How should legal theory address populist governance? This article assesses recent efforts to align populist legal theory with H.L.A. Hart’s positivism, particularly the claim that populists embrace a democratic version of the rule of recognition. It argues instead that the alliance is deceptive: Populists selectively rely on Hart, given that both endorse a static legal theory. It presents two arguments in support. The first, negative argument shows that populist aspirations to immediate popular sovereignty are at odds with Hartian grounds of legal authority. The second, positive argument draws on Hans Kelsen’s distinction between static and dynamic legal orders to reveal their deeper structural similarity: Populism and Hartian positivists likewise minimize official discretion and conceptualize law as a conduit for external political decisions. Clarifying this affinity exposes the risks of static legal theories in legitimating populist distortions and underscores the normative urgency of a dynamic understanding of legal order.

Organizations are often drawn into the contested work of criminal law enforcement. Through compulsory process and mandatory reporting laws, governments routinely conscript organizations such as hospitals, banks, and schools into assisting in surveillance activities whose legitimacy is socially contested. In recent years, conscription has been particularly pronounced with online platform companies, whose extensive collections of user data make them frequent sources of information and evidence for law enforcement agencies. How do actors in platform companies navigate compliance with such contested laws? While neoinstitutional theories of law emphasize how perceived compliance can protect organizational legitimacy, this article shows how perceived compliance with contested laws can also undermine it. Drawing on in-depth interviews with legal and operations staff for platform companies and law enforcement agents, this article explains how perceived compliance with contested laws can give rise to a legitimacy dilemma that organizational actors manage through symbolic ambivalence: compliance practices that signal both an organization’s responsiveness to a law, as well as its independence from the aims, consequences, and institutions associated with the law. The article also suggests organizational and legal conditions that shape how platform actors engage in symbolic ambivalence. These findings extend neoinstitutional theory by showing that the relationship between perceived compliance and legitimacy is not straightforward, but contingent, and by explaining how organizational actors manage the legitimacy dilemma brought about by that contingency.

Recent conflicts have revived interest in a subject that has remained largely untouched since the trials of war criminals after the Second World War: prosecuting individuals for the crime of aggression. Due to its restricted jurisdictional regime, the International Criminal Court has so far been unable to investigate this crime and remains barred from doing so in, for example, the context of the Ukraine situation. When exploring alternative domestic (or hybrid) venues for prosecuting aggression, discussions have come to focus on the possibility of exercising universal jurisdiction (UJ), a concept increasingly used to counteract substantive selectivity of international criminal justice. However, scholars and practitioners have expressed differing views on the extent to which the notion of UJ has come to extend to the crime of aggression under customary international law. This study contributes to the ongoing debates by providing a legal-empirical analysis of the practice and opinio juris of 126 states, as presented to the Sixth Committee of the UN General Assembly under the agenda item on the ‘scope and application of universal jurisdiction’. These empirical quantitative and qualitative insights provide a foundation for evaluating the customary status of UJ over the crime of aggression and exploring the legal challenges of prosecuting aggression under this jurisdictional title.

This article examines the historical evolution, legal foundations and contemporary practice of National Information Bureaux (NIBs), institutions that States are required to establish under the Geneva Conventions to collect, centralize and transmit information on enemy combatants hors de combat and certain categories of enemy civilians who have fallen into the State’s hands. It traces the origins of NIBs from early wartime initiatives in the nineteenth century to their codification in the 1949 Geneva Conventions, particularly Article 122 of Geneva Convention III and Article 136 of Geneva Convention IV. NIBs are intended to facilitate the exchange of information on prisoners of war and interned protected persons, to respond to enquiries concerning their fate and whereabouts, and to assume certain other tasks related to these categories of persons. Drawing on historical sources and contemporary State practice, the article shows that the establishment and functioning of NIBs remain uneven. States most frequently establish NIBs in the context of international armed conflicts, in particular conflicts with neighbouring States or military interventions abroad. These bodies are usually embedded within governmental structures, and their activities often extend beyond the tasks envisaged in the Geneva Conventions, frequently prioritizing issues relating to the State’s own nationals. By contrast, there is no documented practice of establishing NIBs in non-international armed conflicts, although some States have created institutions performing partially comparable tasks. Peacetime practice is also limited, with a relatively small number of States establishing or preparing NIBs through standby institutional arrangements. Two models have emerged: the State-operated model, in which NIB functions are assigned to ministerial or other governmental bodies, and the auxiliary-humanitarian model, in which these tasks are entrusted to National Red Cross or Red Crescent Societies. The article concludes by identifying key challenges in the contemporary operation of NIBs and suggesting measures to strengthen their effectiveness.

Health system integration has been actively promoted in recent years as a promising approach to defragmentize the current delivery framework of health services and contain costs. Yet, integration often faces significant barriers from the bureaucratic sphere. Successful integration is hardly due to good technical design alone; rather, it is often explained by how the policy dimension of the reform is managed. This study embraces a policy sciences perspective to explain the micro policy dynamics of health system integration reforms in a fragmented health system. Engaging the policy entrepreneurship literature, it investigates the county medical conglomeration innovations that have flourished in China in the past few years. Two pioneer counties were selected for in-depth case studies. Qualitative methods were extensively used in data analysis. Analytical attention was specifically focused on how a small team of local policy entrepreneurs championed the reforms amidst multiple constraints. The analysis revealed the varying momentum of policy entrepreneurs and the distinctive reform pathways across the two cases. A certain degree of similarity was also observed in their use of entrepreneurial strategies to promote integration reforms. Importantly, close vertical integration combined with a bundled global budget was adopted in both cases, and this model was subsequently diffused to other localities.

This article explores factors contributing to the launching of private prosecutions for criminal libel during World War I in Calgary against the proprietor of a small newspaper. In the first of the cases considered here, the allegations of this originally English journalist—that a Jewish-owned business had German and Austrian employees—had the potential to inflame local ethic tensions and provoke violence, but the Crown sat on the sidelines while the lumber company prosecuted. In the second case, the libellous text suggested that Calgary’s former Member of Parliament, R.B. Bennett, and his associate William P. McLaws were party to financial improprieties around spending on munitions manufacturing in Medicine Hat. Again, the Crown lawyers watched while Bennett prosecuted and McLaws did not. This article explores the strategic decision-making behind a prosecutorial approach now largely unfamiliar to us.

The exclusive economic zone (EEZ) is one of the most significant innovations of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. As a functional maritime zone rather than sovereign territory, it allocates sovereign rights and jurisdiction over natural resources and certain economic activities to coastal States, while preserving some high seas freedoms for all States. Among these freedoms, the conduct of foreign naval operations in the EEZs remains one of the most contested issues in peacetime, with some coastal States objecting while others accept such operations as lawful. These tensions are likely to intensify during international armed conflict, as naval hostilities could threaten neutral States’ vital interests, including fishing, shipping and the laying of submarine cables.

Central to this tension is whether belligerents remain bound by the “due regard” obligation when operating in neutral EEZs during armed conflict. By applying a decolonial lens, this article reframes due regard not as a mere peacetime provision to be discarded during armed conflict, but as a hard-won decolonial achievement that must be preserved to redress a global balance of power previously tilted toward imperial interests. Dismissing this obligation disregards the power asymmetries and colonial context in which the relevant rules were made. Belligerent-leaning interpretations that characterize due regard as lex ferenda for lack of State practice overlook structural asymmetries in whose practice counts toward lex lata and risk overstating the legal significance of State silence. Broader and more inclusive State engagement is therefore necessary to ensure that the development of the law of naval warfare reflects the interests of all States, not only those of dominant naval powers.