This chapter explores the comprehensive Islamic legal and ethical framework for environmental protection and sustainable development. Rooted in the principles of divine unity (Tawhid) and stewardship, Islamic law presents a holistic approach to natural resource management that emphasizes the intrinsic connection between human responsibility and environmental preservation. The text meticulously analyzes Islamic jurisprudential principles governing the protection of fundamental natural resources including water, air, land, animals, and plants.

The research demonstrates that Islamic environmental ethics transcend mere conservation, viewing environmental protection as a spiritual and moral obligation. Key principles include the prohibition of waste, the concept of trust (amanah), and the fundamental right of all creatures to benefit from natural resources. The study highlights how Islamic law prioritizes public interest, ecological balance, and the prevention of harm through sophisticated legal mechanisms.

By examining Quranic injunctions, Prophetic traditions, and Islamic juristic principles, the work provides a nuanced understanding of how Islamic law conceptualizes humanity’s relationship with the natural world. It presents a robust framework for environmental management that balances human needs with ecological sustainability, offering a distinctive perspective on environmental protection rooted in religious ethics and spiritual responsibility.

Impartiality, broadly meaning the absence of bias and according equal treatment before the law, is a foundational element of judicial decision-making around the world. In this chapter, we consider how the goal of judicial impartiality may be either enhanced and supported or undermined by the use of artificial intelligence. Key developments in legal AI include innovations directed toward courts and decision- makers. These may be process-driven – for example, triaging or decision-supporting systems; in the case of pre-trial processes, judges may need to manage technology-facilitated document discovery. AI systems may also be involved in the production of evidence submitted to the court. Finally, courts and judges themselves may be the subjects of AI tools, such as those which identify patterns in decision-making. As this chapter explores, these different uses all have implications for the way that judicial impartiality is enacted and tested.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is influencing many fields around the world, including court practice and procedure. This chapter focuses on AI and the courts in Australia and New Zealand, examining both criminal and civil trial applications. The first section discusses generative AI, technology-assisted review, and automated decision- making; and the second considers the influence of AI on criminal cases, with a focus on child protection and sentencing. AI has many useful applications in this context, however, it should be carefully regulated. In relation to the development of policy and guidelines on AI, Australia and New Zealand courts are only beginning their implementation and may not be as advanced as other jurisdictions, but there is increasing recognition in government and by legal regulatory bodies, and this will be an area of significant policy development over the next decade.

One of the most significant innovations made by the League of Nations was its new disciplinary mechanism against violators of international peace: the instrument of economic sanctions. Instead of going to war to prevent more war, the League would summon the combined material force of its members to exert strong pressure against aggressors. But to implement this procedure, codified in the Covenant’s Article 16, a number of longstanding international legal norms had to be challenged and modified. This chapter examines the legal revolution constituted by the introduction of sanctions by examining debates surrounding C.241, a key League study about the legality of blockade, in 1927. It shows that justifying the use of crippling blockade-style pressure outside of war destabilized the existing laws of war and peace and was more controversial than is usually assumed.

This chapter explores the implications of AI for human judges through the lens of judicial professional competence. It draws on Australasian experience to make two universal arguments: to include competence on the front bench of judicial regulatory values, and to embed digital literacy in the definition and pursuit of judicial competence. There is a deep-rooted, but increasingly problematic, assumption in common law jurisdictions that judges emerge ready-made from the ranks of senior lawyers. The breadth and complexity of potential judicial engagement with AI poses a profound challenge to this assumption. Even in ‘career’ judiciaries, traditional markers of competence for judicial work do not reliably translate to competence for AI. While other dimensions of modern judicial competence, like cross-cultural skills, may be seen to raise similar concerns, AI-related risks and opportunities are proving unique in the speed at which they emerge and evolve. There is an urgent need for more open discussion about equipping future (and current) judicial cohorts to meet this challenge.

Efficiency is one of the most pervasive arguments in favour of implementing algorithms in courts of law. Across different legal contexts, many judiciaries find themselves pressured towards efficiency by growing caseloads and budgetary constraints. The purported speed of the use of AI can be seen as a solution to many existing problems, and even as a positive contribution to the value of access to justice. Through a case study of the Brazilian Judiciary’s strategy of the implementation of algorithms, the drive towards efficiency is examined and unpacked to reveal a series of tensions. First, there is a lack of conceptual clarity which leads to multiple, and sometimes competing, notions of efficiency, especially in light of the interpretation and interplay of legal principles. Moreover, the neutral appearance of efficiency can obscure political choices that cause substantive changes to the legal system without being submitted to democratic control. In this sense, a more nuanced view of efficiency as a judicial value is necessary, where it can be both contested and balanced against other core judicial values, and also seen as directional and at the service of specific ends of law.

The book develops the synergies between Islamic Law, Environmental Law, and Corporate Social Responsibility to situate the concern of environmental degradation looking at regional, transboundary and global disputes between the state, corporate actors, and stakeholders. This book will lay the foundations of Islamic thought related to environmental protection, air quality control, and water rights. Through the lens of environmental law, the work will broaden the framework for Islamic law and critique political and economic dynamics in Muslim-majority countries that give rise to increased levels of environmental toxicity, hazardous waste, water stress, and rampant extractivism. This collection examines these concerns in terms of rigidities and interdependencies, between competing claims to resources, rights and responsibilities, strategy and governance, between state and corporate actors, and the implications for equity and the common good over the long term. Islam and Environmental Law is simultaneously a classical legal framework and contemporary approach for environmental protection, human rights, and an earth-centered jurisprudence.

Research on judicial use of AI has mainly focused on general attitudes toward algorithmic decision-making, leaving open the question of how policy choices shape public perceptions of the courts. This chapter addresses this gap through a comparative analysis of judicial AI policies across four major jurisdictions: the EU, UK, US, and China. We identify three key dimensions along which these approaches differ: the choice between hard and soft law, transparency requirements, and restrictions on substantive versus administrative use. Drawing on insights from rational choice theory and behavioural economics, we analyse how each regulatory choice might influence public trust and legitimacy. Our analysis suggests that the effectiveness of different approaches likely depends on institutional fit, including the pre-existing legal culture, levels of trust in courts and technology, and broader societal attitudes toward automation. These findings help explain the emergence of divergent regulatory approaches across jurisdictions and offer insights for policy-makers seeking to maintain public confidence in the courts while integrating AI into judicial systems.

Technology has been the bedrock of human existence from time immemorial as every aspect of human life is dependent on one form of technology or the other for their satisfaction. The desire to improve the quality of life and living had induced man to continually invent and innovate. The global economy has become a knowledge economy and the bedrock on which the river of the knowledge economy flows is intellectual property and allied rights. A country’s actualisation of its vision of industrialisation and attendant sustainable development changes as the role of man changes in every era and stage of technology based on such country’s efforts at a particular period to develop its frontiers of intellectual property towards meeting the dynamics of technology. With increased technology and innovation employed in manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation comes environmental pollution and degradation. Many traditional societies in Nigeria fostered strong belief systems and social norms which encouraged or even enforced limits to exploitation of biological resources. These traditional practices are being eroded by several factors. This chapter appraises the IPR, traditional knowledge systems and Islamic law perspective in the protection and preservation of the environment.

There is a deep scepticism concerning the idea that AI should be used in the making of judicial decisions. There are normative risks such as inaccuracy and a lack of explainability and accountability, and there are sociological risks to public trust in the judicial system. Prominent legal instruments such as the EU AI Act, Vilnius Convention, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) seek to set some clear guardrails around the use of AI in judicial decision-making, but face two problems. First, they underappreciate the Collingridge dilemma, in which premature intervention risks over-regulation, while belated intervention risks under-regulation. Second, there is a misplaced faith in the power of legal obligations to provide sufficient (and enforceable) guidance. This chapter asks what model of governance should be adopted for the use of AI in courts. In doing so, it undertakes a survey of the current status and evolution of AI technology in courts, examines how we should evaluate risks, and considers competing governance models. It argues that a model of anticipatory governance, often suitable for long and complex problems, should be adopted, and some of the implications are discussed.

Chapter 10 demonstrates that a Latin American regional bloc with a common agenda focused on international legal reform emerged in the League of Nations during the 1920s and that the origins of this bloc can be traced to an important but little-known campaign spearheaded by the Uruguayan diplomat Enrique Buero. Correspondence from Buero’s recently uncovered private archives reveals the domestic, international, and bureaucratic political obstacles that had to be overcome in order to forge a coalition in Geneva. Ultimately, Uruguay and Latin America’s pivot to the League created leverage for legal reform regarding the use of force and diplomatic protection across multiple international organizations.

This chapter contends that awareness is the first step to any changes, and therefore, cultivating sustainability literacy is needed badly to understand the inescapable laws of thermodynamics that limit the growth pursued by the ‘development’ ideology. In such a way the Ulamas and Muslim leaders will be sufficiently-informed to devise the environmental Shariah that correctly situates human society within the context of Earth’s limited natural energy flows and resource stocks, and at the same time, comply with the will of God. Given these physical constraints of the planet, the currently dominant ethical framework and the endless rat-race of modern life have placed us in a riverbed of self-destruction. Technological fixes can temporarily improve conditions but they cannot move us out of this riverbed of unsustainability. Here is where Muslims need to redefine a genuinely Islamic development model and its parameters. An Islamic development paradigm should not aim at making humans possible to forget God and his own inner reality, and being stifled by the prison of their own creation. Unlike the dominant Eurocentric development paradigm, an Islamic development needs to have its own criteria of happiness index in which humans are free to roam around and choose objects at will.