The present volume focuses closely on the constituents of performing law in its transitive and mobile enactments both inside and outside the courthouses where trials are staged. Working with actors, dancers, musicians, and lawyers, Performing Law provides a novel approach to the dramatics of justice, the theatre of veridiction, through analysis of the elements of its manifestation in architectural, artistic, corporeal, choreographic, filmic, and dance modalities of relay of legal action in the public sphere. These include the stage directions that legal doctrine provides to legal actors, the masks worn, the affective spaces created, the phantasms of interior and exterior, desire and terror, resistance and laughter that perform the long neglected media of the auditory and visual transmission of law as a form of life.

In this chapter I argue that God’s love and goodness make it impossible for him either to intend the evil of human death or to delegate the authority to take a human life. This concludes my argument for the absolute norm against intending death.

This chapter investigates why people join pro-oil campaigns. Attending to the case study of Canada’s Energy Citizens (CEC), the chapter argues that the campaign’s early stages relied on personal connections between members as much as fealty to a political cause. The fledgling campaign mobilized staff’s friends and coworkers, who joined as a show of collegial support. These bonds were solidified by shared feelings of precarity, with members believing that their own livelihoods and communities were dependent on the largesse of oil companies. It was the threat of losing their way of life – or more exactly, the perception that their way of life was under attack from environmentalists and legislators –that kept pro-oil campaigners mobilized. Joiners’ enthusiasm for supporting industry was often tempered by feelings of risk, however, as they worried about how becoming the face of Big Oil might affect their employability or personal relationships. Joiners also critiqued CEC’s focus on civility, which they believed undercut the effectiveness of the campaign.

Laplace operators and their spectral properties are powerful tools for the analysis of networks in the social and the biological sciences and in other domains. In computer science, the theory of families of expander graphs is particularly important. Eigenvalues are also a key for quantifying synchronization and other features of nonlinear dynamics.

International human rights courts and treaty bodies are increasingly turning to automated decision-making (ADM) technologies to expedite and improve their review of individual complaints. These tribunals have yet to consider many of the legal, normative, and practical issues raised by the use of different types of automation technologies for these purposes. This chapter offers an initial assessment of the benefits and challenges of introducing ADM into international human rights adjudication. We weigh up the benefits of introducing these tools to improve international human rights adjudication – which include greater speed and efficiency in processing and sorting cases, identifying patterns in jurisprudence, and enabling judges and staff to focus on more complex responsibilities – against two types of cognitive biases – biases inherent in the datasets on which ADM is trained, and biases arising from interactions between humans and machines. We also introduce a framework for enhancing the accountability of ADM tools that mitigates the potential harms caused by automation technologies in this context.

Chapter 15 provides a biographical analysis of Manley O. Hudson’s role as a networker between the League of Nations and American elites during the interwar period. As a professor at Harvard Law School, Hudson played a pivotal role in advancing the League’s agenda in the United States. Through his extensive travels and engagements with American elites, Hudson circulated information, offered advice, and forged connections that helped to shape the American perspective on international law. The chapter examines how Hudson’s life and profession shaped his development into a prominent figure in a transatlantic network formed around the League of Nations system. Drawing on Hudson’s private papers and other archives, the chapter situates his intellectual and professional work within its social and historical context. By exploring Hudson’s intersecting roles as practitioner, advocate, and academic, we gain insight into his evolution as a leading American international lawyer. This examination allows us to understand the self-perception and worldview of one of the key figures in the development of international law and the complex relationship between the League and the United States. The chapter contributes to the trend in international and transnational history that uses biography to portray transnational spaces and experiences beyond national frameworks.

Say an AI program passes a Turing test because it can converse in a way indistinguishable from a human. And say that its developers can then teach it to converse – and even present an extended persuasive argument – in a way indistinguishable from the sort of human we call a ‘lawyer’. The program could thus become an AI brief-writer, capable of regularly winning brief-writing competitions against human lawyers. If and when that happens, this chapter argues, the same technology can be used to create AI judges, judges that we should accept as no less reliable than human judges, and more cost-effective. If the software can create persuasive opinions, capable of regularly winning opinion-writing competitions against human judges, we should accept it as a judge, even if the opinions do not stem from human judgment.

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the history and developments of AI in courts. In particular, through the lens of legal informatics, we explore four phases in the development and evolution of AI in courts: judicial information retrieval, human-made models of judicial reasoning, machine learning for judicial prediction, and large language models for courts. For each of these, we explore the opportunities and challenges in their implementation and adoption within the judicial system.

The Nordic countries became members of the League of Nations in 1920. This changed the international position of the five Nordic states considerably and also had legal reverberations. During the League’s function, a substantial number of jurists from the five Nordic states contributed to the diverse discourses on the legal dimensions of the organization, its character, and its many functions. The legal expertise on international law grew out of the nineteenth-century inter-Nordic union conflicts that prepared the Nordic jurists formodern international law at the beginning of the twentieth century. The legal scholars were often both jurists and politicians and their legal reasoning and political considerations were intimately intertwined. This chapter studies for the first time the many contributions from over thirty Nordic lawyers that were involved with the legal issues of the League system.

The judiciary must reflect the diversity of the population it serves to ensure justice is both impartial and perceived as fair. This chapter examines how AI in courts influences judicial diversity and legitimacy. While AI can uncover unconscious biases and enhance case analysis, judicial diversity remains essential to prevent AI from reinforcing existing prejudices. The chapter also explores identity awareness and institutional legitimacy. Like other democratic institutions, courts using AI must uphold representativeness. AI can foster collaborative constitutionalism by incorporating diverse perspectives in constitutional debates, helping address concerns about judicial legitimacy when unelected judges overturn decisions by elected representatives. Finally, the chapter considers how judges’ engagement with AI- driven social media affects transparency and public trust. As these technologies shape perceptions of the judiciary, they must be carefully managed to support judicial diversity and legitimacy. This is particularly important for judges from diverse backgrounds, who face greater risks of digital harassment, potentially undermining institutional trust and judicial integrity.

In this chapter I respond to two claims about unborn human beings: first that they have no rights because they have no interests; second that they have no rights because they are not persons.

This chapter is concerned with Pindar’s poems as performance events, compounds of words, vocal melody, and instrumental music. My central claim is that such performances, as well as being events that are listened to, direct and refashion the act of listening. Following an overview of Pindar’s references to music, with which he positions himself as a creative participant in music’s still-developing history, I elaborate this claim in readings of Nemean 4, fr. 152, and Paean 8. In each of these texts, Pindar’s combinations of unusual diction, intertextuality, rhythmical framing, and other aspects of poetic form enable his audiences to listen to words and their meanings anew, and thereby to apprehend musical sound taking on fresh significance.

This chapter discusses the dazzling array of creativity that is language and metaphor in Pindar, in terms of its impact on us as its consumers and in terms of the questions that aspects of lyric diction and style ask of us. The discussion reaffirms the importance of close reading from the inside out as the key to appreciating the nature and challenge of Pindaric lyric. It assesses the powers and risks that come with lyric language in detail and across time, as readers and audiences are stopped in their tracks. The chapter discusses the experiential potential of a representative selection of examples taken from across the corpus, in three sections. Section 1, ‘Options’, investigates how Pindaric lyric fosters both a freedom of expression and an encouragement to audiences and readers to keep their minds open in response. Section 2, ‘Colours of Desire’, explores the sustained intensificatory effects of marked imagery in one extended example from Olympian 6. Section 3, ‘Access and Appropriateness’, explores how the hyperbolic nature of lyric imagery may raise further questions about our commitments to the sentiments that Pindaric lyric finds itself able to project.

Moving beyond the structural antagonism of criminal law, this chapter explores the subject positions of actors in scenarios of sexual harm. If the sex offender emerges as a felon bearing the head of a wolf, the victimized white child emerges as the exemplary figure of vulnerability. While tropes of vulnerability are mobilized to justify paternalistic state coercion, they are also a powerful reminder of humans’ interdependence and mutuality. Thinking with vulnerability as an analytical category focuses attention on the lingering traumatic effects of sexual assault, as well as the severe punitiveness toward sex offenders. Addressing sexual violence does not require draconian penalties; conversely, addressing carceral expansion does not necessitate minimizing sexual violence. Centering vulnerability may allow us to rethink the foundations of our social contract in ways that acknowledge both our precariousness and the sovereign violence that holds us in its thrall.