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.

While Sancho discussed slavery in his letters decades before British opposition to that institution coalesced and became institutionally codified, he undeniably took a firmly anti-slavery and anti-racist stance in his manuscript correspondence. He used his familiar letters to critique and oppose slavery as a practice and an institution as well as to reject and undermine the validity of emerging concepts of “race” in an effort to oppose their effects in the world. Three core strategies emerge: first, satirizing and critiquing the metaphorical mapping of moral character onto skin color in the service of white supremacy; second, reappropriating and resignifying animal metaphors and racial tropes to undermine their efficacy in subjugating humans and non-humans alike within a slaving society; and third, recovering self-determination and agency for Black subjects by asserting ownership over his own body through the manual labor of writing.

Chapter 20 explores the role of the League of Nations frameworks in the internationalization of human rights, with a focus on refugees, stateless individuals, and minorities. The League Covenant did not explicitly address human rights, but it did consider some humanitarian issues, such as the rights of populations in Mandated territories, stateless refugees, and minorities in specific regions like Danzig or Upper Silesia. Despite this, human rights were not a significant factor in shaping international law during the interwar period. Jurists, who were mostly male and aligned with national interests, favoured other issues like state sovereignty, international peace, and collective security. However, in 1929, the Institute of International Law (IIL) adopted a ’Declaration of International Rights of Man’, based on a project by the exiled Russian jurist André N. Mandelstam, that integrated gender equality. The aim was to submit it to the General Assembly of the League in 1933 in order to conclude a ’World Convention on human rights’. These efforts aimed to universalize human rights at a time dominated by colonialism, civilizational discourse, and inequality. The chapter delves into these initiatives within the IIL and their attempts to push for broader human rights legislation in the League of Nations.

This chapter explains why oil companies recently started to embrace citizen mobilization after a long history of avoiding such outreach. It shows that while the coalescing climate movement and the availability of new online tools for organizing have played important roles in this shift, the proliferation of new government forums for citizen input in the regulation of fossil fuel projects has been the core driver of the industry’s new approach.

In this chapter I extend the analysis of the previous chapter to defense against innocent threats. Once again, the norm against intending death applies, but the standards for permissible killing as a side effect are stricter than in the case of unjust threats.

Ignatius Sancho described his Letters as the product of an “African sensibility.” This chapter explores what he meant by this, locating the term “sensibility,” and its cognate “sentiment,” in the context of Scottish Enlightenment science of man (David Hume, Lord Kames, Adam Smith). Through close reading, it examines how Sancho, as a sentimental epistolary writer, used his sensibility to affirm his humanity, reinforce friendships, and make political observation. Sancho’s sentimental epistolary practice, shaped by his correspondence with Laurence Sterne in 1766, was notable for his use of the dash to punctuate his writing. The chapter argues that although both writers use the dash for rhetorical effect, Sancho’s “dashing style” is distinct from Sterne’s punctuational practice. The chapter argues also that Sancho’s mode of sensibility was important in his assessment as a sentimental man of letters in the debate on African arts and letters in the 1770s and early 1780s.