Both Canada and the European Union feature multiple overlapping legal systems, each with independent sovereignty claims and distinctive cultural traditions. Courts in both settings have therefore been forced to reckon with ‘constitutional pluralism’.

In Canada, the contested relationship between Indigenous and settler legal orders has been mediated largely through s35, which recognizes Aboriginal rights, and s25 which shields them from the Canadian Charter. The resulting jurisprudence has focused on protecting cultural difference by creating limited spaces of autonomy within the Canadian state but has largely neglected questions of sovereignty.

In Europe, the relationship between European Union and member-state law has been mediated through an emergent judicial dialog which allows each court to maintain its sovereignty claim by making its acceptance of the other’s authority conditional. The resulting jurisprudence focuses on sovereignty without dealing as closely with questions of difference.

The two contexts therefore represent divergent approaches to shared conceptual and practical problems. To my knowledge, however, no scholarship has seriously compared the two. The following article takes a modest step towards filling this lacuna, introducing European thinkers to Canadian constitutional pluralism and vice versa before reflecting on some of the ways further comparative research can add depth to existing comparative literature, deepen our understanding of constitutional pluralism as a theory and, in particular, raise important questions about constitutional pluralism’s relationship to liberalism.

The constitutive idea centres on the proposition that, as a matter of social fact, law and wider social life each make up and, over time, dynamically shape, the other. This paper argues that we can draw upon designerly ways to make that the constitutive idea more available to scholars, as well as to the wider world. It first highlights the empirical, conceptual and normative dimensions of the constitutive idea. Next it introduces designerly ways, and some examples of how they have already been used at the intersections of legal and economic life. Finally, it identifies three specific problems (one empirical, one conceptual and one normative) arising out of scholarship that attends to the constitutive idea, and explains how we might adapt existing designerly practices to address them.

In the Critique of the Power of Judgement, Kant defines the relation of harmony between the faculties as constituted by the freedom of the imagination and the lawfulness of the understanding. The freedom of the imagination, however, has been broadly understood as directed towards the cognitive needs of the understanding. I propose a novel interpretation, based on Kant’s statements in the General Remark: freedom should be understood as signifying an activity emanating from imagination’s own spontaneity, directed towards the satisfaction of imagination’s own needs, and is revealed through a distinctive phenomenology in the apprehension of the beautiful forms of nature.

Long-lived trees support biodiversity at multiple scales, maintain ecosystem functionality, serve as natural archives, and hold cultural and aesthetic value. Despite their importance, the maximum longevity of many tree species remains poorly understood, limiting the design of effective conservation strategies. Challenges in obtaining reliable tree ages are commonly represented by natural wood decay, sampling obstacles, and indistinct or absent annual rings, which prevent or limit the application of tree-ring analyses (dendrochronology). Radiocarbon dating, increasingly accessible and applicable to all species, provides a flexible approach to study tree longevity and its ecological implications. For tropical trees, which mostly lack annual rings, radiocarbon dating is one of the few reliable methods to determine tree ages. Even in sections of the calibration curve characterized by oscillations and plateaus, statistical methods such as wiggle-matching or deposition models may be used to reduce the range of probable tree ages. In this paper, we illustrate a mismatch between tree-ring and radiocarbon-derived estimates of the longevity of angiosperm trees, with tree-ring maximum ages often half of those obtained through radiocarbon dating. We also present the most up-to-date estimates of maximum longevity for 42 arboreal angiosperm species worldwide, based on a literature review. Radiocarbon results indicate that ages of 400–500 years are a common feature of many broadleaved species, while exceptional old ages are restricted to a small minority of individual trees. Our results underscore the need for increased efforts to locate old and ancient trees, investigate their role in ecosystem ecology and ensure their protection.

Adolescent girls affected by displacement face substantial mental-health risks. The Sibling Support for Adolescent Girls in Emergencies (SSAGE) is a 12-week, gender-transformative, family-based program designed to improve adolescent girls’ mental health in humanitarian settings. This mixed-methods pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) assessed SSAGE’s feasibility, acceptability and potential effects among 186 Venezuelan migrant and Colombian returnee families in Colombia. Adolescent girls aged 13–19 years, their male siblings and caregivers participated in parallel sessions on gender dynamics, communication and relationships. Implementation outcomes drew on the Mental Health Implementation Science Tools (acceptability and feasibility subscales), attendance records and qualitative interviews. Analyses followed an intent-to-treat approach using adjusted linear and logistic regression models. Quantitative analyses did not identify measurable changes in adolescent girls’ mental health outcomes at endline; however, attendance was modest, with only ~10% of families meeting the predefined protocol threshold. Implementation findings revealed strong participant satisfaction and high acceptability of SSAGE content and mentor relationships. Engagement was constrained by economic hardship, transportation and venue barriers, and some caregivers’ acute emotional distress, which likely limited feasibility and potential impact. SSAGE shows promise as a gender-transformative, family-based approach, but successful delivery in urban migrant settings will require tailored and refined implementation strategies.

This article proposes a reframing of the ethics of human intelligence collection (HUMINT). Intelligence officers (IOs) engaged in HUMINT routinely transgress ordinary ethical norms: to serve their nation-state, they lie, manipulate, deceive, and instrumentalize others not only in professional settings (“doing HUMINT”) but also in private life (“living HUMINT”). The currently dominant framework for HUMINT ethics, derived from the just war tradition, does not adequately address key challenges—particularly at the individual level. I therefore argue for a reframing grounded in the lived experience of HUMINT, aimed at real dilemmas faced by conscientious IOs. The proposal has two components: first, expanding the space for individual moral responsibility across all levels of intelligence decision-making; and second, emphasizing peace as a minimal common telos to guide ethical deliberation by both IOs and their agencies. The reframing, I conclude, can enhance the efficiency and accountability of intelligence agencies while providing IOs with a more robust framework to guide their actions.

Consider a random walk in a time-inhomogeneous random environment. When the environment is stationary and ergodic, we identify a quenched harmonic function for almost every realization of the environment. This function allows us to define a random walk in a random environment conditioned to stay positive, using Doob’s h-transform.

Existing research on descriptive representation maintains that political candidates often receive more political support from in-group voters than their out-group competitors. Scholars claim this is due in large part to the assumption that descriptive candidates have a greater inclination to act in ways that benefit their shared identity group. This paper explores the other side of these heightened expectations and asks—How do voters evaluate a descriptive representative whose actions are perceived as being at odds with group expectations? Moreover, how do those evaluations compare to out-group candidates who behave in similarly? Using an experimental test, we examine the costs leveraged against political candidates who meet voters’ expectations and those who do not, and seeing whether the shared identity conditions voters’ evaluations. In doing so, we provide a more holistic view of the ways in which descriptive representation matters to voters.

This article advances a law-and-economics critique of fractional-reserve banking, focusing on the legal taxonomy of bank contracts and the risk externalities of maturity transformation. We argue that the conflation of custody-like deposits with mutuum loans blurs property-rights boundaries and weakens liability discipline. Drawing on Austrian monetary theory, we link fiduciary media and demandable debt to pro-cyclical liquidity, run dynamics and the amplification of systemic risk. We reassess the real-bills doctrine and “demand loans,” showing why they do not neutralise run risk in practice and may obscure solvency–liquidity interactions. We then outline institutional reforms – 100%-reserve custodial deposits and a strict functional separation between custody and intermediation – together with market-based loss allocation. The article concludes with regulatory implications for lender-of-last-resort, deposit insurance, and capital/liquidity regimes consistent with risk reduction and legal coherence.