This study examines Israeli judges’ incorporation of the Arabic language and Islamic religious sources in court rulings within Israel and the West Bank military courts. Analysing seventy-eight judicial decisions (1997–2024) and interviews with legal professionals, we identify six themes motivating this practice: persuasion, authority reinforcement, cultural bridging, mutual respect, substantiation and alternative reasoning. Both Arab and Jewish judges employ this approach across criminal, family and civil law cases. This linguistic and cultural integration enhances court decision legitimacy among Arabic-speaking litigants and fosters intercultural understanding within the legal system. The study contributes to discussions on legal pluralism, judicial behaviour and the role of language in multicultural judicial systems, illuminating how the Israeli legal system navigates its multicultural reality and the interplay between law, language and cultural identity.

This article offers a Baradian–Butlerian reading of Arendse & 42 Others v Meta, a landmark Kenyan case on outsourced content moderation. Moving beyond structural and subjection-centred framings, it theorises law as a site of ontological reconfiguration – where labour, harm and personhood are co-constituted through intra-action. Drawing on diffraction as an onto-epistemological method, the paper examines how the Kenyan courts reclassified digital labour, pierced jurisdictional separability and temporarily unsettled transnational corporate insulation. Yet, this legal aperture also generated recursive violence: moderators lost employment, residency and psychiatric care, even as their trauma became juridically legible. The paper challenges linear emancipatory or subjection-based accounts of such cases, arguing instead that law functions as a diffractive apparatus – producing patterns of recognition and exclusion without closure. It contributes to the governance of content-moderation scholarship by showing how Kenya’s legal system intra-acts with global capital to generate contradictory but generative juridical formations.

Credibility and intent are important but imprecise legal categories that need to be assessed in criminal trials as neither common nor civil legal systems provide decision-makers with clear rules on how to evaluate them in practice. In this article, drawing on ethnographic data from trials and deliberations in Italian courts and prosecution offices, we discuss the emotive-cognitive dynamics at play in judges’ and prosecutors’ evaluations of credibility and intent, focusing on cases of murder, intimate partner violence and rape. Using sociological concepts of epistemic emotions, empathy, frame and legal encoding, we show that legal professionals use different reflexive practices to either avoid settling on feelings of certainty or overcome doubts when evaluating credibility and intent. Empathy emerges as a multifaceted tool that can either generate certainty or be used deliberately to instigate or overcome doubts. We contribute to the growing body of literature addressing the emotional dynamics of legal decision-making.

The article focuses on the Ukrainian official language policies and their impact on Ukrainian people-building, claiming the state promotion of Ukrainian as an exclusive language of public life and the ethnically-based understanding of the Ukrainian people, inevitably lead to the exclusion of non-Ukrainian communities from participation in democratic processes, politicise the already problematic language situation and risk undermining the role of Ukrainian as an official language.

For such an analysis, and a conceptualisation of how the state can shape the nature of the people, the article proposes a new theoretical understanding of the people as an organisational system, based on a functional adaptation of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory and Charles Taylor’s social imaginary.

The work presents an approach to the meaning(s) of dignity in the constitutional field that focuses, first and foremost, on answering the question: what is dignity? Four ways of characterising the notion are described, relying, where relevant, on the input obtained beyond the legal field – especially in that of philosophy. Although each of them accounts for a different kind of human property, an important commonality among them is stressed, which provides a pathway to understand the place of dignity as a constitutional end within a material approach to constitutions.

Migrant care workers are a marginalised group within Austrian society. Based on semi-structured interviews, this paper explores their real-life experiences and the problems they face and asks whether and how the law is relevant to their struggles. In short, migrant care workers are aware of some aspects of the law of the country in which they work, but they are reluctant to mobilise the law. Instead, they avoid disputes by using strategies such as leaving, denying or playing down conflicts. This behaviour can be understood by looking at the situation of migrant care workers in Austria. This paper also highlights the important role of migrant care workers’ networks and how these networks compensate for the lack of individual legal mobilisation.

There have been strong proponents and opponents in academic debates about the use of social science in legal practice. However, in such academic discussions, little attention has been paid to what legal practitioners think about social science and its use in law. The present study shows that legal practitioners have complex views about social science. Drawing on in-depth interviews, it shows that there are five ideal-types of ‘social science consciousness’: enthusiast, pragmatist, indifferent, critical optimist and opponent. The paper shows what the implications are for law and social science, as well as a new research agenda on social science consciousness.

Procedural justice considerations have long justified both the instrumental and intrinsic value of effective participation among court users, where ideals of impartiality, dignity and fairness remain pre-eminent. However, recent developments in socio-legal research as well as legal policy and practice point to an inchoate normative reframing of the law beyond procedural justice grounds, based on what we call the humanising imperative for effective participation. We utilise the philosophy of Hume to elucidate its distinctive features, namely the significance of partiality and the virtues of humanity. The paper further explores the putative enactment of the humanising imperative in three court settings in England and Wales – the Court of Protection, criminal courts and inquests – that indicates the precarity of this orientation in relation to procedural justice principles.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, notably ChatGPT, have emerged in legal practice, facilitating the completion of tasks, ranging from electronic communications to the drafting of documents. The generative capabilities of these systems underscore the duty of lawyers to competently represent their clients by keeping abreast of technological developments that can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their work. At the same time, the processing of clients’ information through generative AI systems threatens to compromise their confidentiality if disclosed to third parties, including the systems’ providers. The present paper aims to determine the impact of the use of generative AI systems by lawyers on the duties of competence and confidentiality. The findings derive from the application of doctrinal and empirical research on the legal practice and its digitalisation in Luxembourg. The paper finally reflects on the integration of generative AI systems in legal practice to raise the quality of legal services for clients.

Internationally, the home is legally protected as a bastion of private life, where one may retreat to and recollect oneself after a day’s work and enjoy family life. With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, working from home – facilitated by new collaborative information and communications technology (ICT) platforms and tools – became mandatory in several countries. For many, the workplace was brought into the home. This article examines how working from home on a mandatory basis during the pandemic affected employees’ perceptions and practices of privacy, and its implications for the legal understanding of privacy. With Norway as a case, it investigates the measures taken by employees and employers to safeguard privacy during this period. The data collection and method combine an interpretation of legal sources with qualitative interviews. The analysis shows experiences and practices that suggest a blurring of roles and physical spaces, and the adoption of boundary-setting measures to safeguard privacy.

This article investigates changes in the right to social assistance – a means-tested cash support programme, regulated by the Social Services Act – for irregularised migrants over a period of four decades, 1982–2022. The article makes the case that austerity policies have hollowed out the right to support, with significant repercussions for those with irregularised residency status. In doing so, it draws on a range of empirical data to shed light on the dynamics of legal change over time and across various settings, identifying both continuities and critical turning points. The latter include shifts in national or local migration policies, and novel intersections between migration law and social law, epitomised by court judgments that have redrawn the lines of inclusion and exclusion in the sphere of rights holders. The article also highlights continuous issues concerning inconsistencies in the legal sources made used of by courts, neglect of children’s interests and needs, and an application of requirements for participation in work-related activities that disadvantage migrants and citizens alike. Ultimately, the article offers insights into how social rights can be preserved in the context of increasingly restrictive migration and social policies.

Financial redress for victims of occupational diseases can be offered through no-fault compensation schemes. No-fault compensation schemes have an explicit mission in promoting perceived fairness and justice. The objective is to offer a quick, fair and just procedure and outcome, while preventing civil court procedures and restoring trust. However, the question is whether applicants of these no-fault schemes indeed experience perceived fairness and justice. This paper discusses the result of an in-depth interview study with fifty-eight victims involved in no-fault schemes for occupational diseases in the Netherlands. We focus on the role of perceived procedural justice, outcome concerns and trust in the (former) employer.

The crisis that now grips the ‘living earth’ establishes an intersection of climate and finance which entails questions of time: what does temporality mean in the context of both climate emergency and the processes of financialisation? In this paper, I intervene in these debates by reflecting on the reconstruction of time as a concrete legal object in the space of international investor-state arbitration. Over the past decade, international arbitration settlements, often using the accounting technique of discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis, have increasingly relied on a conception of investor-oriented time that offers an expansive future, a time of long-term unbroken integrity. I trace the complex but often uneven shifts in arbitration practices through which the future is reconfigured not as a proximate and conditional object but as a category, encoded in DCF, which is endlessly expansive. The time of the unbroken asset, I argue, is in urgent disjuncture with the time of transition.

Even after seven decades since it came into force, examinations of the Indian Constitution remain partial and incomplete. It is not widely known that the original ratified copy of the Constitution also makes a visual argument through the opening pages of every part. These elaborately crafted artworks, which are entirely negated in Indian scholarship, are structured in the form of a teleological and linear narrative, encompassing a claim of an unbroken link to an immemorial civilisation. Based on archival research and a hermeneutic that combines imaginal analysis, literary theory, historical scholarship and constitutional jurisprudence, this article will demonstrate that these constitutive images are the aesthetic foundation that imaginally binds the constitutional subject and the collective citizenry, and this article will show how its negation is closely tied to a foundational ambivalence that endures in constitutional law.