In January 2025, a symposium convened by Japan’s National Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) adopted the Gunma Declaration on Heritage Ecosystems, a new World Heritage framework that, for the first time, explicitly references Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as part of the World Heritage system’s “authenticity” criterion. This commentary offers a critical and reflexive analysis of the declaration’s development, drawing on the author’s experience as a symposium participant. It examines the tension between the declaration’s transformative potential – particularly its alignment with Indigenous understandings of the inseparability of nature and culture – and the structural exclusion, silencing, and erasure of Indigenous voices witnessed during its drafting. The analysis highlights how colonial narratives of “contaminated” Indigenous cultures, “purity,” and “authenticity” continue to determine Indigenous legitimacy in practice. This commentary argues that the Gunma Declaration’s advances risk becoming forms of symbolic recognition and illusory inclusion unless translated into enforceable state practice. Ultimately, this commentary is offered as an act of Indigenous resurgence, urging that the future of heritage governance be grounded not in institutional rhetoric but in Indigenous self-determination and the courage to imagine the World Heritage system otherwise.

Prosecutor v Al Mahdi (Al Mahdi) has repeatedly been criticized as a “missed opportunity” for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to engage with Islamic law. However, an in-depth analysis of trial transcripts reveals that the ICC is already deeply engaged with Islamic normativity, albeit in ways that reproduce colonial patterns of recognition: it refuses to recognize the jihadist institutions as a legal order while simultaneously validating Sufi religious practices as authentically Islamic. Combining a praxeological law-in-action approach with scholarship on legal pluralism and colonial recognition, we argue that the ICC cannot adjudicate such cases without making implicit determinations about legitimate and illegitimate forms of Islamic practice. In our view, Al Mahdi thus reveals the inherent limitations of international criminal law when confronted with alternative normative orders. The politics of recognition at work here echo colonial practice, demonstrating how international criminal justice transforms and reifies the very normative systems it claims to engage with.

Prosecutors play a pivotal role in the American criminal justice system, exercising broad discretion over charging, plea bargaining, and sentencing recommendations. Yet despite their significant influence, we know surprisingly little about how the public perceives prosecutors – or the conditions under which trust in them is earned or lost. Building on research on political trust and leveraging new, granular survey evidence, we argue that public confidence in prosecutors is shaped by three interacting domains: (1) ideological identity and background characteristics; (2) orientations toward government and legal institutions; and (3) social dynamics – especially political efficacy and social capital. Our analysis shows that these forces jointly structure trust through multiple pathways, clarifying when and why prosecutorial legitimacy is strengthened or undermined. This framework offers concrete benchmarks for understanding variation in trust across communities and for evaluating reforms amid sustained scrutiny of the criminal justice system.

Behavioral economics’ most severe criticism is that it lacks a coherent theory for predicting when irrationality will govern decision-making. BE is often therefore identified as a body of anomalies residual or exceptional to rational choice theory. This Article answers the question of why this is the case and does so by distinguishing between two types of predictive power—endogenous and exogenous. In lacking any normative foundation, behavioral economics is limited to the latter, which illuminates not only its theoretical limits but also why such exogeneity may be incompatible with a legal system based on general and uniform governance structures. The Article thus clarifies this long-running question of not only why behavioral economics is the residual of rational choice but also why it should be.

This article draws on Roger Cotterrell’s framework for the sociological interpretation of the concept of trust to expound on, via examples from an empirical project in South Africa, methods for the empirical study of an informal environmental economy. Three distinct challenges encountered during fieldwork on the informal waste economy in South Africa are used to make a case for more robust empirical research methods – positionality, observation and the production of a documentary film, a non-traditional output. Each challenge concerns the relationship of trust between researcher and research respondent. The article concludes that these challenges can be addressed and managed via the appropriate socio-legal methodological framework. The article’s findings will have relevance for those embarking on an empirical study of the informal environmental economy, and for those interested in socio-legal methodology more generally.

Supported decision-making presents a promising avenue to address tensions between the benefits of clinical research for persons with intellectual disability (PWIDs) and the potential exploitation of PWIDs in research. However, while much has been written about supported decision-making with PWIDs in clinical practice, there has been little attention to its possible use in clinical research, especially for PWIDs whose capacity to benefit from support may be uncertain or disputed. In this article, we will interrogate three challenges that arise in this context: communication, influence, and speculation and displacement. Through examples adapted from ethics consultations and cases in the literature, we aim to provide guidance on how to address these challenges.

This paper examines the effect of post-Brexit UK trade agreements on devolved regulatory autonomy. It does so by: (i) carrying out a comprehensive mapping exercise of the overlaps between such agreements and devolved matters; (ii) analysing the domestic legal framework for the implementation of international trade commitments in devolved law; and (iii) identifying the extent to which trade agreements have affected devolved competences and/or caused substantive changes to devolved legislation. The paper demonstrates that UK trade agreements have rarely resulted in significant changes to devolved legislation. This outcome is attributable not only to the limited regulatory ambition of the agreements concluded so far, but also to the distinctive role played by UK domestic implementing legislation in shaping the scope of devolved autonomy. In particular, it shows how the interaction between international trade commitments and the UK’s implementation framework operates as a ‘double bind’ on devolved autonomy.

This article explores the potential of supported decision-making for helping individuals with intellectual or cognitive disabilities to make value-aligned or authentic decisions with respect to participation in clinical research. We argue that supported decision-making is valuable in this context not merely because it promotes self-determination, but also because it increases the likelihood that individuals’ decisions align with what matters to them. To realize this potential, it is important to recognize and address situations in which individuals with intellectual or cognitive disabilities are at increased risk of making decisions that are contrary to their values. We focus on two such situations in particular: when the individual must integrate multiple, potentially competing values, and when the relevant values are insufficiently specified and require unpacking. These challenges can be met, we propose, by integrating dialectical support — a form of structured, dialogue-based assistance designed to help individuals explore and apply their values — into supported decision-making practices.

While the legislative text of the Digital Fairness Act (DFA) has not yet been published, it is already clear that its effectiveness will depend as much on its enforcement design as on the content of its substantive provisions. Experience with recent instruments – including the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the Artificial Intelligence Act and the Data Act – reveals persistent difficulties in ensuring consistent and timely enforcement across Member States. Building on the findings of the Commission’s Fitness Check of EU Consumer Law on Digital Fairness, this article examines how the enforcement design developed in these legal acts can inform the institutional and procedural design of the DFA. It argues that the challenges identified by the Digital Fitness Check reflect deeper patterns of procedural, institutional and epistemic fragmentation in EU enforcement. By analysing how different enforcement designs address these tensions through mechanisms of centralisation, coordination and capacity-building, the article identifies key design choices that may shape the emerging enforcement framework of the DFA.

We advocate for a change in the way individuals with cognitive impairment are enrolled in minimal risk clinical research. We do so in the hope that such a change will lead to more cognitively impaired individuals being enrolled in research. Our proposal applies only to cases where would-be participants retain some interest in decision-making as well as the ability to express a decision. In these cases, we argue that the common practice whereby researchers either obtain consent from the individual or consent from a surrogate and assent from the individual, is ethically unnecessary. Instead, a process of facilitated decision-making based on SDM (supported decision-making) should be employed. Although it is possible that this process of facilitation will enable some individuals to make a capacitated choice who would not otherwise have done so, this should not be a requirement of getting to choose. In those cases where a would-be participant, despite support, fails to make a capacitated choice, the individual should still have the final say about participation. In this respect, our proposal deviates from standard practice. However, we argue that our proposal offers participants as much ethical protection as the more common procedures involving surrogates.

Actors in international politics frequently relate to multiple international norms in taking and justifying decisions. The multiplicity of global normative standards creates constraints and opportunities, affecting how norms matter in contemporary world politics. International relations theorists have therefore devoted increasing attention to relations and interactions between international norms and to norms’ complex internal structures. In this article, I take stock of this recent research and propose avenues for advancing it. I sketch a pluralist agenda on norm complexity that I delineate from long-standing research on international regime complexity. I then zoom in on the most dynamic part of the agenda, the study of agency in complex normative settings. I argue that political actors creatively navigate norm complexity by (re-)connecting constitutive elements of different norms, thus relating these norms to one another in varying, often conflicting ways. I show how this concept of creative navigation can be integrated into different constructivist approaches to norms and normativity to highlight different drivers and implications of such creative agency. I use examples at the nexus of norms governing climate change, nuclear energy, and nuclear non-proliferation to illustrate how different perspectives on navigation can be applied in a pluralist engagement with norm complexity.

In recent years, some have argued that supported decision-making can be ethically superior to surrogate decision-making with respect to decisions involving adults with cognitive and intellectual impairments or disabilities. In this paper, we argue that supported decision-making could also be ethically superior to surrogate decision-making in the context of clinical research that involves greater than minimal net risks. In current practice, adults who lack decisional capacity are often excluded from research that involves greater than minimal net risks (call this the minimal risk requirement). While this approach is intended to protect them, it can be ethically problematic, in part because excluding adults who cannot consent blocks scientifically valuable research that needs to enroll them and undermines the generalizability of the research that excludes them. With this concern in mind, we argue that supported decision-making can provide an ethical means to enroll adults who cannot independently consent in greater than minimal net risk research. Supported decision-making thus offers a valuable modification to the surrogate enrollment requirement, and provides good reason to reject the minimal risk requirement as well.

This paper examines how financial actors enter and reshape healthcare systems, building new, often transnational, social, technical, and financial infrastructures for organising and providing care. We use the concept of assetization – the transformation of ‘things’ into rent-generating assets for investors – to explore how financial actors appear within healthcare. Drawing on empirical case studies from England, Canada, and the Netherlands, we show how assetization unfolds differently across national contexts, shaped by political cultures, regulatory environments, and institutional legacies. Rather than deploying uniform strategies, financial actors respond strategically to systemic frictions and perceived crises, positioning themselves as problem-solvers and embedding investor logic into healthcare provision. As such, assetization is an active process that constructs new infrastructures facilitating future investment and normalising financial presence in healthcare. By tracing how an emerging investor logic reshapes the conditions that allow financial actors to turn healthcare into an asset across different socio-political and institutional contexts, and by tracing the mechanisms through which this logic is articulated and enacted, this paper reveals how care is increasingly integrated into broader circuits of financialization. In doing so, we raise critical questions about the evolving governance, valuation, and organisation of healthcare under expanding financial influence, pointing towards a future research agenda

This first study of the 2023 Council of Europe (CoE) Data Protection Regulations focuses on the institutional design of the Data Protection Commissioner and the Data Protection Officer (DPO). It shows that the reform of both offices was inspired by the EU offices of the EDPS and the EU DPOs. In the context of an EU-CoE dialectical relationship in data protection, the EU exerts significant influence over institutional design. The article highlights differences between those offices and their EU counterparts. In particular, the weak enforcement/monitoring powers of the CoE Commissioner limit possibilities for accountability within the organisation. The study ends with recommendations to strengthen the Commissioner’s mandate.

In an increasingly data- and AI-driven economy, integrating ethical values into algorithmic decision-making is becoming ever more pressing. Benevolence is a fundamental value in human and organizational interactions, fostering trust, fairness and long-term relationships. Companies, particularly in the financial sector, must balance economic efficiency with social responsibility. As business decisions become increasingly automated, the question arises whether and how benevolence can be programmed. Research on artificial benevolence explores how AI systems can maximize not only efficiency but also trust, mitigate discrimination and align with broader corporate purposes. This requires an interdisciplinary perspective integrating technical, ethical and legal dimensions. While existing regulations increasingly shape AI-driven decisions, the question remains how artificial benevolence can be implemented and legally anchored.

A brief examination reveals the multifaceted legal challenges involved in implementing artificial benevolence in consumer banking. In addition to the omnipresent questions of data privacy and liability, risks of discrimination shape the legal debate on a practice of benevolent AI-driven decision-making. Further issues stem from governmental participation in consumer banks based on the model of a public savings bank. The social impact of decisions made by banks in their interactions with private customers on tenancies, real estate projects and the provision of daily necessities is exceedingly important to fundamental rights. Another relevant question is whether administrative bodies could commit themselves to derivative participation claims. This article outlines these issues in the context of the growing regulatory framework provided by European Union law.

While it is evident that the burden-sharing proposed by the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) is a form of solidarity, it remains to be seen whether this represents solidarity between states to the exclusion of refugees themselves. If so, this may justify the critical conclusion drawn by renowned refugee scholar James Hathaway that the GCR is a cop-out by the global North to pick and choose who, when and how they want to share the burden of refugee protection rather than a form of solidarity. This article therefore considers whether the solidarity and community foreseen by the GCR have made things better for refugees who are supposed to be the primary beneficiaries or merely better for the refugee hosts. Recognizing that the basis of the GCR is the rights-based approach of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, this article argues that an investigation is warranted into whether the solidarity envisioned by the GCR can operate as a legal concept in this context and therefore hold the international community accountable for the protection of refugees.

In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the colonial legacies that shape Western cultural institutions. Such public engagement, however, risks falling prey to oversimplification and becoming empty. Museums, in particular, have faced a deep crisis of legitimacy in connection to the growth of the public awareness over past lootings and other cultural misappropriations. If this popular momentum runs ashore in its pars destruens, however, it will lose its potential to inspire profound societal change. Against this backdrop, the present case note offers an in-depth analysis of the experience of the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève (MEG), which has recently reopened its doors to the public with a new mission of decolonization. This case note investigates how a museum—especially one with a problematic past, such as an ethnographic institution—can critically confront its colonial heritage while keeping the public informed and actively involved in the process.