positivism” or NLAP). NLAP argues that questions about legal rights and obligations are moral questions; that legal reasoning is a form of moral reasoning; and that there is no domain of legal normativity that stands independently of moral considerations. This paper doesn’t offer a decisive argument against NLAP. Instead, it argues that NLAP is distinctively American: it relies on certain aspects of American legal practice that are not representative of other legal systems. To the extent that general jurisprudence attempts to offer a relatively general theory of law, theories that can accommodate variations across legal cultures are better than those that cannot. This is a relevant consideration against NLAP.

The World Health Organization has declared 2021–2030 the “Decade of Healthy Ageing”, aiming for the best quality of life through health as the population ages. Beyond healthy ageing, scientists are adopting artificial intelligence technologies for longevity science which can foreseeably enable humans to routinely live to 120 years and beyond. With such breakthroughs within reach, the challenges associated with longevity need to be considered, from the impact on the social system to the possibility of an international law right to longevity, along with associated considerations such as on sustainability. This article questions whether there already is, or should be, an international human right to facilitate considerably extended lifespans, along with other relevant legal frameworks.

This article examines Turkey’s constitutional trajectory through Carl Schmitt’s concepts of sovereignty, exception and dictatorship. It argues that Turkey’s political development cannot be fully understood as a process of gradual democratic erosion alone but must be analyzed as a sequence of constitutional ruptures in which exceptional powers have repeatedly redefined sovereign authority. From Abdülhamid II’s suspension of the 1876 Constitution to the Grand National Assembly’s exercise of wartime sovereignty in 1921, the military interventions of 1960 and 1980, and President Erdoğan’s post-2016 consolidation of power, sovereignty has shifted among personal, collective and institutional actors capable of suspending legality and founding new constitutional orders. By situating Turkey within a longer history of sovereign reconstitution, the article critically reworks Schmitt’s framework to show how emergency provisions – initially designed to defend constitutional order – can be transformed into instruments of constitutional refoundation. It demonstrates how commissarial responses to crisis may evolve into sovereign dictatorships, enabling regime transformation under the appearance of legal continuity. In doing so, the article contributes to debates on authoritarian constitutionalism and emergency governance by clarifying the constitutional mechanisms through which legality is suspended, reconfigured and redeployed. Beyond the Turkish case, the article advances a broader comparative agenda for global constitutionalism: integrating the study of democratic erosion with an analysis of sovereign reconstitution in moments of exception, thereby illuminating how contemporary constitutional orders are reshaped through crisis.

Since the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape is undergoing a rapid transformation. Currently, the use of AI chatbots by consumers has largely been limited to image generation or question-answering language models. The next generation of AI systems, AI agents that can plan and execute complex tasks with only limited human involvement, will be capable of a much broader range of actions. In particular, consumers could soon be able to delegate purchasing decisions to AI agents acting as “Custobots.” Against this background, the Article explores whether EU consumer law, as it currently stands, is ready for the rise of the Custobot Economy. In doing so, the Article makes three contributions. First, it outlines how the advent of AI agents could change the existing e-commerce landscape. Second, it explains how AI agents challenge the premises of a human-centric consumer law which is based on the assumption that consumption decisions are made by humans. Third, the Article presents some initial considerations how a future consumer law could look like that works for both humans and machines.

Article 5(1)(c) of the EU AI Act is widely reported as a ban on using AI systems to score individuals’ social behavior, and such ban was likely motivated, at least in some part, by European lawmakers’ concerns over the widely misrepresented dystopian scenario of China’s Social Credit System. However, as the text of the provision presents considerable interpretive uncertainties, it could potentially lead to the prohibition of scoring practices that have been commonplace and socially beneficial both before and after the advent of AI and algorithms. Alternatively, the provision can be interpreted and implemented narrowly—and perhaps must be—so that most existing and potentially implementable scoring practices are not unnecessarily affected. The European Commission’s guidelines publicized in early 2025 suggest that authorities may be leaning towards such narrow reading. A narrow reading is also necessary when one understands the role that social scoring plays in human societies. And by drawing on China’s experiences with implementing and regulating its Social Credit System (SCS), policymakers around the world may also realize that there are feasible options for regulating AI-based social scoring practices instead of insisting on an outright ban.

An enduring access-to-justice crisis leaves most low- and middle-income people without meaningful assistance for civil legal problems. In response, several U.S. jurisdictions have experimented with licensing legal paraprofessionals—such as Limited License Legal Technicians (LLLTs)—to provide a circumscribed set of services directly to the public. Using Washington State’s pioneering LLLT program and its successors as a case study, this Article argues that paraprofessional reforms have under-delivered because they replicate key features of the traditional professional model: substantial educational prerequisites, supervised practice requirements, and high-stakes examinations that raise entry costs, limit supply, and constrain scalability.

The Article contends that modern AI changes the production function of routine legal work—particularly client intake, document preparation, and the translation of facts into legally relevant narratives—yet AI deployed directly to consumers poses serious risks, including error, bias, confidentiality threats, and jurisdictional mismatch, and it cannot reliably identify when a matter requires escalation to a lawyer. The Article therefore proposes an “AI–paraprofessional fusion” model: purpose-built, jurisdiction-specific AI tools paired with lightly trained human paraprofessionals who provide process guidance, verify and quality-control outputs, and triage cases for escalation when warranted.

Finally, because unauthorized-practice rules are state-created constraints that helped produce today’s scarcity, the Article argues that the AI infrastructure enabling this model should be developed and maintained as a public good—auditable, updateable, and broadly accessible—rather than left solely to private market incentives. This approach offers a scalable path for United States jurisdictions—and potentially others—to expand competent, lower-cost legal assistance while preserving safety through human oversight and clear escalation channels.

There is a widespread sense among international economic lawyers that the most-favored-nation obligation, as the expression of a nondiscrimination norm is fundamental for international trade law. But ought they adorn MFN with its normative halo? This article studies the historical emergence of the MFN-as-fundamental mythology. It shows that this mythology is the outcome of three controversial projects over the course of the twentieth century. Embedded historically, they reveal that much less than nondiscrimination, MFN has historically been the vector for drawing the boundaries across which discrimination operates, whether between imperial powers and colonies, or between the West and the East. It is only out of a relatively recent, and intellectually radical turn that MFN became synonymous with the very idea of a universalist, nondiscrimination-centric, international trade law. But that intellectual universe—ordoliberalism—now being past us, this Article asks what account can we offer of alternative norms that have structured international trade law.

Despite their status as a formally protected group in US immigration law, unaccompanied minors are not guaranteed legal representation. Facing removal proceedings in immigration court alone places children at high risk of deportation back to danger and deprivation in their home countries. Limited funding exists for migrant-serving legal aid organizations, and indigent children’s demand for free legal services far outpaces the available supply. This article examines access to counsel among unaccompanied minors in removal proceedings in US immigration court using a newly compiled administrative dataset comprising nearly four hundred thousand cases. We contribute to access-to-justice scholarship on the “justice gap”—the difference between the number of people experiencing civil legal problems who could benefit from legal assistance and those who receive it. Past research on immigrant adults and the broader civil legal realm has focused on geographic factors and resource availability as determinants of access to counsel. We find that these are also important determinants of access to counsel among immigrant children. In addition, we show that client characteristics—namely, gender, age, nationality, and Indigeneity—that potentially shape the viability of the case in immigration court, and, thereby, attorneys’ client selection practices, also act as determinants of access to counsel.