Imprecise Bayesianism has been proposed as an alternative to Standard Bayesianism, partly because of its tools for representing ambiguity. Instead of representing credences via precise probabilities, a set of probability distributions is used to model belief states. However, there are criticisms of Imprecise Bayesianism’s update rule. A recent alternative update rule is Alpha Cut, which evades some of the primary criticisms of Imprecise Bayesian updating. We compare Alpha Cut with Imprecise Bayesianism and another alternative update approach called Calibration. We find that Alpha Cut has problems with respect to ambiguity, coherence, and performance qualities, whereas there are more promising alternatives.

Direklerarası Street was a popular promenade and entertainment hub in late Ottoman Istanbul. It was constructed in the arasta form along the historical Divanyolu in the 1720s and largely retained its spatial configuration until the 1880s. This article examines the spatial transformation of Direklerarası Street from the 1880s to the 1910s, situating it within the broader dynamics of late Ottoman urban reform. It investigates urban interventions such as the demolition and reconstruction of arcade columns, street lighting, pavement reconfigurations and square design, not merely as outcomes of modern urban regulations but also as processes intricately linked to the various dynamics shaped by the sociopolitical and cultural contexts of the late Ottoman capital.

Environmental protection is widely considered a core function of the state. Yet more than 210 million people currently live under the control of armed non-state actors (ANSAs), many of whom exercise state-like authority over vast, environmentally important territories. Despite growing legal and political science scholarship on ANSAs, their role in environmental protection remains largely unexplored. International law, shaped by conflict-centric frameworks, often fails to account for ANSAs’ non-military dimensions – especially those related to environmental service provision. Similarly, theories of rebel governance have yet to meaningfully incorporate environmental service provision as a governance facet. The article addresses this gap by examining the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) in Colombia, drawing on documentary analysis and interviews with former combatants. It shifts the limited ecological perspective on war, arguing that the FARC-EP’s environmental practices amounted to a form of rebel environmental governance – structured, intentional and legally plural. Through this case study, the article challenges dominant narratives that view ANSAs solely as environmental spoilers or incidental protectors and instead advocates for a more comprehensive understanding of their impact as environmental service providers and lawmakers. In doing so, the paper reframes ANSAs as socio-legal actors whose environmental practices merit scholarly attention – particularly in ongoing debates around accountability and transitional justice in conflict-affected regions.

During the early twentieth century, Ivy League legal scholars developed a positivist jurisprudential method known as legal realism. Concerned with the law’s relationship to social conditions, legal realism methodologically triumphed in the elite legal academy and brought to a close what one historian has described as the “decline of natural law” in American jurisprudence. Catholic legal scholars in the United States responded to this decline by invoking the natural law philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and his nineteenth-century neoscholastic disciples, arguing that legal realism irredeemably divorced law and morality. In so doing, these scholars effectively inaugurated what the author terms the neoscholastic legal revival, a decades-long period of debate between Catholic natural lawyers and their positivist contemporaries about natural law’s foundational relationship to the US legal tradition. To explain the history and significance of this debate, the author uncovers the origins the neoscholastic legal revival in particular features of nineteenth-century European Catholic intellectual culture that were transmitted to the United States through the Society of Jesus, the world’s largest Catholic religious order. The author especially examines the lives and legacies of two American Jesuits, William J. Kenealy and Francis E. Lucey, who helped to lead the neoscholastic legal revival and who illustrate how recovering the revival’s forgotten history can enrich scholars’ understanding of this important period in US legal history.

This article develops Border Work (BW) as a theoretical concept and methodological approach, underexplored in socio-legal scholar-activism, through analysing two distinct examples: Noor, who applied for protection, and her individual and collective struggle for residency and the making of a manifesto against borders. While both examples depart from feminist methodology, the differences are stark: Noor, excluded from democratic processes, faced deportation risks, while we, with institutional support, engaged in public mobilisations without such threats. Despite these differences, we use BW to understand and analyse both examples, highlighting their commonalities. The analysis of the manifesto work and Noor’s efforts shows how transgressive work creates new subject positions. BW provides a deeper understanding and a common analytical framework for scholarly work interlinked with activism. Through BW, Noor transformed from being seen as an object of the law to becoming a creator of legal knowledge. In the manifesto exercise, the boundaries are both collective and political: participants jointly challenge the national order and advocate for a transnational political identity. Both Noor and we, as part of the collective, engaged in the making of the manifesto and engaged at the intersection of personal experiences and powerful institutions and ideologies, with the aim of contributing to the struggles within and against restrictive migration regimes. Socio-legal scholars are experienced when thinking critically about the role and rule of law in society; BW can be understood to put this knowledge into action and apply it in broader struggles for justice.

The International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda Akayesu trial, which led to the precedent-setting conviction for rape as a constituent act of genocide, offers guidance for scholars uncovering “hints” of sexual violence in armed conflict (SVAC) in legal archives. This includes consideration of: the strategic importance of SVAC testimony within the overall archive, indictment or mandate of a proceeding; euphemisms related to SVAC and how they intersect with societal attitudes toward SVAC and its victims; question framing, follow-ups, and interventions by judges or other stakeholders. Review of SVAC evidence should be attentive to the following indicators of potentially more widespread sexual atrocities: recurring acts of SVAC committed across official, public, and private spaces; the absence of areas of refuge; acts of public sexual violence, including those that have a performative dimension; occurrence of SVAC in the context of pervasive physical insecurity and fear for survival within a climate of impunity for the perpetrators; commission of SVAC as part of a sequence of crimes leading up to, and including, the death of the victim; targeting of SVAC victims based on their ethnicity or identity; experience of SVAC within a maelstrom of ethnically or identity-based violence; and the existence of supplementary sources documenting SVAC that are external to the trial record.

Social reproduction offers a critical lens through which to analyse how labour law creates and constructs labour/ers. Socially reproductive work, traditionally ignored in waged labour markets, has been omitted from legal categories that protect workers. Yet these same legal categories that create and construct labour/ers are themselves socially reproduced. In Sicilian agricultural work, social reproduction happens in the extra care that is needed in labour carried out by migrantised workers, as well as the silence that is reproduced by markets that overlook the exploitation buttressing a local economy. The lens of social reproduction connects the work behind the scenes that depends on the complicity, whether wilful or ignorant, of consumers who do not ‘care’ that the labour producing Sicilian Denominazione di Origine Protetta (Protected Designation of Origin, DOP) and Indicazione Geografica Protetta (Protected Geographical Denomination, IGP) products is legally irregular. Contributing to discussions of labour law’s limits, this article addresses how labour exploitation is socially reproduced through the invisibilisation of labour involved in cultivating and harvesting Sicilian DOP olives and IGP tomatoes.

This article explores a continuum of environmental participation, from formalized participation in decision-making processes, protected by law, at one end, to protest on the streets, criminalized by law, at the other. Participation across this continuum is partially constituted, but also constrained, by law. We share and extend Brian Wynne’s evocative language of ‘uninvited’ participation to describe the contributions that fall outside institutionalized participation, so that our continuum is composed of ‘invited participation’, ‘uninvited participation’, and ‘forbidden participation’. Focusing especially on those states where liberal democracy is thought to be most secure, this article looks across the interconnections between different categories of environmental participation, highlighting the breadth and intensity of the shrinking of civic space in Europe, and the role of law in that.

This article analyzes the medicalisation strategies deployed by Peruvian alienists in the daily life of the Lima Asylum during the last third of the 19th century. Special attention is given to the process of hospitalisation of the insane in the psychiatric hospital, since this administrative procedure reveals the dialogue, confrontation, and negotiation between the asylum staff and the state and social bodies in the public management of insanity. Through the support of the civil authorities in charge of the psychiatric hospital administration, we argued that the local alienists sought to impose medical knowledge in the asylum space as the legitimate criterion for the confinement of the insane in Peru. This process was not without tensions, setbacks, and disputes, especially with the families and the state agencies of control and social defence seeking to preserve their former prerogatives over the fate of their insane.However, we propose that these medicalisation strategies promoted by the alienists in the daily space of the Lima Asylum managed to situate psychiatric care as a state problem and these actors as experts in the public management of insanity.

This short note is not a book review but a set of reflections intended to indicate the potential benefits to jurists of an encounter with Professor Rhodri Lewis’s book Shakespeare’s Tragic Art. Shakespeare’s genius, as Lewis finds it performed in the tragedies, is that he does not try to make sense of life but dramatises our common struggle to make sense of life. These reflections will hopefully demonstrate that legal trials perform in a comparable way – not trying to cure that which is past remedy but giving the parties a forum in which to perform life’s agonies in agonistic mode.

In times of crisis, the role of the mayor encompasses not only political and administrative functions but also ethical and identity-oriented aspects, with the aim of strengthening relations with the community. This dual profile offers the opportunity to reassert their institutional role. In this context, our research analyses the leadership style of mayors during the Covid-19 pandemic through case studies of five mayors in Sicily, a region of Italy characterised by significant structural economic deficits. The research makes an original contribution to the study of crisis leadership by integrating two areas of analysis: communication and political strategies. These reveal different attempts to reconcile operational responses to crises with the need for communication to encourage the community’s acceptance of strict rules and compliance. In particular, this research highlights crisis response strategies that reflect different ways of relating to the community, suggesting new avenues of analysis that can guide future research.

This paper highlights the fundamental importance of the family as a pre-political institution for moral education and a signaling mechanism for cooperation in Locke’s state of nature. Conjugal societies moderate children by teaching them to follow the law of nature. They also serve as signaling mechanisms that enable moderate individuals to trust others and collectively enforce the law of nature. The family, as a pre-political moderating institution, underpins the fragile peace in Locke’s state of nature. Contrary to common beliefs, I argue that the family makes Locke’s depiction of the state of nature more credible than Hobbes’s. This has significant implications: exegetically, it explains why individuals in Locke’s state of nature (imperfectly) follow the law of nature; normatively, it provides reasons to prefer Locke’s liberalism over Hobbes’s authoritarianism; and speculatively, it invites social contract theorists to seriously consider the extent to which liberal political institutions rely on informal institutions.

This article examines how Black business directories from the Jim Crow era provide insight into Black communal life and urban citizenship. These directories offered guidance and legibility to inhabitants of the USA’s new ‘Negro main streets’, while also inscribing Black urban identities into the spatial syntax of modernizing American cities. An analysis of over 200 directories across four eras shows how these publications created a space for Black urban citizenship to develop by including practical information; by highlighting community leaders, property ownership and contributions to local taxes; and by urging voter registration and government lobbying. This research suggests that Black business directories are a rich resource for understanding Black urban history.

This paper reevaluates the importance of John Taurek’s article “Should the Numbers Count?” putting his arguments in the context of work on the role of love in ethics. We can fruitfully read Taurek as attempting to ground a duty of beneficence in love. Taurek’s article should be read as having three distinct strands of thought. It articulates beneficence as responding to a value that is non-aggregative, criticizes the aggregation of human value as such, and assumes that beneficence has a very wide scope – from ordinary helping actions to disaster cases. What critics overlook is that even if there is some aggregative account of human value, Taurek gives powerful reasons for thinking that it is patently not the value typically taken to underlie our duty of beneficence. This leaves us, however, with difficult questions about the scope and limits of the duty of beneficence – and so of love – in ethics.

This article examines the evolving category of yellow music in the People’s Republic of China from the Maoist era to the early reform period, with a focus on the reception and regulation of Teresa Teng’s music. It argues that yellow music was not a static or CCP-invented concept, but one that expanded and contracted in response to shifting political climates and ideological campaigns. Drawing on archival documents, official newspapers, and autobiographical accounts, this article explores how the label “yellow” was applied to a wide range of musical styles and examines how this shaped public musical consumption. Instead of framing yellow music listening as an explicit form of resistance, this article highlights how such practices reflected unmet emotional and esthetic needs. The entry and eventual state appropriation of Teng’s music illustrate both the cultural consequences of the Cold War and the CCP’s adaptable approach to cultural governance. Teng’s widespread popularity helped revive suppressed traditions of individual emotion and love in music, and her gradual rehabilitation reveals a negotiated space between official ideology and popular demand. Ultimately, this article sheds light on the dynamic interplay between state control, listener agency, and global influence in socialist and post-socialist China.