Marine genetic resources (MGRs) sit at the centre of emerging biotechnological innovation, yet the international legal regimes governing their access, use, and benefit-sharing remain fragmented and often contradictory. This article operationalizes Hohfeld’s relational framework to map the legal relations embedded in six core instruments that regulate MGRs: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Nagoya Protocol, the WIPO Treaty on Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (GRATK), and the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement. The resulting Hohfeldian mapping shows how claim-rights, obligations, powers, and other legal positions are distributed across these regimes, revealing overlapping and sometimes competing legal logics within MGR governance. This approach clarifies the relational structure of these legal positions and highlights how legal form shapes, and occasionally obscures, the exercise of authority, the creation of regulatory gaps, and the persistence of asymmetries, particularly in relation to benefit-sharing and the treatment of digital sequence information. The analysis draws on a manually curated, machine-readable dataset that serves as a resource for further research. The article places the legal governance of MGRs within wider debates on the international law of global commons and sets out a methodological scaffold for comparative and critical legal analysis. It ultimately invites a reconsideration of who owns and who owes what within the evolving governance of MGRs.

Most US chief local prosecutors are elected, presenting foundational accountability questions. Prosecutors have significant incumbency advantages and wield broad discretion over criminal charges and plea deals. Our study illuminates a knowledge deficit regarding prosecutors. National and state surveys show that most Americans do not know core prosecutorial functions and cannot correctly identify their prosecutors, likely stemming from poor information provision. Among low-information respondents, job approval of prosecutors is lower compared to high-information respondents. This uncovers an accountability paradox: (1) the public knows little about prosecutors, (2) knowing less decreases prosecutor approval, but (3) most prosecutors are reelected time and again.

The Arabian Gulf has a chequered history of subjugation and alliances of interest with the British, chiefly as a means of averting Ottoman and other external political control. However, there is evidence that Gulf people had always desired independence from British rule and domination. This aspiration was manifested in the adoption of Arab nationalism as an ideological foundation, both in opposition to the British and in pursuit of a pan-Arab union. Attempts for self-determination found their expression in the formation of distinct groups, associations and clubs whose key concern was the granting of constitutional civil liberties. These groups were directly predicated on Arab nationalism and flourished for roughly a decade from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. Political activism exhibited in the Arabian Gulf during this period evinces a high degree of awareness of regional as well as global politics. It shows that Arabs in the Gulf were neither docile adherents to British rule nor happily subservient to the dictates of Westminster. The article’s analysis, while drawing on all Gulf Arab states, places particular emphasis on social movements in Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait, where such movements were considerably more active than in neighbouring countries.

Backlash has become commonplace against elected officials across the United States. This is especially true for reform prosecutors, who seek to move away from traditional, tough-on-crime approaches to prosecution. How do prosecutors make sense of backlash to reform policies? How do prosecutors respond to attempts to limit their discretion, remove them from office, or otherwise inhibit their power? We draw on 68 interviews with prosecutors from 33 states and find that reform prosecutors report a chilling effect of backlash, which has pushed some out of office and forced others to carry out reforms under personally and professionally fraught conditions.

Patients living with nociplastic pain are at particular risk of being unfairly judged because their symptoms are subjective and occur without measurable abnormalities. Nociplastic pain, now recognized as a third category of pain alongside nociceptive and neuropathic pain, arises in the absence of tissue damage sufficient to explain the clinical presentation. This “unseen” pain affects at least ten percent of the population, commonly involves the musculoskeletal or visceral systems, and leads to substantial suffering and functional impairment. Validation of these chronic symptoms is often contentious because no objective biomarker or physical sign can reliably confirm their presence or severity. The concept of illness without measurable parameters challenges clinicians and conflicts with legal systems that rely heavily on objective evidence in adjudicating health-related questions. Most clinicians have limited training in medicolegal principles, standards of impartiality, or the ethical distinctions between patient advocacy and objective reporting. These challenges are amplified in cases involving chronic nociplastic pain, where the lack of observable findings complicates clinical interpretation and may conflict with traditional expectations for legal evidence. Bias, whether conscious or unconscious, may occur at multiple stages of the medicolegal process. Inaccurate, incomplete, or biased information from patients, treating clinicians, independent medical experts, insurers, or legal representatives can influence fairness, credibility, and decisional outcomes. This review summarizes key considerations in the adjudication of chronic nociplastic pain and examines how various sources of bias may shape medicolegal decision-making. Improving awareness of these risks and implementing strategies to reduce bias may promote a more reliable and equitable interface between clinical assessment and legal adjudication.

Senatorial scrutiny of judicial nominees has long centered on the role of confirmation hearings in advice and consent, but senators draw on multiple sources of information when evaluating nominees for lifetime appointments to the federal bench. Questions for the Record (QFRs) – written questions submitted to nominees after the conclusion of their hearings – are a common yet understudied component of the Judiciary Committee’s vetting process. I analyze the use of QFRs for all Circuit Court of Appeals nominees from 2001 to 2022, finding that partisan differences between the nominating president and senator strongly structure who submits them, while interest group opposition to a nominee, though significant, plays a more modest role than it does in senators’ question-asking behavior during confirmation hearings. Moreover, senators’ use of QFRs has increased substantially in recent sessions of Congress, especially following reforms to the filibuster in 2013. These findings suggest that QFRs are not simply an extension of hearing questions. Instead, they serve their own vetting functions for Committee senators, particularly for outpartisans, those highly engaged in the process, and when time constraints may limit other means of vetting.

European policymakers have long sought to strike an appropriate balance between supporting EU-native cultural production and pursuing the objectives of internal market harmonisation. To this end, the 2018 reform of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) introduced a set of measures for on-demand audiovisual media (VOD) providers, including catalogue quotas, prominence requirements and financial contributions. However, the coherence and effectiveness of these provisions remain highly contested. In particular, national implementations of financial obligations have produced adverse effects. They have intensified fragmentation among Member States and enabled them to prioritise domestic works over non-national European productions. Such fragmentation of the European audiovisual market will also preserve a heterogeneous ecosystem of producers, making it exceedingly difficult for a local service to scale and evolve into a pan-European platform. Consequently, despite the ambitions of EU policymakers, the emergence of European champions capable of competing with foreign players on an equal footing is likely to remain elusive. Moreover, the AVMSD rules on financial obligations create opportunities for regulatory gaming, insofar as Member States use the policy goal of fostering cultural and linguistic diversity as a convenient pretext for subsidising their local economies.

Since its ruling on the Maastricht Treaty, the German Federal Constitutional Court has developed a doctrine that elevates the fundamental constitutional principles in conjunction with the right to vote to the status of a ‘right to democracy’. In this Article, we explore how plaintiffs draw on the right to democracy in an effort to activate the Court’s self-asserted prerogative of ultra vires and identity review and keep Karlsruhe in the game of adjudicating on the conditions and boundaries of European integration. We assume that the legal opportunities associated with constitutional complaints invoking the right to democracy involve a dynamic, interdependent relationship where (the same) plaintiffs build on existing case law to develop legal arguments and where the Court evaluates, refines and codifies these arguments. To substantiate this interactive process of an expansion of legal opportunities, we draw on a largely untapped data source and use the original pleadings in four cases against the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) and the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) of the European Central Bank, linking these complaints to the respective court decisions.

Douglas Laycock’s theory of substantive neutrality has had much to say about contemporary debates in U.S. law and religion, particularly for courts and scholars grappling with the problem of religious exemptions from general laws. It is fair to say that the U.S. Supreme Court has in many respects adopted Laycock’s approach in free exercise cases. But Laycock’s work on the Establishment Clause side has unfortunately been less influential on the Supreme Court. In the context of Establishment Clause challenges to government-sponsored religious expression, Laycock has argued that the government endorsement of religion through official sponsorship of religious speech violates substantive neutrality because government endorsement of religion encourages religious belief without leaving room for private individual choice. But the court has moved away from any consideration of endorsement or substantive neutrality in cases considering challenges to official religious expression, focusing instead on vaguely-described historical practices and understandings. In this article, the author explains the correctness and insightfulness of Laycock’s theory, which elucidates and justifies the Supreme Court’s now-abandoned endorsement doctrine and explains why the Supreme Court’s current approach to the issue of official religious speech is much more problematic than the substantive neutrality approach.

Sophie Legros1 is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Methodology of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She holds a PhD from the Department of International Development at the LSE. Her research explores changes in social norms shaping work, care and security in gang-controlled neighbourhoods in Medellín, Colombia, and the methods best suited to capture those dynamics.

The role of pharmaceutical companies in promoting overuse of opioids by influencing medical discourse is underexamined. Marketing messages have been seeded in journal articles, continuing medical education (CME), prescribing guidelines, educational activities, and professional society recommendations. Terms generated or redefined by industry created a framework for promoting opioids. This paper focuses on the terms “opiophobia,” “pseudoaddiction,” “breakthrough pain” and “pain is the 5th vital sign.” The reframing of incipient opioid use disorder as “tolerance” and “dependence” is also discussed. The proliferation of these industry-supported terms within medical discourse created a false evidence base that opioids were safe and effective for chronic pain and that withholding opioids deprived patients of the best care.

This article examines the relevance of ‘deliberative’ constitutionalism – the idea that democratic deliberation ought to inform our expectations of constitutional law and processes – to constitutional moments in non-state contexts. More specifically, it explores the ways in which extending a deliberative constitutional lens to non-state spaces can both enrich our understanding of the legal-political dynamics within these spaces and, in turn, inform the field of deliberative constitutionalism itself. To do this, it takes an empirical approach to interpret and analyse a constitutional process through which a university student union reinvented its own democratic structures, in significant part through a ‘deliberative mini-public’ of everyday members. Drawing on interviews, observations and records, it demonstrates that a deliberative constitutional lens maps onto and usefully interprets the democratic process in this context while also offering empirical insight into an underexplored dimension of deliberative constitutionalism: that is, connections between deliberative approaches ‘to’ constitutional reform and the resulting constitutional features ‘from’ which subsequent political deliberation flows. It shows how the former carries ‘through’ into the latter by way of the internalization of deliberative norms resulting from both direct and indirect experience with deliberative approaches.

Dr Kubo Mačák is Professor of International Law at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. He is the author of Internationalized Armed Conflicts in International Law (Oxford University Press, 2018) and co-author of the Handbook on Developing a National Position on International Law and Cyber Activities: A Practical Guide for States (University of Exeter and NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, 2025), and has published widely in leading journals such as the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, International Review of the Red Cross and Journal of Conflict and Security Law. He serves as the General Editor of the Cyber Law Toolkit, an award-winning online resource on the international law of cyber operations. From 2019 to 2023, he was a Legal Adviser at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva.

Mariana Salazar Albornoz is Adjunct Professor of Public International Law and of International Human Rights, Criminal and Humanitarian Law at IE University in MadridandatUniversidadIberoamericana in MexicoCity. Since 2023, she has been a member of the Board of the United Nations Register of Damages. Between 2019 to 2022 she was a Member of the Inter-American Juridical Committee, serving as Rapporteur on International Law Applicable to Cyberspace and on Privacy and Data Protection. She recently concluded her membership on the Editorial Board of the International Review of the Red Cross (2020–25). Among her previous roles, she was Coordinator of International Law and Director of IHL, ICL and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights at the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as Regional Manager of the Latin American Internet Association and Associate of the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities.

Mohamed Helal is a Professor of Law at the Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University, and a member of the African Union Commission of International Law, where he served as Special Rapporteur for the Application of International Law in Cyberspace and oversaw the drafting of the Common African Position on the Application of International Law in Cyberspace. He is also a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. His scholarly work has appeared in the European Journal of International Law, Global Constitutionalism, Climate Law, the American Journal of International Law, the Harvard National Security Journal, the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics, the Fordham International Law Journal, and the Emory International Law Review.

This article examines the rise of ecclesial units in US prisons, wherein inmates are trained and certified for Christian evangelism as state-assigned inmate field ministers. Unlike general religious education programs in public prisons, these newer units, referred to within prison communities as God pods, function as ecclesial training centers for Christian ministry undertaken by matriculated state prisoners. The author contrasts the work of inmate field ministers with that of public chaplains governed by mandates of religious neutrality. Drawing from on-site and archival research, the author contends that these new programs instantiate Christian doctrine as government speech while imposing religious tests for public benefits upon state prisoners. The author profiles recent case law advancing a history-and-tradition standard for Establishment Clause cases, while noting the long-standing expectation of religious neutrality by public institutions. The author highlights recent scholarly accounts of US prisons as imbued with Christian theology amid a broader defunding of secular rehabilitation. While religious entrepreneurs have long delivered Christian programming in public prisons, new ecclesiastical units institutionalize Christian doctrine as state rehabilitation, raising urgent questions about religious liberty in the carceral sphere and the future of faith-based programming.