Wills have lent themselves to more performative possibilities than any other legal document. They have been engraved, painted, written about and sung. Yet within legal scholarship these representations have been overlooked. Interpreting the Reading of the Will widely, this article demonstrates the tenacity of the will on artistic imagination and, at the same time, its starkly shifting functions and audiences. Adopting a chronological approach, it examines church monuments from the sixteenth century, nineteenth-century ‘realist’ paintings and novels, twentieth-century crime fiction, comic operas and figurative domestic porcelain, and more recent gritty and glamorous TV soaps and contemporary performance art. Aided by scholarship across a wide range of disciplines, it argues that this diverse work mirrors and illuminates historical, political and sociological debates about the public and private nature of inheritance. In a hyper-visual world, it makes a case for taking artistic endeavours seriously within legal scholarship and pedagogy.

When does legal mobilisation democratise institutions rather than instrumentalise them? Existing frameworks cannot answer this question: deliberative democracy theory evaluates political engagement without addressing legal mobilisation; socio-legal scholarship documents litigation’s effects without providing normative criteria. This article develops reflexive juridification as a framework for evaluating democratic legitimacy across institutional domains. Democratic legitimacy, I argue, requires movements to fulfil three copulative requirements: communicative translation, functional differentiation and identity preservation. These requirements – grounded in Habermasian discourse theory and operationalised through comparative analysis of Chilean and United States cases – specify procedural standards for assessing how movements navigate political deliberation and legal interpretation simultaneously. Comparative analysis reveals that instrumental juridification emerges symmetrically across ideological orientations: progressive movements through the judicialisation of politics (Chile’s Constitutional Convention), conservative movements through the politicisation of law (Dobbs). The framework advances interdisciplinary legal studies by providing normative criteria independent of ideological content, evaluating process rather than substance.

The global order is undergoing significant transformations with far-reaching implications for international criminal justice. These shifts pose an existential challenge to core crimes accountability while re-shaping its pursuit. As the liberal order recedes, the International Criminal Court (ICC) faces a crisis driven by absolute sovereignty’s reassertion, weakened multilateral governance and increasing political and coercive pressures from powerful states. Simultaneously, these developments promote decentralised accountability, fostering the emergence of a polycentric system of international criminal justice. Trends in re-nationalisation, hybridisation and regionalisation align accountability with a more pluralistic, fluid global order. In this context, the ICC is not obsolete but requires a redefined role. While no longer the apex of international criminal justice, its existence remains crucial to addressing the risks of decentralised accountability. The Court, particularly its Office of the Prosecutor, should reconfigure strategies around positive complementarity, repositioning itself as a co-ordinating hub within this polycentric system.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about changes to almost every aspect of life. Courts were no exception, with the pandemic dramatically increasing the use of virtual court hearings. This paper explores virtual hearings and their impact on therapeutic approaches to judging, which prioritise connection and engagement between judicial officers and participants. While particularly drawing on the experience in Australia and the United Kingdom, the paper draws on broader international research to identify the potential challenges of seeking to conduct therapeutic judging online, but also areas where the virtual environment might improve participants’ therapeutic experience. Further research on this topic is likely to be fruitful, as virtual court hearings become a more entrenched part of court practice. We therefore canvass areas for future research, to enhance the therapeutic potential of the judicial role in a virtual environment.

Despite the social, political and personal importance of contentious death investigation, medico-legal autopsies have received scant socio-legal attention. By extending understanding of the importance of care for the dead in this context, this article begins to bridge that gap. To do this, I explore original empirical data from interviews with Anatomical Pathology Technologists who both assist during post-mortems and take responsibility for the care of the deceased’s body before and after autopsy. I argue that care is woven throughout their practice and identities. This care is enacted within a complex context of relations and regulations, such that practice can simultaneously be technically and morally ‘good’ (including actions that go beyond what is necessary or mandated). In making this argument, I both extend understandings of care to relationships with the dead, and contribute new insights into the way that coronial justice can, and should, gain legitimacy.

This paper adopts a sociosemiotic perspective to examine how normative consensus and legitimacy are constructed in global artificial intelligence (AI) governance discourse. Drawing on a corpus of forty-seven international normative documents, the study identifies an emerging cross-textual consensus around three core principles – Safety, Human-centric and Fairness – and analyses how these are semiotically encoded. The findings reveal tensions between state and non-state actors, and between semiotic agreement and practical implementation. For instance, ‘Safety’ is often framed through securitisation discourse, while ‘Human-centric’ is increasingly grounded in international human rights frameworks. The study further shows that discursive strategies such as nominalisation help establish surface-level consensus but introduce ambiguity that undermines enforceability. By conceptualising governance texts as dynamic semiotic systems, this research moves beyond the hard law–soft law dichotomy, revealing global AI regulation as a contested arena of meaning-making. It offers a theoretical basis for advancing more inclusive and operational governance models.

Why did the nineteenth century see so little progress in addressing smoke pollution, even as smoke was increasingly recognised as a problem and economical technological solutions were identified? This article argues that efforts to abate smoke were impeded by the antagonistic class relationship between stokers and manufacturers, which prevented the emergence of a mutually beneficial compromise around smoke abatement. Employers sought to reduce smoke by compelling their stokers to take greater care under the threat of punishment. Law played an important role, siding with employers to impose liability for smoke pollution on stokers. Even when stokers were not prosecuted directly, employers often demanded indemnities as compensation for careless stoking. This reinforced mistrust between the two classes, undermining efforts to bring stokers on board with the goal of abating smoke. These findings may offer lessons today, as climate policy continues to be opposed despite the availability of green technologies and the existence of a scientific consensus on climate change.

Rates of judicial dissent vary dramatically between Southern Africa’s appeal courts, even though judges frequently circulate between their benches. This variation cannot be explained by the ideological distance between judges or by their judicial philosophies. Differing institutional arrangements provide better but still incomplete explanations. These arrangements reflect dramatic transformations in the region’s judicial cultures. Analysing these diverging cultures illuminates why some forms of dissent have proved particularly contentious, and why styles of adjudication favouring dissent in some areas of the law have aroused particular hostility. There is thus no straightforward ‘norm’ that promotes or undermines judicial consensus in the region.

This article develops an evaluative framework for community-rooted justice systems through comparative analysis of South Africa’s Community Advice Offices (CAOs) and Bolivia’s constitutionally recognised Indigenous jurisdictions. Departing from courtroom-centric approaches that have dominated access-to-justice scholarship, the study employs socio-legal methodology synthesising ethnographic research, constitutional texts and institutional analyses. The examination reveals that both systems derive legitimacy from relational embeddedness rather than formal legal authority, resolve disputes holistically within social networks and navigate ongoing tensions between community autonomy and state regulation. From these practices, five evaluative dimensions emerge inductively: accessibility, responsiveness, legitimacy, empowerment and sustainability. The framework offers conceptual tools for assessing alternative justice mechanisms on their own terms, contributing to a shift from descriptive legal pluralism toward evaluative pluralism attentive to how communities themselves produce and experience justice.

This paper revisits debates about the right to communicate from the late 1960s to early 2000s, examining how different actors engaged with this concept in reaction to imminent technological changes and their implications for society. It explores how these actors advocated for or contested this concept at different international forums such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to advance different agendas for the international order. In telling the story of the right to communicate, this paper adopts a historical-materialist approach, examining discursive struggles as reflective of and conditioned by material and social relations and their contradictions, and reflects on the question of the promise and perils of human rights for social change, considering not only the malleability of rights language but the material conditions of which human rights concepts are reflective and constitutive.

This article brings critical human rights scholarship into the intersex sphere to unearth the potential limitations of the growing deployment of human rights to improve the health care experiences of intersex people. It traces the changing tactics of intersex activist groups and identifies three tendencies – reformism, coerciveness and juridification – that may be brought by the intersex movement and international agencies embracing human rights as the vernacular. This article argues that the dominance of the human rights approach, while allowing the intersex struggle to gain legitimacy, visibility and recognition, risks fuelling a depoliticised framework of remedicalisation and increased penality. It deflects attention from the endeavour of interrogating the social and cultural foundations rendering intersex variances a deviant form of embodiment.

Constitutional democracies face significant threats. Such threats are countered by various theories of militant democracy and non-militant democratic self-defence, using a wide range of repressive, educational and social policy tools. The article introduces an alternative perspective on democratic self-defence policies, emphasising integration as a key component in maintaining the resilience of the constitutional community and draws on Rudolf Smend’s integration theory. It explores how constitutional design through its structures, powers, procedures, rituals and symbols shapes community cohesion and strengthens the constitutional order by deliberately using emotions.

As cities in the Global South gain visibility in global forums – engaging in climate negotiations, forming alliances and aligning with development goals – their legal and economic status remains structurally ambivalent. This article challenges the idea that these cities are becoming full international legal actors. Instead, we argue that they possess a ‘borderline international legal personality’: conditionally included in global regimes through mechanisms that reinforce long-standing asymmetries. Central to this dynamic is the notion of ‘creditworthiness’, now a key metric of development. Tools like sub-sovereign credit ratings pressure cities to prioritise investor confidence over local needs. These interventions promise international agency but often deepen financial dependency. We call for a re-reading of urban internationalism, attentive to the in-between status of Global South cities – caught between aspiration and discipline. Any emancipatory urban agenda must confront the financialisation of local governance and centre debt justice, autonomy and institutional reform.

Environmental protection is widely considered a core function of the state. Yet more than 210 million people currently live under the control of armed non-state actors (ANSAs), many of whom exercise state-like authority over vast, environmentally important territories. Despite growing legal and political science scholarship on ANSAs, their role in environmental protection remains largely unexplored. International law, shaped by conflict-centric frameworks, often fails to account for ANSAs’ non-military dimensions – especially those related to environmental service provision. Similarly, theories of rebel governance have yet to meaningfully incorporate environmental service provision as a governance facet. The article addresses this gap by examining the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) in Colombia, drawing on documentary analysis and interviews with former combatants. It shifts the limited ecological perspective on war, arguing that the FARC-EP’s environmental practices amounted to a form of rebel environmental governance – structured, intentional and legally plural. Through this case study, the article challenges dominant narratives that view ANSAs solely as environmental spoilers or incidental protectors and instead advocates for a more comprehensive understanding of their impact as environmental service providers and lawmakers. In doing so, the paper reframes ANSAs as socio-legal actors whose environmental practices merit scholarly attention – particularly in ongoing debates around accountability and transitional justice in conflict-affected regions.

Social reproduction offers a critical lens through which to analyse how labour law creates and constructs labour/ers. Socially reproductive work, traditionally ignored in waged labour markets, has been omitted from legal categories that protect workers. Yet these same legal categories that create and construct labour/ers are themselves socially reproduced. In Sicilian agricultural work, social reproduction happens in the extra care that is needed in labour carried out by migrantised workers, as well as the silence that is reproduced by markets that overlook the exploitation buttressing a local economy. The lens of social reproduction connects the work behind the scenes that depends on the complicity, whether wilful or ignorant, of consumers who do not ‘care’ that the labour producing Sicilian Denominazione di Origine Protetta (Protected Designation of Origin, DOP) and Indicazione Geografica Protetta (Protected Geographical Denomination, IGP) products is legally irregular. Contributing to discussions of labour law’s limits, this article addresses how labour exploitation is socially reproduced through the invisibilisation of labour involved in cultivating and harvesting Sicilian DOP olives and IGP tomatoes.