The scholarly discussion of Kant’s republicanism focuses heavily on his ‘negative’ conception of freedom: independence or not being subject to another master. What has received much less attention is Kant’s ‘positive’ conception of freedom: being subject to one’s own legislation. This chapter argues that Kant’s positive conception of external freedom plays a crucial role in his Doctrine of Right: external freedom in the negative sense (mutual independence) requires and is realized by freedom in the positive sense (joint self-legislation). After first discussing the ‘innate right to freedom’, it is shown that, on Kant’s account, this fundamental right is realized fully only when external freedom is realized in both senses and in all three spheres of public right. Any satisfactory account of Kant’s republican theory must complement the focus on independence with an emphasis on citizenship and joint self-legislation.

Chapter 2 juxtaposes the myth of proprietary authorship embodied in the legal idiom of ‘work’, ‘author’ and ‘originality’ with the realities of print production in late eighteenth-century Germany. I problematise the conventional view of the literary work as an intellectual creation of a personal author through a paratextual reading of Kant’s 1785 essay that reconstructs its underpinning historical processes and conditions. This analysis includes not only the epitextual background of the German Enlightenment and the role therein played by periodicals such as the Berlinische Monatsschrift, but also the peritextual features of catchwords, signature marks and front matter that appeared within and alongside Kant’s text. I argue that these paratexts lead us back to the print machinery of the German Enlightenment: a socio-technological assemblage of human actors interacting with technologies, which Kant and others sought to steer so as to address the problem of print saturation. The existence of such a machinery, one that preceded the authorial figure, perturbs copyright law’s attachment to original authorship. Insufficient to deal with the complexities of the book’s emergence, the terms and doctrines of copyright law tend to suppress the deep historicity of literary production.

Concerns about the role of prejudice and racial discrimination first expressed by Voltaire and Zola were often at the forefront of pre-DNA campaigns to correct wrongful convictions. Despite this, the American innocence movement frequently neglected the role of racism in wrongful convictions. It neglected links between lynching and frequent DNA exonerations, where white victims misidentified Black men. Racism was recognized in the wrongful convictions of the Exonerated (Central Park) Five but not in other similar wrongful convictions of Black teenagers. Trump mobilized anti-Black racism in his calls for the Five to be executed. The role of both anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism in the 1971 wrongful conviction of Donald Marshall Jr. for the murder of a Black teenager in Canada is examined. A 1989 public inquiry into this wrongful conviction did not ignore racism in the same way as similar American inquiries into wrongful convictions. Patterns of anti-Indigenous racism and the role of stereotypes in the wrongful conviction of Indigenous men in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States are identified. Finally, the place of anti-racism in the future evolution of innocence movements is discussed.

The question of how politics and ethics connect, if at all, in our societies is crucial, especially given today’s socio-economic and geopolitical challenges. Commentators have sought answers in Kant’s texts: the relation between the Categorical Imperative (CI) as the fundamental principle of ethics, and the Universal Principle of Right (UPR) as the fundamental principle of politico-legal norms, has been variously interpreted as one of simple dependence, simple independence, or complex dependence. Recent interpretations increasingly agree that Kant was not a simple independentist. However, questions persist about the philosophical significance of Kant’s account, specifically whether certain aspects of his thought inconsistently commit him to simple independentism. One aim of this chapter is to illustrate this critical strategy starting from a specific interpretation of the UPR. It is argued that, although robust, this interpretation is not the most accurate. While this strategy opens new avenues for further objections to Kant, the chapter concludes that the complex dependentist reading is philosophically the most convincing to date.

The rapid development of data analytics, computational power, and machine/deep learning algorithms has driven artificial intelligence (AI) applications to every sphere of society, with significant economic, legal, ethical, and political ramifications. A growing body of literature has explored critical dimensions of AI governance, yet few touch upon issue areas that directly resonate with the diverse context and dynamics of the non-Western world, particularly Asia. This chapter therefore aims to fill the gap by offering a contextual discussion of how Asian jurisdictions perceive and respond to the challenges posed by AI, as well as how they interact with each other through regulatory cross-referencing, learning, and competition. Premised upon an analysis of the diverse regulatory approaches shaped by respective political, legal, and socioeconomic contexts in such jurisdictions, this chapter identifies how Inter-Asian Law has emerged in AI governance in the forms of regulatory cross-referencing, joint efforts, and cooperation through regional forums and points to potential venues for normative interactions, dialogue, best practices exchanges, and the co-development of AI governance.

This chapter examines the narrative of cybersecurity in China’s mass media, with a focus on the domestication of cybersecurity and its subsequent challenge to democracy. While much ink has been spilled over cybersecurity in (Western) democracies, less is known about the narrative and discourse of cybersecurity in an authoritarian context and its implications for global Internet governance and security. This chapter fills this gap by exploring news narratives on cybersecurity in China’s domestic mass media after the enactment of the Cybersecurity Law of the People’s Republic of China in 2017. Drawing on computer-assisted semantic network analysis of 9,094 news articles and commentaries, this chapter uncovers how the Chinese regime is adopting a discourse of cybersecurity to legitimize and consolidate its control over the Internet and to counter the challenges of global Internet connection. This domestication discourse is further utilized to place blame on the West for cyber threats. This chapter concludes with thoughts on the domestication of cybersecurity by authoritarian regimes like China and the challenge of defending cybersecurity.