The evolution of AI presents both challenges and opportunities for courts. To date, most discussion and examination of AI and courts has focused on decision-making tools, reflecting a broader trend in discourse around courts that unduly centres on courts’ adjudicatory functions. Yet courts perform a far wider set of functions and societal roles. This chapter examines the current and potential uses of AI, questions of suitability and ethics, and the challenges and opportunities that arise through this broader consideration of what it is courts actually do, beyond determining disputes. While AI may enhance access to justice, reduce costs, save time, and potentially improve the quality of justice, significant challenges arise, including the potential erosion of judicial respect, inaccuracy, and concerns for the separation of powers. Crucially, court users and the public ought to be more widely consulted in how AI is developed and deployed for courts to achieve better, fairer, and more effective justice.

I turn now to questions concerning killing in war. I first rehearse Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of the conditions that must be met for a just war. Aquinas clearly differs from me in his belief that those with public authority are morally entitled to intend death as part of what is required for them to carry out their responsibilities. I argue, however, that even St Thomas is more restrictive with regard to intentional killing than are some contemporary Thomists.

Although everything we know about Ignatius Sancho’s early life comes to us from a short biographical sketch written by the lawyer Joseph Jekyll (1754–1837) as a preface to Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho: An African (1782), much of this is unsubstantiated and some appears improbable, exaggerated, or even invented. This chapter accordingly offers a critical reassessment and attempts a historical reconstruction of Jekyll’s “Life of Ignatius Sancho.” It offers a possible version of events that may explain Jekyll’s account of Sancho’s childhood journey from Cartagena to London. It argues, however, that the challenge of verifying much of “The Life” remains insurmountable at present and we can better understand “The Life” as a rhetorical intervention in the early phase of the British abolition campaign rather than as an unproblematic record of historical events. Jekyll’s “Life” may offer the reader, this chapter concludes, a moral rather than a literal truth.

Ever since the earliest Arabic writings on medicine we meet treatises on widespread illnesses or crowd diseases, including epidemics. Some of those works discuss the causes and treatment; others deal with the treatment only. This paper is limited to the works that deal with environmental pollution as a cause of such illnesses. They cover subjects like air and water contamination, solid waste mishandling and environmental assessments of certain localities. The treatises reviewed are those written by (1) al-Kindi, (2) Qusta b. Luqa, (3) alRazi, (4) Ibn al-Jazzar, (5) al-Tamimi, (6) Abu Sahl al-Masihi, (7) Ibn Sina, (8) Ali b. Ridwan, (9) Ibn Jumay’, (10) Ya’qub al-Isra’ili, (11) Abdullatif alBaghdadi, (12) Ibn al-Quff and (13) Ibn al-Nafis. Studying the contents of each work shows which authors were merely copying the Greek theory of humours and miasma, and which made genuine contributions to the field. The period covered in the paper is up to the end of the thirteenth century A.D. This is because the Black Death took place in the fourteenth century, and encouraged several authors of that time to write about epidemics and plagues. Other contemporary researchers have studied these later works.

This chapter discusses the importance of the audience in research on forensic performance. “Forensic performance” is taken here to include the dramaturgical techniques that inform Erving Goffman’s account of “the presentation of self in everyday life,” extending not only to ways of affirming one’s own position but also to ways of portraying the various figures or propositions in a legal dispute. These practices include the use of speech, gesture, and ritual to convey arguments, embody or criticize legal authority, and impersonate a party, witness, or any other participant in an actual or imagined scenario. The audience includes those in the courtroom and imagined observers in the larger public. The chapter begins by examining criticisms of forensic performance in the early modern period and then turns to the use of cross-examination in the nineteenth century. Finally, the discussion considers judges’ behavior, particularly when they encourage the audience to laugh in response to their questions. By doing so, judges merge the role of an impartial interlocutor attending to policy questions and the role of an individual to whom the law might apply.

The present chapter attempts a comparative analysis of three different legal systems and their approaches to environmental law, contributing to the extensive literature on this area of law in numerous areas of the world such as the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. However, that literature appears to have had little coverage of the treatment of environmental law in Islamic law, one of the three main global legal systems together with common and civil law. The bold spread of Islamic tendency in the Middle East that followed the so-called “Arab Spring” assures major changes in the political and economic sphere, including environmental and natural resource levels. Environmental threats are very pressing all over the world, as the Earth needs to be protected through the adoption of universally applicable legal rules and the right to a healthy environment needs to be elaborated on in international instruments. Man’s position in the universe is premised on two principles: the stewardship of man which means that man is not only a creature but also God’s khalifa (steward) on earth.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are used in court to analyse legal data, cite case law, evaluate and generate evidence, or support judges with prediction. As technological advancements enter the courtroom, assessing their impact on core judicial values is crucial. This chapter asks whether AI undermines procedural fairness in judicial decision-making. To address this question, it first presents procedural fairness as a normative concept studied across different disciplines. It shows why procedural fairness matters and what values fair procedures aim to foster. Drawing on case studies and scholarly work, it then illustrates how AI systems may impair these values. It then investigates how regulatory attempts and ethical frameworks for AI in judicial systems aim to address the resulting issues by analysing fundamental principles of technology regulation. The main argument of the chapter is that AI regulation must be complemented by specific procedural rules tailored to the judicial domain. In the age of AI, fair procedures should realise participation, increase trust, preserve neutrality, and provide mechanisms to detect errors in AI systems.

This chapter brings the book to a close by advancing an understanding of languaging as a relational, embodied, and political practice. Rather than treating language as a neutral vehicle for transmitting information, the chapter emphasises how languaging is deeply entwined with questions of identity, belonging, and power. It is shown to be simultaneously playful and precarious, resistant and creative, continually challenging static and purified notions of language. The chapter further develops the notion of pedagogical languaging as a way of reframing education in response to the radical cultural and communicative reconfigurations of the twenty-first century. Pedagogy, it argues, must move beyond the delivery of standardised curricula to become the intentional design of spaces where learners mobilise their full semiotic repertoires such as linguistic, embodied, cultural, and digital in dynamic, relational, and multimodal meaning-making.

This chapter speaks of Sancho’s meaning to me as a Black Briton. It is also about his general place in the pantheon of Black British figures. I write about belonging and Sancho because it is at the heart of the reason to study a life such as his. Knowing about this Black Briton and his eighteenth-century world can impact on Black lives lived in the UK today. Sancho’s legacy is his engagement with the world of his time and the mirror of that engagement in ours. Artistic, political, and domestic history is interwoven with personal views on a figure who made his compromises and his accommodations in a world not designed for him or people like him. My chapter seeks to unearth a little talked about and less known subject, which is Britain’s deep and exceptionally involved participation in the human trafficking of millions of Black people from the continent of Africa. I conclude with highlighting the positive, contemporary manifestations of interest in Sancho and his world.

Chapter 7 examines how the German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt, AA) strategically engaged with scholarly international law between 1920 and 1925 to challenge the post-Versailles international order. Drawing on extensive archival research, it explores how the AA mobilized legal scholars, subsidized international law publications and institutes, and sought to exploit the legal framework established by the League of Nations as a double-edged sword – originally designed to serve the Entente, yet also capable of inflicting damage on its wielder. The study demonstrates that the AA covertly collaborated with international law scholars as informants and agents and actively sought to influence international legal discourse – as seen, for example, in the case of the Hague Academy of International Law. It highlights the AA’s increasing sophistication in navigating within the newly formed Versailles system of international law. Ultimately, the study reveals a deeply entangled relationship between diplomacy and academia, suggesting that international law was not merely a normative framework but an instrument of statecraft in German foreign policy, weaponized in the service of national interests under the guise of academic independence.

Al-Mizan: A Covenant for the Earth was completed which is led by United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) under the umbrella of Faith-Based Organizations and is contributed by Muslim thought leaders worldwide. The covenant reminds that responsibility of humanity, especially Muslim communities, is on climate change and is to project natural resources and biological variety of world’s common heritage. Moreover, the covenant emphasizes that it is a sacred aim that humanity must respect the natural balance in accordance with values that establish the fundamental of Islam.