A key issue in the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments is jurisdiction, with a distinction drawn between ‘direct’ jurisdictional rules, which are applied by the court of origin at the time of initial adjudication, and ‘indirect’ rules applied by a court at the recognition and enforcement stage. While some commentators and national laws suggest that no jurisdictional ‘gap’ should exist between direct and indirect rules, in this article it is contended that, outside the context of a federal system or international convention with uniform rules, no compelling justification exists for eliminating the gap.

This Article discusses the design of an innovative approach to the traditional medical-legal partnership. This potentially transformative service model proposes the use of unauthorized practice of law (UPL) reform to embed civil legal problem solving within a patient care setting. Unlike in the traditional medical-legal partnership — a service model which embeds lawyers within patient care settings to address patients’ justice needs — we explore the promise of patient advocacy through community-based justice workers (CBJWs): members of the community who are not lawyers but who have specialized legal training and authorization to provide civil legal help to those who need it most. This work is the result of a partnership between Innovation for Justice, a social justice legal innovation lab housed at both the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law and the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business, and University of Utah Health. The present framework for UPL-reform-based medical-legal partnerships was developed through robust community-engaged research and design work across the 2022–23 academic year. This article discusses the research findings and proposes a framework for replication in other jurisdictions.

This paper reviews current theoretical and numerical approaches to optimization problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) that depend on random variables or random fields. Such problems arise in many engineering, science, economics and societal decision-making tasks. This paper focuses on problems in which the governing PDEs are parametrized by the random variables/fields, and the decisions are made at the beginning and are not revised once uncertainty is revealed. Examples of such problems are presented to motivate the topic of this paper, and to illustrate the impact of different ways to model uncertainty in the formulations of the optimization problem and their impact on the solution. A linear–quadratic elliptic optimal control problem is used to provide a detailed discussion of the set-up for the risk-neutral optimization problem formulation, study the existence and characterization of its solution, and survey numerical methods for computing it. Different ways to model uncertainty in the PDE-constrained optimization problem are surveyed in an abstract setting, including risk measures, distributionally robust optimization formulations, probabilistic functions and chance constraints, and stochastic orders. Furthermore, approximation-based optimization approaches and stochastic methods for the solution of the large-scale PDE-constrained optimization problems under uncertainty are described. Some possible future research directions are outlined.

Higher educational cooperation has long been central to China’s foreign relations. This article examines the political ramifications of the exodus of international students from China during the COVID-19 pandemic. China introduced some of the world’s most restrictive entry requirements for international travelers, forcing most international students at Chinese universities to study remotely between the Spring semesters of 2020 and 2022. This affected the 221,700 foreign students who were enrolled in Chinese universities, 81,600 of whom were from African countries (Mulvey 2021; UNESCO 2022). Travel restrictions were barely eased until late in the spring semester of 2022, and the border was finally opened for most students during the fall semester of 2022 (Liu and Peng 2024). Some students missed five semesters of in-person classes, and others gave up on their studies in China altogether. Thousands of students campaigned globally for the right to travel to China, attend classes in person, and get the educational experience they had envisioned.

Climate change resulting from human activity is causing sea-levels to rise. Rising sea-levels pose an existential threat to small islands. Some have argued that this might result in islands losing their status as ‘islands’ and, at the same time, their maritime areas. The present article disagrees. In order to qualify as an ‘island’, a coastal feature must be ‘a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high tide’: Article 121(1) of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). A feature that meets these requirements is, according to Article 121(2), entitled to a territorial sea, an exclusive economic zone and a continental shelf. Article 121(3) provides that rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or an economic life of their own have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf. The words ‘naturally formed area of land’, as well as broader considerations, suggest that the status of a feature is determined on the basis of its natural condition—not changes generated by human activity. Just as construction through human artifice cannot elevate a coastal feature into an island, man-made climate change which causes sea-level rise cannot turn an island into something other than what is described in Article 121(1).

Drinking culture. What happens in the field. It was just a joke. Don’t rock the boat. Archaeology staggers under the weight of its many “gray zones,” contexts of disciplinary culture where boundaries, relationships, ethical responsibilities, and expectations of behavior are rendered “blurry.” Gray zones rely on an ethos of silence and tacit cooperation rooted in structures of white supremacy, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism. In the gray zone, subtle and overt forms of abuse become coded as normal, inevitable, impossible, or the unfortunate cost of entry to the discipline. Drawing on narrative survey responses and interviews collected by the Working Group on Equity and Diversity in Canadian Archaeology in 2019 and 2020, we examine the concept of the gray zone in three intersecting contexts: the field, archaeology’s drinking culture, and relationships. The work of making archaeology more equitable relies on our ability to confront gray zones directly and collectively. We offer several practical recommendations while recognizing that bureaucratic solutions alone will not be sufficient. Change will require a shift in archaeological culture—a collective project that pulls gray zones into the open and prioritizes principles of care.

We study random walks on metric spaces with contracting isometries. In this first article of the series, we establish sharp deviation inequalities by adapting Gouëzel’s pivotal time construction. As an application, we establish the exponential bounds for deviation from below, central limit theorem, law of the iterated logarithms, and the geodesic tracking of random walks on mapping class groups and CAT(0) spaces.

Some contemporary philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition contend that agents differ from non-agents in that the former possess and exercise two-way causal powers.1 According to this distinction, non-agents possess powers that have only one type of manifestation. The powers of agents, by contrast, are manifested in two distinct and opposed ways.2 In developing this account, two-way powers theorists explicitly draw on Aristotle’s distinction between rational and non-rational powers in Metaphysics Θ.2 and 5 (see, e.g., Alvarez, 2009, p. 72, n. 16, 2013, p. 109; Steward, 2020, pp. 352–4; Frost, 2020, pp. 1148–1151). Proponents of this approach disagree about the nature of the two ‘ways’ in which agents manifest their agency (see especially Frost, 2020, and Steward, 2020). There is accordingly disagreement about how we should understand the Aristotelian ideas that anticipate the relevant notion of a two-way power (§§2–3). Nevertheless, all parties seem to agree on this much: a two-way causal power is a single power that directly relates to two distinct and opposed ways in which matters might proceed (see Alvarez, 2013, p. 102; Steward, 2012, p. 155; Lowe, 2013, p. 177; Frost, 2020, p. 1148).

Courts in England ordinarily grant anti-suit injunctions when proceedings are (or will soon be) initiated in a foreign court in breach of clauses which subject disputes to the exclusive jurisdiction of courts, or refer them to arbitration, in England. Would they, however, grant such relief in support of foreign dispute-resolution clauses? In UniCredit Bank v RusChemAlliance, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom answered this question in the affirmative, thus expanding the English courts’ power to issue anti-suit injunctions. This article seeks to assess the likely extent of this expansion and the future implications it could have for the law on anti-suit injunctions in England. The article also examines the Supreme Court’s pronouncements on the other significant issue in the case concerning the law governing arbitration agreements and their potential effect following the enactment of the Arbitration Act 2025.

Can social norms give rise to distorted information in China? We observe that China’s leading social norm related to alcohol consumption and social drinking enhances earnings management. An analysis of toxic alcohol scandals supports a causal interpretation. Further evidence suggests that the influence of alcohol may come from the negative externality that it creates, which is propagated by corporate leaders and cannot be attenuated by market-oriented institutions. Our results reveal a social norm externality that may have important normative implications.