In the Anglophone world of law, the German legal historian and legal theorist Cornelia Vismann (1961–2010) is best known as an acute interpreter of French high theory, especially of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. This type of reception is, I argue, somewhat distorted. For her English-speaking colleagues, French “poststructuralism” provides the interface that enables Vismann to enter into shared discursive constellations with her Anglo-American critical legal colleagues. But at the same time, such a reception also downplays the very specifically German soil from which her unique scholarship arose. This Article discusses Vismann’s German background as media theory, the discipline that she was mostly associated with by her compatriots. The Article then assesses what Vismann’s media-theoretical contributions potentially offer to the contemporary study of law. For this “other Vismann,” the media-theoretical study of law was, I suggest, a practically oriented critical discipline that focused on law’s “cultural techniques” and how they operated. I also briefly touch upon what is generally known as “German media theory” through key figures such as Friedrich A. Kittler and Bernhard Siegert.

In this Article we analyze whether and how the legal reactions to COVID-19 brought permanent changes to three main areas that are at the very basis of the study of comparative constitutional law: the horizontal separation of powers in different forms of government; the vertical separation of powers and its effects on forms of state; and the reviewability of limitations to human rights and personal freedoms by bodies exercising constitutional review. Rather than just examining and categorizing the reactions, we search for the political, institutional, factual, and sometimes even cultural rationales at the basis of each trend. Our claim is that COVID-19 was a driving force for relevant changes in the three analyzed areas, but we also recognize that these changes did not come “out of the blue,” as they were already “latent” in considered legal systems. The analysis demonstrates that the traditional categories we use to classify the forms of government, forms of state, and the mechanisms of constitutional review, although being useful paradigms to study these topics, have in themselves the potential to be “stretched,” and even unhinged, when global and long-lasting emergencies, as COVID-19, are in place.

When establishing constitutional rules that regulate political parties, liberal democracies struggle between civil liberties—thus tolerating anti-democratic parties—and potential threats of democratic breakdown, which can be reduced by prosecuting and prohibiting anti-democratic parties. We suggest that liberal democracies must balance false positives and false negatives by combining ex ante and ex post regulatory mechanisms. By making use of a unique dataset of thirty-seven liberal democracies collected by the authors, we find empirical results consistent with our positive theory. An extensive review of the normative debate and case law provides additional qualitative support.

This Article considers how the ranking of states, as perpetuated by the international legal order, may play a role in the considerations of those targeted by global naming and shaming campaigns. To do so, it examines Qatar’s response to being shamed in the lead up to and during the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup. Drawing from international relations literature on status and adopting a critical approach to unpack the prevalence of the hierarchal structuring of states in the contemporary international legal order, the Article claims that the practice of shaming, as a human rights enforcement strategy, inevitably pushes target states to question their status within the international legal community. This could, counterproductively, lead to negative outcomes for the rights of the very individuals these campaigns seek to protect. Furthermore, the Article sketches out a theoretical argument for why certain states may consider the enactment of cosmetic legal reforms to be an attractive strategy for countering a global shaming campaign.

The language of human rights is a prominent tool of choice to push for moral principles such as justice, equity, and fairness in the social, economic, and political spheres. Simultaneously, the concept and practice of human rights have attracted critiques. Relativism is one such enduring critique. Relativists advocate due and reasonable consideration towards cultural diversity and specificity of diverse human communities, within the limits allowed by universality of human rights. The relativist critique featured prominently in the debates surrounding Qatar’s hosting of the FIFA World Cup 2022. Commentators have spoken about Qatar’s scrutiny often moving beyond legitimate human rights criticism, uninformed activism being counterproductive; and the appropriateness of, largely, Western and maximalist ideals of human rights being applied without accounting for local needs and peculiarities. In this Article, I bring together the literature on the relativist critique and the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 as a case study, to examine the usefulness and limitation of human rights as a language of critique to achieve meaningful transformative change in sporting contexts. I focus on the debates surrounding the rights of migrant workers and the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community; and argue that while human rights advocacy had a notable impact in relation to FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, it is a tale full of cautions and lessons.

Among the many human rights and corruption concerns surrounding the Qatar 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup, two ultimately rose to the fore: labor and LGBTQ+ rights. A careful look at Qatar’s response to these issues reveals a sharp and provocative contrast. Though the World Cup organizers and the Qatari Government generally resisted Western criticism of its LGBTQ+ laws and practices, both bodies adopted systemic labor reforms. To the extent these reforms remain in place several years after the event, they can be said to constitute a human rights legacy. This Article explores one angle from which to understand this contrast. It distinguishes between principles, which are deeply rooted in a country’s political, cultural, or religious belief system, and practices, which find their support in convenience, profit, and the self-interest of entrenched powers but which lack a deeper cultural, philosophical, or religious grounding. It further argues that sexual morality is best understood in the context of Qatari law and culture as a principle, while the labor abuses are mere practices. This distinction helps explain the disparate levels of reform and legacy: to the extent human rights violations are rooted in principles, the likelihood of reform and therefore of legacy is relatively low; where these violations are rooted merely in practices, the likelihood may be substantially higher. This distinction can also help to predict how future host countries/cities will respond to the human rights standards that megasport governing bodies increasingly enforce.

One year ago, the Qatar World Cup was in full swing, and Qatar was omnipresent in our public and private spheres. For many, the Qatar 2022 World Cup will forever be intimately connected with the plight of migrant workers. This Article dives into the confluence of spectacle, counter-marketing, international—labor and human rights—law, and local reforms, which came together in the long decade which followed FIFA’s fateful decision in December 2010 to give the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. It starts by situating the FIFA World Cup 2022 within Qatar’s drive for soft power and nation branding, before turning to re-counting how the 2022 World Cup was “ambushed” in the name of Qatar’s migrant workers and their rights, putting the issue on the global agenda and triggering the involvement of the ILO. Thereafter, the Article discusses the effects of this ambush counter-marketing by engaging with the labor reforms introduced by the Qatari government, while highlighting their limits in terms of scope and implementation. The Article concludes with a general discussion on the blind spots and shortcomings of the turn to counter-marketing as a strategy to vindicate international human rights or labor rights.

The aim of this paper is not to relitigate Qatar’s human rights record but to assess the effectiveness of its labor reforms: the principal concern is dispute resolution and enforceability. While Qatar instituted a broad suite of labor law reforms in the years preceding the World Cup, questions remain about whether they have improved access to justice for migrant workers. More attention needs to be given to the dispute settlement system established by Law No. 13 of 2017 to assess if new legal norms translate into enforceable rights. It is argued that the labor dispute system has largely failed by not taking into account the circumstances that define the employer-employee relationship in Qatar, especially the stark imbalance in power. While reforms might endure at the level of formal law, the dispute system will fail to deliver genuine justice to workers unless it is refashioned.

The FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 received an unprecedented amount of criticism from civil society and human rights organizations for the human rights risks and adverse human rights impacts related to organizing and staging the event. Interestingly, it was the first World Cup that was delivered with a team of human rights volunteers monitoring human rights issues at event venues on match days.1 Given the novelty of this project, this Article first informs about the FIFA human rights volunteers (HRV) program in general and second, it analyses to what extent it can be considered a concrete and practical example of an organization’s human rights due diligence (HRDD) and remedy efforts. As some of the broader business and human rights literature suggests, there seems to be a lack of practical examples of how corporations implement HRDD, making FIFA’s HRV program an exception worth studying.