This article identifies an overlooked legacy of the child protection movement in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century U.S.: transformations in evidence law and procedure that undermined common-law restrictions on children's testimony. Scholarship on the nineteenth-century modernization of evidence law argues that the rise of cross-examination allowed for the demise of common-law witness disqualification rules. The erosion of restrictions on children's testimony, however, requires an alternative or additional explanation, because cross-examination did not allay fears about children's reliability. The driving force for changes in the law governing child witnesses, I argue, was the slate of nineteenth-century child protection laws whose enforcement typically required children's testimony. The case study of Progressive-Era New York, presented here, reveals how evidence law and procedure adapted to substantive law's demand for children's evidence: reformers legislated an exception to the common-law oath requirement in children's cases, pushed trial courts to modernize their approach to examining child witnesses’ competency, and expanded the state's power to detain children as material witnesses. Those reforms fostered the ends of law enforcement, but did not resolve enduring debates about the reliability risks of children's testimony and the costs of testifying for children's wellbeing.

Gordon Barrett (GB): Research Associate, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, UK (special issue co-editor).

This article addresses the significant research gap concerning the regulation of surrogacy intermediaries in China’s rapidly growing surrogacy market. Employing a ‘law in context’ perspective, it explores the question of how to effectively regulate surrogacy intermediaries in the Chinese context. Situated within China’s unique socio-cultural landscape, where procreation carries profound significance, the study navigates the complexities of surrogacy regulation, including ethical dilemmas, rights infringements and regulatory ambiguities. The article advocates for the regulation of surrogacy in China to prevent possible exploitation, referencing three international models: prohibiting commercial surrogacy, governing non-profit surrogacy organisations and imposing duties on for-profit surrogacy agents. The aim is to construct a robust, context-sensitive regulatory framework for surrogacy in China, focusing on identifying suitable intermediaries and defining the scope of effective regulatory oversight.

Academic defenders of sweatshops argue that disregarding labour rights will result in increased welfare in the developing nations where transnational corporations (TNCs) operate. They argue that TNCs should ignore local labour laws in the best interests of the poor. In this article we criticise this ‘ignore the law’ position regarding sweatshops on three separate grounds. First, it fails to acknowledge the demands for businesses to respect the rule of law as part of the development process. Second, it utilises an inadequate account of voluntary contractual bargaining which overlooks how employment practises operate in sectors prone to utilising sweatshop labour, leading to coercive employment conditions incompatible with human dignity and free choice. Third, it fails to adequately account for labour law and international labour standards, which embody a strong moral conception of dignity at work and observance of fundamental human rights in protecting workers against abuse through the resulting legal duties placed on states and corporate actors. We conclude that poverty reduction requires the support of both private and public actors. Advocating the side-stepping of labour laws distracts from the important work of institution building necessary to protect workers and facilitate economic growth consistent with decent work, sustainable development, fairness and human dignity as embodied in international labour standards.

Derek Parfit’s view of personal identity raises questions about whether advance decisions refusing life-saving treatment should be honored in cases where a patient loses psychological continuity; it implies that these advance decisions would not be self-determining at all. However, rather than accepting that an unknown metaphysical ‘further fact’ underpins agential unity, one can accept Parfit’s view but offer a different account of what it implies morally. Part II of this article argues that contractual obligations provide a moral basis for honoring advance decisions refusing life-saving and/or life-sustaining medical treatment; advance decisions have similarities to contracts, such as life insurance policies and will-contracts, that come into effect when the psychological discontinuity is through death.

This paper will engage with the early colonial maps of the British East India Company to analyze its representative, as well as creative, functions, delineating how maps represent existing legal relations, entrench hierarchies, and visually transmit projected, and aspired, notions of legal authority and sovereignty. This paper studies the constitutive role of cartography apropos law, territory, and social order, in a specific historical context, by examining the crucial political role played by the British East India Company's cartographic practices and maps in aspiring and imagining the transplantation and establishment of English sovereignty in the Indian subcontinent. This paper will also show how British maps visually entrenched and supplemented unique forms of social hierarchy and marginalization, and legal categories and stratifications, in Indian cities. By analyzing maps, memoirs, cartouches, dedications, ornaments, plans, prospects, and historical manuscripts appertaining to the eighteenth and early nineteenth century operations of the Company, this paper will demonstrate, firstly, that cartography preceded, visually imagined, and set the stage for the coalescence of British sovereignty and the expansion of its law in the Indian subcontinent; secondly, that cartography provided the visual support for social ordering; and thirdly, that maps do not have a singular function. This paper proposes a notion of cartojuridism to capture the myriad ways in which cartography, law, sovereignty, and society intersect and relate with each other.

A life of the mind can be lived only by creatures who know that they have minds. We call these creatures “persons,” and currently, all such persons THAT we know OF are “alive” in the biological sense. But are there, or could there be, either in the future or elsewhere in the universe, creatures with “a life of the mind” that are not “alive” in the sense that we humans usually understand this term today?

This article examines the first tour of Buffalo Bill's Wild West in Italy and the so-called ‘sfida dei butteri’ (the challenge of the Italian cowboys of the Pontine marshes), which took place in Rome in March 1890. Analysing nineteenth-century Italian newspapers and photographs, I demonstrate that populist, anti-capitalist, and anti-American sentiments marked the Italian media's responses to the American show. In the historical context of Italy's socioeconomic crisis and of the first phase of colonial expansion in Africa (1870–1922), the mixed reception of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, amplified by the media event of the sfida, shaped the fate of the western genre in Italy.

Floods are not merely ‘natural’ disasters; rather, they emerge as socio-natural phenomena shaped by political, social, and economic processes. Law plays a pivotal role in producing and sustaining these processes and contributes to the creation of unjust environments. Drawing on political ecology and environmental history, this article analyzes the role of law and its interactions with colonialism and capitalism in the Damodar river valley in Eastern India. The Damodar river valley is an intensely engineered and hazardous region, a site of multiple interventions and developmental and ecological experiments for over a century. Colonial and post-colonial legacies have left a lasting imprint on legal, policy, and institutional frameworks, establishing a path-dependent trajectory for addressing future climate change adaptation challenges. While focusing on a specific case study, the article's approach and findings have broader significance, especially in the context of climate adaptation. The central argument underscores the need to understand the political and legal dimensions of flooding, and reinforces the need for a shift beyond incremental adjustments that do not tackle the underlying structures that produce the injustices associated with floods. It highlights the importance of ‘transformative adaptation’ approaches that address the root causes of climate-related disasters, such as restructuring power relations between actors, reconfiguring governance structures, and scrutinizing ideologies that mediate how water is used and distributed.

In the 1860s, the first zoos appeared in the Romanov empire. This article deals with the reasons for their establishment by looking into the early history of St Petersburg’s zoo, which has not been explicitly discussed in the historiography. By situating its history in the global context, it argues that, on the one hand, St Petersburg’s zoo was founded because the city’s officials wanted to enhance the fame of the capital of their empire in the globalizing world of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the founder of the zoo had other motivations and was principally driven by mercantile considerations. Thus, St Petersburg’s zoological garden is presented as one of the important social spaces and points of reference of the Romanov empire’s capital, which could bring fame and fortune to the zoo’s owners and the city in which it was located.

A confluence of societal changes, particularly hardening racial attitudes following the Indian Mutiny in 1857 and the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865, resulted in widescale disillusionment with imperial humanitarian projects in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. As this article demonstrates, however, the membership and income of the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) increased at precisely the moments when this disillusionment was at its sharpest. This article combines quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the nature of the Society's mid-century membership base, demonstrating that, rather than a monolithic decline, a humanitarian polarization took place in response to imperial crises that led some (largely Tories) to disillusionment and others (largely Whigs) to entrenchment. Furthermore, by attending to discursive trends within speeches at APS annual meetings as well as in private correspondence between members and the secretary of the Society, I explore how APS members explained the connection between their own lives and the treatment of distant Indigenous peoples in the colonies. Finding that British Indigenous rights activism was only seldomly expressed in terms of Indigenous peoples themselves, I show that support for the APS was most commonly related to concerns for friends and family living in the colonies, along with disquiet about the impact of colonial injustices on international competition. This enabled Indigenous rights activists to continue their efforts in the face of disillusionment with the capabilities of racialized “others.”