This chapter explores how citizens in the Frisian area of the Netherlands joined forces to combat disinformation through the project "De Pit" from September 2022 to September 2023. The project involved three independent regional learning communities with diverse participants investigating and exposing disinformation. The goal was to empower communities to fight disinformation as part of an active community at their local library, (vocational) school, or university. We conducted a multiple experimental case study to analyze how these communities establish rules, roles, and agreements to critically collect, analyze, understand, and report on the information surrounding them in online and offline spaces. Considering the different backgrounds, level of education, ages, and geographical locations enables us to learn if people create similar or different solutions to fight disinformation. Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development framework has supported us in understanding these learning communities and how the participants have developed a research approach enabling them to interpret the facts behind information circulating in the public sphere. Our research indicates that learning communities, backed by local institutions such as libraries, schools, and universities, can provide a secure space for acquiring and practicing skills. This can help in efforts to reduce polarization online and offline by engaging individuals from various backgrounds. Learning communities focus on creating a safe environment where individuals can self-govern with expert guidance. Our study suggests that defending democracy may begin within offline communities, fostering discussions on both local and global issues. Finally, as part of this chapter, we present a ‘roadmap’ with conditions and recommendations to implement a successful learning community to inspire and support others in setting up similar initiatives.

Inter-Asian Law is starkly absent from constitutional accounts of reproductive rights in Asia. Instead, Asian jurisdictions tend to draw from the Global North, with the United States Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade occupying norm status. To explicate the potential of Inter-Asian Law in transforming reproductive rights, an act of imagination is required, suspending Roe as the central comparative frame and introducing alternate, hypothetical referents from Asia. This chapter conducts this task at two stages. First, it develops imagination as a method of comparative constitutional law. Second, applying the imaginative method, it hypothesizes what reproductive rights might look like if Nepal served as a referent for India and India as a referent for Bangladesh. In documenting explicit shifts in the constitutional construction of these rights, the chapter cements the place of Inter-Asian Law.

Chapter 3 both deepens and problematises the legal understanding of literature by attending to the making and perception of typefaces, particularly the Breitkopf Fraktur typeface in which Kant’s 1785 essay was set. Close reading a 2001 House of Lords decision, Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd v Marks & Spencer Plc, allows us to see that literary copyright and published edition copyright, though pertaining to the respective labours of authors and publishers, nonetheless share an ‘originalist’ aesthetics of the book that affirms the myth of proprietary authorship. To dislodge copyright’s originalist aesthetics, I revisit and compare Fichte’s and Kant’s accounts of the printed book in late eighteenth-century Germany, which, in their own ways, anticipate and undermine the contemporary legal perspective. Unlike Fichte, Kant recognised the visual materiality of the book, including the perceptibility of its typeface and typesetting, which pointed to an historical domain of embodied interactions. Guided by Kant, I attend to two aspects of the material history of the Breikopf Fraktur typeface: the history of its production and the history of its perception. This material history of the typeface, which reveals the deep interactions between human actors and print technologies, acts as a counter-image to copyright’s originalist aesthetics.

Can neurotechnologies be used responsibly in the rehabilitation of convicted persons, respecting fundamental freedoms and rights? This is the question we have endeavoured to answer throughout this book. The human rights challenges generated by new and emerging neurotechnologies have been widely noted by scholars, ethics committees and human rights bodies. This has prompted a debate on how and to what extent human rights protect – and should protect – against unsolicited interference with our brains and minds. In a recent report on the impact, opportunities and challenges of neurotechnology in relation to human rights, the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee concluded that neurotechnologies can affect human rights in a “unique manner”. Therefore, developing an actionable human rights approach is of the “utmost importance”. Some of their concerns relate to the potential use of neurotechnology in the criminal justice system, holding that “most of the applications proposed are extremely problematic from a human rights perspective”. For example, they consider that “forceful extraction of information from detainees or offenders through the use of neurotechnology is prohibited”.

The first part of this chapter examines how commentators in both adversarial and inquisitorial systems have looked to the other system as a means to prevent wrongful convictions. Those in adversarial systems have been attracted to inquisitorial commitments to truth-finding, aversion to plea bargaining and fact-based appellate revisions. Those in inquisitorial systems have looked to the role of the defence counsel in calling and cross-examining witnesses and public and transparent fact-finding. The second part illustrates some differences among inquisitorial systems by contrasting the correction of wrongful convictions in Sweden and Norway and the different use of guilty pleas in China and Taiwan. The next part examines how German, Italian, French, Chilean and Japanese systems remedy wrongful convictions, including through fact-based revision procedures. Finally, trends in the use of guilty pleas and summary procedures in those countries are examined. Although it is diminishing, inquisitorial systems still have an advantage over adversarial systems because of their caution in relying on guilty pleas and summary procedures for serious offences.

At the heart of this chapter lies the following question: how can the fact that lawful behaviour can be enforced be explained against the background of Kant’s moral philosophy? I argue that without grounding Right in morality we cannot even understand coercion as a normative problem. The reason is that for Kant coercion becomes problematic only vis-à-vis persons, because they – being ends in themselves – can legitimately claim not to be coerced (1). This does not mean, however, that coercion is completely inadmissible according to Kant. For by defining equal, relational freedom as a sphere of non-domination, the law also defines a sphere in which coercion is permissible because it is morally unproblematic and requires no justification (2). Tracing back coercion to the limits of autonomy, however, does not only explain why coercive force is ‘deducible’ from moral autonomy (and the Categorical Imperative as its principle). Even more, this requires us to reconsider whether Kant can consistently argue against the external enforceability of internal perfect duties (e.g. the prohibition of suicide) (3).