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.

Literature in the legal humanities has begun to turn toward performance as a new site of analysis: as source, representation, and intervention. From Law and Performance (2018) to Law as Performance (2022), this belated comparison has garnered increasing traction. But methods from dance and performance studies, those wayward disciplines where corporeality supersedes the literary, still make only passing appearances. The repercussions, however, exceed the methodological toward the most material. This chapter underscores the consequences for this absence by centring the lone figure, “Naked Athena,” as a femme body in protest whose choreographic aesthetic of whiteness allowed particular flexibility under the law. Through her balletic performance of resistance, themes of discipline, elegance, and decorum swirl against the indecent, vulgar, and obscene labels afforded other protesters in the same scene. Motivated by this framing, I focus us toward identification of the publicly exposed body as righteously revealed or promiscuously pornographic, an aesthetic distinction theorized within art history as the difference between nakedness and nudity yet left ambiguous in legal terms.

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.

Chapter 6 compares the work of the enslaved poet Ambrosio Echemendía with that of several free authors of African descent, including Juana Pastor (often considered the first woman poet in Cuba), Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, probably the most popular Cuban writer of the century), and África Céspedes (one of the collaborators of Minerva (1888–1889), the first periodical by Black women). Black Cuban writing, the chapter argues, does not begin with Juan Francisco Manzano or Plácido, as most scholars have generally assumed; neither of them reclaimed Blackness in their texts. It makes more sense to argue that it begins with the poetry collection that Echemendía published in 1865 – the first book published in Cuba in which an author self-fashioned as racially stigmatized and questioned this stigma. Through this panoramic view, the chapter traces how a long history of public disidentifications with blackness began to make room for a distinctively Black literature – one that foregrounded and problematized racialized subject positions.

The decline of the classical doctrine of civil war in state practice began right after the American Civil War, when the concept of belligerent recognition had barely been coined in the legal literature. There were several reasons for this. First, after the abolition of privateers in the 1856 Declaration of Paris, the maritime powers had essentially deprived future insurgents of their primary weapon at sea, the privateer. Second, developments in the law of neutrality after the Geneva arbitration raised the prospect of state responsibility towards belligerents for neutral states. Third, as indeterminate pragmatism became a diplomatic norm, new legal vocabularies began to develop that were seemingly independent of questions of formal recognition. New, deliberately ambiguous approaches to recognition emerged, especially in the Latin American insurgencies, such as the recognition of insurgency doctrine.

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.

The third chapter analyses the decisive transformation phase of the European Community (EC) from 1969 to 1992, during which the organisation developed from a technical cooperation project into a systemically relevant force that determined the fate of entire economies and countries. The change began with the Hague Summit in 1969, which brought about three key decisions: completion of the Common Market, deepening through new policy areas, and the first round of enlargement in 1973 to include the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Denmark. The 1970s also brought fundamental challenges. The EC responded with innovative institutional solutions, some of which emerged outside the treaties. The chapter identifies four central factors for the rise of the EC to become the dominant western European organisation: its economic logic, its legal assertiveness, its own budget, and the marginalisation of alternatives. More generally, the chapter shows how the EC became the dominant force in western European integration through a combination of pragmatic adaptation to crises, institutional innovation, and the systematic expansion of its legal and financial capacities. This process was neither planned nor linear, but the result of numerous individual decisions and struggles, which together brought about a fundamental transformation.

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.

Law, with its seemingly endless paperwork, is almost overwhelmingly textual. From contracts to briefs to opinions to treatises, law lives in its texts. Simultaneously, law requires performances to produce authenticity and authority. Witness testimonies, pleadings, and trials all enact the law through participants’ bodies. There is no law without text. There is no law without performance. Legal texts and performances produce and reproduce each other: Legal texts record or script legal performances; legal performances generate or stage legal texts. Because law entwines text and performance, this chapter considers the law’s material textuality and its theatricality in tandem by probing how law brings performance to book. Drawing on theater studies and the history of dramatic texts, I offer methods for reading legal texts as scripts that precede or follow legal performances. Examples from Anglo-American law reveal that legal documents’ typographical conventions uncover law’s reliance on performance and its anxiety about deviating from textuality. More sophisticated legal attention to the relationship between text and performance would better serve law and, more importantly, justice.

Civil Society and Prohibition

While politics at the national and provincial levels converged to produce prohibition as a political idea and demand, thereby influencing its policy features along the way, it was the concurrent development of a vibrant prohibition culture that imbued the policy with moral force as the demand of the Indian people. Prohibition become an ideal as it filtered through society before crystallising in the provinces as a policy. Indeed, civil society activism reinforced the Congress's demand for the policy as it took shape, bringing a distinct casteist and gendered worldview into alignment with teetotalism-as-patriotism.

Reflecting ‘a convergence of modern science with a synthesis of Victorian morality and established merchant/Bania and Brahman pious norms’, social movements across India had surfaced certain elitist values that gradually became cultural norms between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. As they often included the threat of social exclusion, movements that originated and developed within caste communities proved remarkably effective in persuading large numbers of people to turn away from drink – more so, arguably, than state-led prohibition subsequently was. However, there was a key difference between earlier movements and the distinct culture of prohibition that took root between 1920 and 1937. Although the latter was overtly political in its orientation and outlook, it was embedded in a discourse that elevated it above the domain of politics. As an influential Tamil newspaper put it, ‘the political issue need not be mixed up with this. Go to your villages and organise compacts so that there may not be any drunkard therein.’

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.

The American Civil War (1861–1865) represents the high-water mark in the history of the classical doctrine of civil war. The war was fought on an unprecedented scale on land and at sea, and its global repercussions led to unavoidable diplomatic confrontations between the belligerents and neutral foreign powers unlike ever before. Through the key documents and cases of the conflict, this chapter illustrates how the thoroughly legalistic civil war came to be the culmination of the classical doctrine, and how it led to the coining of ‘recognition of belligerency’, a core concept of the mature doctrine of civil war. The chapter also explores the final breakthrough of international arbitration and state responsibility as a response to disputes raised by civil wars in this period, and traces the canonisation of these new developments in jurisprudence in America and in Europe.