Informal international instruments increasingly influence domestic court rulings by serving as authoritative materials to interpret uncertain legal norms. This poses a significant democratic problem because the instruments originate from undemocratic international institutions and bypass parliamentary oversight. This Article challenges the established doctrinal description of the interpretative relevance of legally non-binding instruments by reimagining it through Niklas Luhmann’s systems theoretic description of law as communication. The approach reveals a decision-making mechanism that enables democratically suspect political influence to be exercised through the legal system. To address this systemic vulnerability, the Article argues that domestic courts can act as bulwarks of democracy when interpreting legal norms with applicable informal instruments. Drawing upon novel insights from Jürgen Habermas’s discursive theory of law and democracy and Martti Koskenniemi’s culture of formalism, the Article argues that a democratic legal culture—emerging from a democratic mindset held by judges who visualize themselves in the place of others—can help mitigate the democratic deficit of informal international instruments by bringing them into contact with discursive democratic requirements. Noting that courts are themselves capable of democratically questionable action, the Article finds that the democratic legal culture can also make legal systems more resilient to democratic backsliding.

Health Technology Assessment (HTA) is an essential tool for transparent decision-making and prioritisation of resources routinely used in many high-income countries. The use of HTA in resource allocation is now gaining traction in several Low- and Middle-Income Countries too. India is one such country that has taken critical steps to integrate HTA into its policymaking framework. We explore the potential role of Adaptive (aHTA) as a screening measure and a more flexible approach to optimising the capacity of HTA. Adaptive HTA, as ‘a structured approach to identify and conduct the optimised full HTA analysis’, offers a pragmatic way to balance the need for swift decision-making with methodological rigour. We examined the value aHTA brings to decision-makers based on the Indian experiences in conducting aHTA and further discussed the challenges involved in its methodology and implementation. Institutionalising aHTA is proposed as both a tool for topic prioritisation and optimising the full HTA for timely decision-making, integrated within the broader HTA ecosystem in India. Given the evolving nature of aHTA methods and processes, we propose that there is a need to: standardise aHTA methodologies and develop reference cases which benchmark a set of guiding principles, methodological, and reporting standards.

This paper engages with the literature on the right against rights and autocratic legalism to examine the context and tactics of conservative legal mobilization against rights in North Africa. Drawing on legal case studies, interviews, and court observations in Egypt and Tunisia, I argue that in contexts of illiberal legality, law and rights discourses become the legitimizing tools of conservative mobilizations. The case studies presented reveal three primary tactics used by conservative legal actors in Egypt and Tunisia in their assault on gender and sexuality rights. The first, rights selectivism, is a tactic of referencing a set of rights to legitimize the oppression of other rights. Second, by deploying repressive legalism, conservative legal actors resort to tangential legal codes to punish minorities and those advocating for minority rights. Third, through appeals to majoritarianism, democracy, and anticolonial work are used to trump minority rights. This study contributes to emerging sociolegal scholarship on the right against rights and illiberal legality by illustrating how rights and legality are weaponized to advance antirights, antigender, and antiminority agendas.

This article reviews the history and current evidence of systematic pharmaceutical industry corruption. It draws on studies by the OECD on international corruption; reports of the Securities and Exchange Commission; studies of the Public Citizen health Research Group of settlement agreements between federal and state authorities and pharmaceutical firm; the history of the Medicare and Medicaid Anti-Kickback Act; professional and industry codes of ethics; the literature on institutional corruption; and studies of conflicts of interest. These sources support findings of systemic corruption since the mid-20th century. The paper also explores the relationship between classic corruption, institutional corruption and conflicts of interest in medicine and pharmaceutical policy.

On 31 August 2024, tickets for the Oasis reunion tour went on sale. The outcome was predictable. Prospective purchasers waited online for hours to buy tickets, many were disappointed. Tickets soon appeared on secondary sites at prices which greatly exceeded originally advertised prices. The resulting outcries fed into the new Government’s manifesto promise to ‘put fans back at the heart of events by introducing new consumer protections on ticket resales’. The best solutions to address the popular concerns are: (1) to improve the allocation of tickets in the primary market; and (2) add a greater degree of consumer protection to reduce information asymmetry in the primary market. The former reform requires no regulatory intervention. As a second-best solution I suggest rethinking regulation of the secondary market, as most of the current and proposed regulatory efforts in this market are either unworkable or exacerbate fan frustration. Regulatory interventions on basis of ‘fairness’ or ‘putting fans first’ exacerbate these market failures. The source of the problem is market failure in the primary market, and it is towards this that regulatory effort should be directed. Intervention in the form of secondary market price caps will undermine efforts to protect fans.