Chapter 11 introduces the concept of legitimation in discourse and considers how it might function, and be studied, in the context of health(care) communication. First, we look at how contributors to the online parenting forum Mumsnet use labels denoting attitudes towards vaccinations. We point out how labels that involve opposition to vaccinations, such as ‘anti-vaxxer’ tend to collocate with negation, and then consider how people justify negating the applicability of the label to themselves. This reveals a range of different concerns around vaccinations. We then draw on a study of patient feedback in which we examined how patients legitimate their perspectives and the evaluations they gave in their feedback. For example, this included patients representing themselves as experienced users of healthcare services. Additionally, some patients used aspects of their identities to position themselves as requiring attention, while others used techniques such as employing second person pronouns to imply that their experiences could be generalised to other patients.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the land rights movement, drawing from the experience of the Yolngu peoples in northern Australia. This chapter identifies the different ways that land rights may be recognized. Each of these mechanisms has strengths and weaknesses, with a constitution being the most robust form of protection for land rights. However, the biggest challenge is in the implementation of land rights. Despite the challenges, Indigenous Peoples have successfully protected and reclaimed their lands under the ongoing force of dispossession, employing strategies such as direct action and litigation. Drawing from the contexts presented in this edited book, this chapter identifies the barriers to advancing land rights; the strategies to overcome these barriers and to support the reclamation of land; and identifies some of the opportunities to strengthen land rights moving forward.

In 2011, the Brazilian Government began dismantling the country’s robust framework for Indigenous land rights by enacting measures to deny Indigenous Peoples’ access to their ancestral lands. From 2019 to 2022, the government did not recognize or title a single hectare of Indigenous lands, despite more than 700 pending requests for demarcation (or formal designation and titling). A change in government and six land demarcations in 2023, however, show signs of a new era for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and relationship with the state. This chapter analyzes evolving Indigenous land rights pre- and post-constitutionalization in 1988, the result of intense political mobilization and shifting colonialist perceptions of Indigenous Peoples. This chapter also discusses the main obstacles faced by Indigenous Peoples in enforcing Brazil’s protective land rights framework, accounting for the structures of settler colonial states – structures that permit institutional and physical violence against Indigenous Peoples by state and non-state actors alike. Finally, this chapter examines the opportunities created since the change in government in 2023, proposing new avenues to advance Indigenous Peoples’ constitutional land rights in Brazil.

This chapter examines conservative attacks on social media, and their validity. Conservatives have long accused the major social media platforms of left-leaning bias, claiming that platform content moderation policies unfairly target conservative content for blocking, labeling, and deamplification. They point in particular to events during the COVID-19 lockdowns, as well as President Trump’s deplatforming, as proof of such bias. In 2021, these accusations led both Florida and Texas to adopt laws regulating platform content moderation in order to combat the alleged bias. But a closer examination of the evidence raises serious doubts about whether such bias actually exists. An equally plausible explanation for why conservatives perceive bias is that social media content moderation policies, in particular against medical disinformation and hate speech, are more likely to affect conservative than other content. For this reason, claims of platform bias remain unproven. Furthermore, modern conservative attacks on social media are strikingly inconsistent with the general conservative preference not to interfere with private businesses.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is often called "The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet." This 1996 law grants platforms broad legal immunity against claims arising from both third-party content that they host, and good-faith content moderation decisions that they make. Most observers agree that without Section 230 immunity, or some variant of it, the modern internet and social media could not exist. Nonetheless, Section 230 has been subject to vociferous criticism, with both Presidents Biden and Trump having called for its repeal. Critics claim that Section 230 lets platforms have it both ways, leaving them free to host harmful content but also to block any content they object to. This chapter argues that criticisms of Section 230 are largely unwarranted. The diversity of the modern internet, and ability of ordinary individuals to reach broad audiences on the internet, would be impossible without platform immunity. As such, calls for repeal of or major amendments to Section 230 are deeply unwise. The chapter concludes by pointing to important limits on Section 230 immunity and identifying some narrow amendments to Section 230 that may be warranted.

Chapter 7 considers how language change over short timespans can be examined using corpus-assisted methods. We present three case studies. The first study involves a corpus of patient feedback relating to cancer care, collected for four consecutive years. A technique called the coefficient of variation was used to identify lexical items that had increased or decreased over time. The second study considered UK newspaper articles about obesity. To examine changing themes over time, we employed a combination of keyness and concordance analyses to identify which themes in the corpus were becoming more or less popular over time. Additionally, the analysis considered time in a different way, by using the concept of the annual news cycle. To this end, the corpus was divided into 12 parts, consisting of articles published according to a particular month, and the same type of analysis was applied to each part. The third case study involves an analysis of a corpus of forum posts about anxiety. Time was considered in terms of the age of the poster and in terms of the number of contributions that a poster had made to the forum, and differences were found depending on both approaches to time.

The volume’s Introduction is divided into four parts. It begins by setting out the analytical framework animating this volume, namely “juristocratic reckoning," which builds on, yet critically modifies and reappropriates, Ran Hirschl’s (2004) notion of “juristocracy” in order to capture a broader process of transformation through which law and legal categories are invested with unusual weight and responsibility beyond their more conventional carrying capacity. Such over-freighting of law typically involves a “dialectics of reckoning,” through which law is first elevated during certain moments in time, which then give way to a second phase, a coming to terms with juristocracy’s failures marked by critique, skepticism, and eventual disenchantment. Within this larger dynamic, certain histories of juristocratic reckoning are imbued with what the Introduction describes as an “iconic indexicality,” in which their supposed historical significance itself enters into the process of juristocratic elevation and then unraveling. Against the backdrop of this conceptual exposition, the Introduction situates Reckoning with Law in Excess in the current conjuncture – an era of crisis and confrontation, characterized by growing debates, within academia and beyond, about the demise of the rule of law. Having located the overall analytical project within different historical, political, and academic contexts, the Introduction then traces the contours of juristocratic reckoning through the diverse and global range of case studies assembled in the volume, including some that are marked by an iconic indexicality and others that are not. It proposes three “taxonomies of reckoning,” which coalesce around concerns with “states of juristocracy,” “alter-legal reckonings,” as well as “juristocracies against the state,” attesting to the persisting centrality – if always contested, variable, and fragmented – of the state form. Last but not least, the Introduction examines the temporality of juristocracy, since viewing the case studies through their various temporalities reinforces the wider point that dialectics of reckoning must be understood through their empirical and historical heterogeneities rather than as exemplars of an abstracted sociolegal category. Revisiting the various case studies, the Introduction shows how the dialectics of juristocratic reckoning are associated with moments, momentums, and mobilizations in the living archives of law that often yield inconclusive or ambiguous results and remain open to multiple interpretations, directions, and futures.

As Chapter 1 discusses, one of the most consistent conservative critiques of social media platforms is that social media is biased against conservative content. A common policy proposal to address this is to regulate such platforms as common carriers. Doing so would require social media platforms to host, on a nondiscriminatory basis, all legal user content and to permit all users to access platforms on equal terms. While this seems an attractive idea – after all, who could object to nondiscrimination – it is not. For one thing, the Supreme Court has now recognized that social media platforms possess "editorial rights" under the First Amendment to control what content they carry, block, and emphasize in their feeds. So, regulating platforms as common carriers, as Texas and Florida have sought to do, is unconstitutional. It is also a terrible idea. Requiring platforms to carry all content on a nondiscriminatory basis, even if limited to legal content (which it would be hard to do) would flood user feeds with such lawful-but-awful content as pornography, hate speech, and terrorist propaganda. This in turn would destroy social media as a usable medium, to the detriment of everyone.

During the paradigmatic moment in the 1990s that Hirschl refers to as “juristocracy,” the global institutionalization of neoliberalism effectively untethered economic control from nation-states. States’ capacity to regulate economic flows diminished, as did their ability to fulfill many of the entitlements that were then aspirationally included in progressive constitutions. Peasants, small-scale food producers, and rural workers felt the effects of neoliberalism especially hard as global trade agreements and structural adjustment policies dismantled state support and made them vulnerable to global competition. With states constrained by binding global rules, these groups were forced to rethink existing grammars of social justice. Rather than simply claiming rights, they therefore devised new claims and repertoires of mobilization in the attempt to subordinate global capital flows to popular control. Through the claim of food sovereignty, rural communities formed transnational movements that today mobilize at sub- and supra-national levels with the goal of building decentralized, democratic, and sustainable food systems. This chapter describes how transnational food sovereignty movements have reconceptualized rights around the networked form of transnational governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), one of the key arenas of global food governance, it illustrates how food sovereignty movements creatively mobilize the right to food to institutionalize their own symbols and practices of representation. In doing so, the chapter argues that food sovereignty movements have rearticulated the right to food as a “representative claim” through which they seek to democratize transnational governance.

The late twentieth-century recognition of indigenous peoples as collective subjects of human rights represents a case of “iconic indexicality,” as international human rights instruments held out promises of recognizing difference, repairing colonial harms, and reckoning with the slow violence of genocide. During the first decades of the twenty-first century, indigenous peoples in Guatemala mobilized human rights through legal actions to defend their ancestral territories and ways of being, mirroring similar processes occurring across Latin America. Yet at the same time the intensification of extractive industries deepened processes of capture of state apparatus by corrupt elites and criminal networks, leading to backlash and the stalling or reversal of earlier legal victories. Today indigenous communities and their allies are subject to systematic criminalization and renewed processes of legalized violent dispossession. This chapter argues that the current “juristocratic reckoning” with the promise of indigenous rights must be viewed in the longue durée. Indigenous people have engaged with hegemonic forms of law since conquest, and although these engagements acquired new dimensions and intensity during the twentieth century’s “age of human rights” (Goodale 2022), they were accompanied by a keen awareness of the historical role of law in old and new forms of colonial violence and dispossession. This is because colonial legal orderings of land and territorial resources are always racially constituted. As Nichols (2020), Di Giminiani (2018) and others have shown, the laws of the colonizers remade indigenous worlds by constituting land as an alienable object (“property”), displacing alternative “land ontologies” to justify racialized inequalities grounded in systemic violence. The late twentieth-century turn to law by indigenous peoples never supplanted other horizons of justice premised on alternative lifeworlds; indeed, the juristocratic shift and its centering of “self-determination” served to amplify claims and histories conceived prior to and beyond human rights law. As this chapter shows, through processes of judicialization indigenous lawyers’ collectives in Guatemala have meticulously documented long-run theft of indigenous lands and appealed to less individually centered and proprietary understandings of land to stake decolonial claims to self-determination. Various mechanisms have been deployed; for example, special expert witness reports or different forms of indigenous self-representation in court to amplify alternative ontologies within the public sphere. This strategic, discursive, and affective engagement with the law is just one part of ongoing processes to strengthen autonomous self-governance.