Andrew Clapham is Professor of International Law at the Geneva Graduate Institute, teaching international law, human rights law and the laws of war. He served as a member of the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan from 2017 to 2023, and is the co-editor, with Paola Gaeta and Marco Sassòli, of The 1949 Geneva Conventions: A Commentary (Oxford University Press, 2015). His latest book, War (Oxford University Press, 2021), was awarded the Paul Reuter Prize in 2025 and is available as open access.

Energy dependence and rising pollution from the energy sector have compelled states to re-evaluate their energy policies and legal frameworks in favour of sustainable energy development. In this context, energy transition emerges as a strategy to achieve global climate goals while ensuring energy security. However, making the energy transition a “just transition” presents numerous challenges. These challenges are growing as innovation in the energy sector accelerates, with digitalisation presented as a tool to drive the energy transition and optimise current energy systems. This trend has been integrated into the EU’s policy objectives and regulated by the EU’s legal framework. However, this political decision has sparked ethical and legal debates about the digital transformation of the EU energy sector, particularly regarding energy justice. By analysing instruments in the EU’s policy and legal framework, this paper addresses the intersection of the twin transitions through the lens of energy justice. Therefore, this study assesses the EU policy and legal framework of twin transitions from an energy justice perspective. The geographical scope of this research covered the EU. The methodology includes doctrinal legal research. The conclusions of this research encompass an assessment of selected EU policy and legal instruments applicable to the twin transitions.

Legal and ethical frameworks remain dominated by a broadly binary conception of moral status as the primary organising idea: entities are typically treated either as persons, with extensive rights, or as things, with at best limited protections. While many jurisdictions now recognise animal welfare and anti-cruelty duties, these measures generally stop short of acknowledging independent full moral status. This landscape is ill-suited to the diversity of entities whose capacities challenge existing categories, from nonhuman animals to unprecedented beings. This article proposes a pragmatic spectrum of moral status, conceptualised as a continuous gradient on which entities can be located according to their morally relevant capacities. Grounded in a triangulation of established ethical theories, the framework is structured by three anchor thresholds—sentience, consciousness, and sapience—allowing graduated protections to “kick in” at different points. The spectrum is applied using a multimodal approach to measurement, demonstrating how it can guide governance where current law leaves a vacuum. By moving beyond the person/thing distinction with a capacity-based continuum, this approach offers a flexible, anticipatory tool for recognising and responding to the moral claims of diverse entities while avoiding both overreach and neglect.

The ethically reflective assessment of life reveals a paradox. On the one hand, many people regard life as one of the highest values and celebrate each new life. On the other hand, every sentient life is inevitably exposed to suffering. Why, then, do we usually consider sentient life worth starting, despite the fact that, apart from a relatively small group of antinatalists, this judgment is rarely questioned? In this article, I argue that sentience is not an advantage but a disadvantage because its central negative consequence is unavoidable suffering for every sentient being. I further argue that bioethics and healthcare ethics should take antinatalist intuitions more seriously in order to challenge pronatalist assumptions that normalize procreation and, in doing so, magnify eradicable suffering.

In the face of an escalating climate crisis, climate litigation is increasingly being utilized as a means to set boundaries to States’ lack of climate action. In what stands as one of the most consequential climate cases to date, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) determined in Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland that individuals have a human right to protection against the adverse effects of climate change. Through an in-depth analysis of the judgment, this Article explains the Court’s ruling that effective protection of human rights requires States to base their emissions reduction targets on a quantification of their fair share national carbon budgets in relation to the remaining global carbon budget for 1.5oC. This has far-reaching implications for the scrutiny of States’ emissions reduction targets. The Article shows that, as a consequence of the rapidly depleting remaining carbon budget for 1.5oC, States may no longer be able to remain within their fair share through domestic reductions alone. In such circumstances, States need to contribute to emissions reductions outside of their territory and reduce their domestic emissions at their highest level of ambition.

This paper investigates how a Brazilian judge in Barra Mansa, in the State of Rio de Janeiro, adjudicated cases in the early 20th century. It focuses on how Judge Torres made decisions and engaged with legal writings, judicial precedents, and laws. The study seeks to uncover the interrelated lines he drew between the legal framework governing adjudication and the normative rules he applied in concrete cases. Since jury trials were an exception in the Brazilian legal system and none occurred in Barra Mansa during the research period, Torres’s rulings played a central role in shaping local concepts of justice. Analyzing judicial decision-making in a specific town and time frame sheds light on the broader dynamics of legal practice in early 20th-century Brazil.

The rise of health care AI raises concerns over whether patent disclosure supports reproducibility and legal validity. This study analyzes 865 granted medical AI patents (2015–2025) from the US, China, and the EU using a five-dimensional framework (algorithm transparency, training data accessibility, model reproducibility, result verifiability, and mathematical support) implemented through NLP-assisted expert scoring. Results suggest limited technical transparency; approximately 40% of patents score zero in at least two dimensions. Performance varies significantly: algorithm transparency is relatively strong (>60% score 2), while training data accessibility is less prevalent (4.6% score 2) and mathematical support is frequently omitted (39.4% score 0). Statistical testing indicates US patents significantly outperform Chinese patents (p < 0.001), while EU results remain exploratory (N = 31, mean 6.2). These patterns appear associated with institutional factors, strategic applicant behaviour, and technical complexity. Such limitations may pose risks to enforceability and market development, highlighting the need for targeted disclosure improvements. This study contributes a replicable framework for translating legal standards into measurable indicators, providing cross-jurisdictional evidence to guide examination, litigation, and policy refinement in medical AI governance.

We extend cue theory to examine why and how dissent on the court below acts as a cue to apex courts in selecting the cases they hear. We posit that dissent on the court below is a cue to the apex court that the case involves complex legal issues. To test our predictions about how dissent on the court below affects the selection of cases and factors mediating and moderating this relationship, we use original data on 8,405 special leave applications to the High Court of Australia (2003–2018), finding evidence in support of cue theory.

The powers relating to social security devolved to the Scottish Parliament by the Scotland Act 2016 have been utilised at scale, with Social Security Scotland now responsible for delivering more than a dozen different benefits in Scotland.1 Though the governing law remains the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018, the regime of devolved social security has recently been tweaked. In the Social Security (Amendment) (Scotland) Act 2025, the Scottish Parliament created a regulation-making power which will be used in time to modify the legal basis of the Scottish Child Payment (SCP), the most prominent of the new devolved benefits. This note considers that change in the context of a discussion of how social security was devolved (in part) to the Scottish Parliament and the manner in which the devolved competence has been deployed in the intervening years. Against that background, it comments on the operation of the so-called ‘shared powers’ model of devolution which applies to social security.

The privatization of rights and obligations of states under the influence of international organizations (IOs) is a challenge for international law. The difficulty resides in the lack of a clear public status of those organizations. This article purports to identify an ‘international public law’ of both states and IOs. Only such a law could indeed institute international organizations as ‘public’ institutions of their member states’ peoples and thereby ‘reinstitute’ those peoples. The article’s first section presents an institutional-normative account of publicness. A second section presents how, even though an international law ‘of the public’ gradually developed after the nineteenth century, that public dimension was never very strong, not the least because of the role played by IOs. The third section explains indeed how, due to IOs’ construction as functional and apolitical organizations and the private law analogies that have dominated their organization, the international law of IOs quickly turned into a vector of public/private hybridization of both states and IOs. To address this challenge, the fourth section argues not only for a general and minimal common public status of IOs under international law, but also against quick analogies with states’ sovereign rights and obligations. To help consolidate the proposed distinct albeit continuous public status of IOs, the fifth section spells out what could be the common but differentiated public rights of states and IOs which may not be conferred to private persons, and their common but differentiated public obligations that could set limits on the private exercise of these rights.

This article considers how married women’s legal status under coverture shaped retail credit practices in the twentieth-century United States, as a mass consumer economy began to take shape. It focuses particularly on the law of necessaries, which made husbands liable for the “necessary” purchases of their wives. Rooted in English common law, this doctrine had long facilitated the flow of commerce by enabling married women—who lacked the legal capacity to pledge credit in their own names—to trade on their husbands’ credit. Yet at the dawn of the twentieth century, when women’s preferences were increasingly determining retailer practices, the law of necessaries provoked new tensions among merchants, wives, and bill-paying husbands. What counted as necessary in an expanding world of goods, and who had the right to decide? Conflict over these questions lay at the heart of numerous lawsuits from the period, including one brought in 1901 by famed Philadelphia retailer Wanamaker & Co. against a New York businessman who refused to settle his wife’s charge account. In probing Wanamaker v. Weaver, this article casts light on a key inflection point in the development of modern consumer credit, when American women’s growing importance as consumers collided with a legal foundation that diluted their financial autonomy. The conflict generated confusion for credit-granting retailers in the early twentieth century and would ultimately influence their approach to consumer credit in decades to come.

When does legal mobilisation democratise institutions rather than instrumentalise them? Existing frameworks cannot answer this question: deliberative democracy theory evaluates political engagement without addressing legal mobilisation; socio-legal scholarship documents litigation’s effects without providing normative criteria. This article develops reflexive juridification as a framework for evaluating democratic legitimacy across institutional domains. Democratic legitimacy, I argue, requires movements to fulfil three copulative requirements: communicative translation, functional differentiation and identity preservation. These requirements – grounded in Habermasian discourse theory and operationalised through comparative analysis of Chilean and United States cases – specify procedural standards for assessing how movements navigate political deliberation and legal interpretation simultaneously. Comparative analysis reveals that instrumental juridification emerges symmetrically across ideological orientations: progressive movements through the judicialisation of politics (Chile’s Constitutional Convention), conservative movements through the politicisation of law (Dobbs). The framework advances interdisciplinary legal studies by providing normative criteria independent of ideological content, evaluating process rather than substance.