Stefan Grundmann, Hans Micklitz, and Moritz Renner’s New Private Law Theory: A Pluralist Approach is a wide-ranging, ambitious, and fascinating project. In this article I offer one way to read the NPLT as a mosaic, rather than a patchwork, by first taking seriously the idea of legal theory as the core of NPLT’s methodological commitments, and second taking seriously its subject matter of private law as the source of its substantive underpinnings.

Legal theory, I argue (much in line with GMR’s rich text), is distinctive from other discourses about law given its acute awareness to law’s normative filter, which furthermore implies a synthetic commitment that these other discourses do not share. But legal theory should also, I claim, be attentive to the constitutive role law plays in constructing the building-blocks of many of our interpersonal interactions, and it should thus be particularly cautious from relying on philosophical or social scientific inquiries that take contingent configurations of property or of contract as a given. This lesson, in turn, is crucial for contemporary discussions of private law obligations that go beyond the libertarian duty of non-interference. Rather than reifying the libertarian conceptions of property and contract and resorting to exogenous justifications for our interpersonal obligations of non-discrimination and accommodation, private law theory can—and indeed should—rely on happier conceptions of these core legal institutions, which vindicate the freestanding significance of these obligations and thus also validate their transnational applicability.

Did trade patterns in services change into activities that were more digital-intense after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008, and was this shift structural? This paper uses a Difference-in-Difference (DID) approach to investigate whether services trade became more digital-based after the GFC in 2008. It finds support that the GFC formed a break from the previous period that caused services trade to become more digital – although there are signs that this had already started before 2008. Countries with high internet usage and a comparative advantage in digital-intense services, such as R&D, information exchange, computer services, and charges for Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), on average saw post-GFC a 6% increase in global exports compared to other non-digital sectors. More striking is that upper-middle income countries and countries with medium levels of skills also witnessed a sharp increase. These significant outcomes may indicate the direction into which patterns of services trade are likely to turn after the current economic crisis resulting from COVID-19.

This article proposes to see the history of the international law on foreign investment as about the promotion of investor rights as much as the resistance to investor obligations. The argument is that the divide between investment protection and the responsibility of foreign investors is one of the most significant features of international investment law. The article shows that the different treatment of rights and obligations is grounded in the same business project and legal imagination. Maintaining this divide has never been easy, as this model faced resistance, particularly from Latin America, trade unions and human rights activists. The analysis concludes by noting that academics can contribute to reimagining the international law on foreign investment by bringing investment treaty law and business and human rights closer. This shift is already happening.

Police, like other bureaucratic agencies, are responsible for collecting and disseminating policy-relevant data. Nonetheless, critical data, including killings by police, often go unreported. We argue that this is due in part to the limited oversight capacity of legislative bodies to whom police are accountable. Although many local assemblies lack the means for effective oversight, well-resourced state legislatures may induce transparency from state and substate agencies. This argument is evaluated in two studies of police transparency in the United States. First, we examine the compliance of 19,095 state, county, and municipal police agencies with official data requests over five decades, finding strong positive effects of state legislative capacity on transparency. Second, we examine the accuracy of transmitted data on killings by police, finding that lethality is systematically underreported in states with lower-capacity legislatures. Collectively, our study has implications for research on policing, legislatures, agency control, and analyses of government data.

This paper explores the relationship between the concept of the ‘identity of the child’ and legal parenthood. It examines the role of identity in the determination of legal parenthood in three contexts: (a) parental orders after surrogacy arrangements; (b) disputed paternity cases; and (c) the statutory rules in cases involving gamete donation. This paper argues that the concept of ‘identity’ plays an inconsistent role in the attribution of legal parenthood, because the concept lacks substantive content within judicial reasoning and the statutory framework. The understanding of identity, and the role it plays, appears to change in these different contexts to serve the different purposes that the law is trying to achieve. The reason for this inconsistency is that, despite the utilisation of the language of the ‘child's identity’, legal parenthood remains adult-centric and premised upon replicating the binary, two-parent model of the nuclear family. We argue that instead of appealing to this incoherent concept of ‘identity’, the courts should explicitly engage with different types of parenthood and acknowledge the importance of each for both children and parents. Such an approach would result in more truly child-centred reasoning and serve to diminish the predominance of the binary, two-parent model.

Popular discourse about freedom of speech tends to default to the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas, notwithstanding empirical evidence undermining this concept. Its persistence illustrates the profound attachment freedom of speech inspires, despite the difficulty of justifying it in epistemic terms. I suggest that the ancient Greek historian Herodotus offers a compelling alternative to the marketplace metaphor with his account of isegoria at Athens. In Herodotus’s telling, Athenian equal right of speech is worthwhile not because of its effects on speech but because of its effect on political culture; equal speech energizes the Athenians and Athens. He thus offers a nonepistemic defense of the right to speak, defending it instead in terms of power and belonging. Yet his account also highlights how Athenian equal speech unleashes political harms and therefore offers a way to defend free speech without minimizing its dangers. Herodotus thus helps us productively reframe contemporary free speech debates.

In his 1935 judgment in Woolmington v DPP, Viscount Sankey declared the prosecution's burden of proving the accused's guilt was a ‘golden thread’, running ‘throughout the whole web of English criminal law’. This paper explores what Woolmington can tell us about the appeals process – and about the criminal law itself – less than 30 years after the first automatic right to appeal was created in English criminal law. It argues that the decision helps us understand the political pressures that could help to form – and make possible – legal decisions during this period. And it finds that the Woolmington decision itself – both in the text of the decision and in its immediate reception – was more universal than it was fundamental. Woolmington, I argue, has always been more about the high-level principles of English criminal law than about securing any kind of minimal procedural rights for a defendant.

In response to a forced labour review by the International Labour Organization (ILO) that threatened to turn into a formal international inquiry,1 the government of Qatar commenced an ambitious programme of labour reforms aimed largely at addressing concerns about its treatment of migrant workers. About 2.4 million men and women,2 an estimated 88.4 per cent of the small Gulf nation’s population,3 are migrant workers. It has the second largest known gas reserves in the world, and its airbases are home to the largest United States military installation in the Middle East.4 Yet, the small Gulf emirate garnered little international scrutiny until it was awarded in 2010 the right to host the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) men’s Football World Cup tournament in 2022.

Congregations, with their size, breadth, and legacy of shaping political activism, have the potential to be important sites of action for addressing racial injustice in America. Yet historical legacies of racism and persistently high levels of racial animus have made white evangelical communities in particular resistant to addressing racism. Most efforts to address racism in these communities begin with prejudice reduction programs that often fail. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, we examine the effectiveness of a different kind of six-week racial justice program in one of the nation’s largest evangelical megachurches that focuses on animating action among people open to tackling racial injustice in their church. We find that program participation is associated with increased feelings of efficacy, amplified perceptions of community, a greater commitment to cross-racial perspective taking, and greater likelihood of engaging in meaningful action. We argue that the program works by focusing on cross-racial relationship building to equip a people pre-disposed to action to actually take action. Developing such leaders is potentially the first step in a program other congregations can take to tackle racial injustice.

The last decade has witnessed the emergence and rise of trade disputes over renewable energy support measures. By pitting trade against the environment, these disputes ignited a considerable debate over the adequacy of the green policy space available under WTO law. This article examines whether and to what extent the first ten years of litigation settled the key issues in this debate by undertaking a systematic analysis of the developments in the case law and in the renewable energy policy landscape. The analysis reveals that the case law has raised more questions than answers and much uncertainty remains as to the scope of the policy space available for the subsidization of renewables. It also highlights how these disputes steered the debate away from the most contentious issue of subsidy regulation to the slam-dunk issue of non-discrimination. In doing so, they helped conceal rather than resolve the green policy space deficit in multilateral renewable energy subsidy governance.

Recent scholarship has warned that the American public is turning away from democracy, with many focusing on the role of polarization in driving these trends. While these studies devote a great deal of attention to conceptualizing and measuring polarization, however, there is much less attention to the concept of democracy itself. As a result, they encounter several problems: First, lack of attention to the categorical and contextual differences between various democratic transgressions can lead to misleading findings. Second, slippage between macro and micro level analysis of backsliding can make it difficult to draw solid inferences about attitudes. Finally, lack of attention to contestation within the concept of democracy obscures a different kind of regime contention reflected in public attitudes. These problems confound efforts to understand whether the American public is truly turning away from democracy and point to the need for greater collaboration among scholars from different intellectual traditions and methodological orientations.

How to better police mental illness is an evergreen component of criminal justice reform agendas. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has, like many departments, adopted specialized strategies designed to improve these encounters by tasking officers with both care and control responsibilities. These hybridized policing strategies are illustrative of a larger trend of managing social marginality through institutions that increasingly destabilize the penal/welfare state binary. This article draws from fieldwork with the LAPD to analyze how patrol officers construct the category of “mental illness” and deploy hybridized strategies. The analysis focuses on the inflection points that shape how a subject is categorized and the call’s disposal to understand how policing from the “murky middle” of state governance unfolds on the ground. Findings show how officers strategically invoke the pressure of time and the power of place to construct this category and deploy specialized resources when resolving trouble case, or “5149 and a half,” calls. Here, hybridized strategies function to manage social marginality through a governance of problem solving that appears uninterested in doing either care or control. The article concludes by reflecting on the project of hybridizing care and control to police mental illness specifically and social marginality more broadly.

This paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork in Belgian welfare administrations to identify daily practices of resistance among Belgian ‘welfare bureaucrats’ who interrogate the new welfare and immigration law reforms that further restrict migrants’ access to social assistance. The contestation strategies are used to circumvent and sometimes break the formal and informal policy guidelines while still allowing them to perform and remain loyal to the state and to higher principles such as a commitment to the fundamental right to human dignity. Three main contestation strategies are identified: failing to provide certain services to demonstrate the absurdity of certain guidelines, writing reports against the administration and in favour of the user, and encouraging litigation against the federal agencies that employ them. These strategies show Belgian welfare workers’ commitment to providing a form of public service that aligns with their professional ethos rather than enforcing specific government policies.

Drawing on ethnographic research across two street-level bureaucratic institutions in Istanbul, Turkey in the late 2010s, this paper traces the causes and implications of the politicisation of bureaucrats in the context of authoritarianisation. It argues that politicisation of bureaucrats cannot solely be taken as a reflection of the erosion of bureaucratic autonomy and capacity but must be explored further to reveal how bureaucrats cope with authoritarian pressure as well socio-legal destabilisations to preserve their institutional ethos. To this aim, I demonstrate how bureaucrats get politicised in response to authoritarian policies and, in turn, labour to uphold the rule of law despite politico-legal risks. The paper particularly focuses on how bureaucrats weave political solidarity and circulate anti-government discourses and how they use their knowledge of the legal-regulatory repertoire and archives to deter and ‘correct’ unlawful practices through their everyday work. The paper generates insights into the fashionings of political subjectivities and agency by bureaucrats through their labouring in the face of authoritarian interventions, legal disruptions and the increasing interactions with the citizenry. In doing this, my objective is to shed light on the everyday workings of authoritarian state and to get a better picture of the way the law is ‘made real’ (Latour, 2002) across mundane encounters between bureaucrats and the citizenry.

A functional universalistic approach to human dignity in legal argumentation – a theory which applies three variables to define the functions of dignity: content width, argumentative power, and applicability before courts – relative individual right, objective value and source of human rights as legitimate basic functions – the problematic nature of hybrid functions created by blending the basic functions – a set of principles to avoid hybrid functions and minimise the problems caused by them – qualitative analysis of several examples of judgments by supreme, constitutional and international courts to support the theory