One of the chief aspects of last December's landmark Paris Agreement on climate change was the acceptance of the notion that all states would make a “contribution” to the global effort to address climate change. These voluntary, nationally determined, non-binding pledges are the most visible feature of the reorientation of the international climate regime away from its previous emphasis on “top-down” international coordination, and toward a “bottom-up” architecture that provides greater national flexibility in order to induce broader participation. At the same time, however, the agreement to keep the rise in average global temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius indicates that there is a limit to the quantity of carbon that can be emitted to meet this temperature goal, raising the challenge of how to apportion this carbon “budget” among states. Can a fair distribution of the carbon budget be achieved amid voluntary contributions? This paper first discusses the tension between the top-down distribution that a carbon budget approach generally implies, and the bottom-up institutional elements of the new climate architecture. Second, it reviews the alternative ways in which considerations of fairness have been integrated into the design of the Paris Agreement, and the rise of “national circumstances” as the context for fairness. Finally, this paper points to the increased role for normative argumentation in this bottom-up world, where new norms embedded in the Paris Agreement, especially relating to increases in national ambition, take on greater importance in efforts to achieve an equitable response to climate change.

Robert Sparrow recently argued in this journal that several initially plausible arguments in favor of the deployment of autonomous weapon systems (AWS) in warfare are in fact flawed, and that the deployment of AWS faces a serious moral objection. Sparrow's argument against AWS relies on the claim that they are distinct from accepted weapons of war in that they either fail to transmit an attitude of respect for enemy combatants or, worse, they transmit an attitude of disrespect. In this reply we argue that this distinction between AWS and widely accepted weapons is illusory, and therefore cannot ground a moral difference between AWS and existing methods of waging war. We also suggest that if deploying conventional soldiers in a given situation would be permissible, but we could expect to cause fewer civilian casualties by instead deploying AWS, then it would be consistent with an intuitive understanding of respect to deploy AWS in this situation.

The notion that some means of waging war are mala in se is a confronting one. Surely, any weapon can be used for good or ill? Philosophers often try to justify the category of mala in se by suggesting that some weapons are inherently incapable of being used in accordance with the just war principles of distinction and proportionality. This line of argument faces two obvious objections. First, claims about the limits of particular weapons typically fail to consider the different contexts in which they might be used. For example, anti-personnel mines can be used as defensive measures for fixed installations in marked locations that are fenced off from civilian intrusion. Second, deriving the category of mala in se from the principles of distinction and proportionality makes it redundant. The argument that some weapons cause disproportionate suffering is more persuasive, but it falters if one conducts an honest appraisal of the nature and extent of the suffering caused by weapons that are not held to be mala in se.

During the past decade there has been a resurgence of interest in the concept of recognition in international theory. Once the narrow concern of social theorists, the concept of recognition is nowadays invoked in at least three different senses in order to explain three different things. First, it is commonly used to explain how states and their identities are shaped by interaction, and how the modern international system has emerged as a cumulated consequence of such patterns of interaction. In this context, the concept of recognition is used to explain how states are individuated and differentiated from each other, how the international system thereby becomes stratified along status lines, as well as why conflicts over status are possible or even inevitable. Second, although the concept of recognition has long enjoyed wide currency within international legal theory, where it is used to account for what makes states legal persons and equal members of international society, recent scholarship has done much to complicate this view by pointing out how practices of inclusion often have gone hand in hand with practices of exclusion, and how this has led to an informal stratification of international society. Third, the concept has most recently been invoked to suggest how the undesirable consequences of international anarchy can be mitigated or even avoided through mutual recognition between political communities.

What interests do states have in assisting and protecting vulnerable populations beyond their borders? While some political leaders and commentators promote a circumscribed understanding of the national interest that rules out accepting substantial risks and costs for the sake of the distant vulnerable, others endorse an “enlightened” conception of the national interest that recognizes the long-term utility to be gained by helping them. However, while this notion of “enlightened” self-interest gives states reason to act in some instances, it fails to prompt action in other cases where the suffering of strangers is less strategically important. Some leaders and commentators have responded to this problem by reaching for some other, less material conception of the national interest to justify assisting the distant vulnerable, but they have often struggled to find the language they need. This article finds a solution in the debates about self-interest waged in seventeenth-century Europe. Dissatisfied both with Hobbes's narrow understanding of self-interest and Pufendorf's more “enlightened” understanding, Leibniz defended a more generous and “disinterested” conception, grounded not in considerations of material utility but in the pleasure to be derived from helping those in need. This article demonstrates two ways in which this “disinterested” conception of self-interest can be of use today. First, it provides resources for explaining why states already sometimes act in “disinterested” and altruistic ways. Second, it provides leaders with a tool for persuading people to help the distant vulnerable, even when it appears to be in neither their narrow nor their “enlightened” interests to do so.

This article assesses recent claims that international courts and tribunals can enhance their legitimacy through public reason. Section one argues that international legal scholars attribute a wide range of meanings to public reason, and goes on to provide clarification of how this range of conceptions, or ideas and ideals, referred to as public reason fits into the dominant and broadly Rawlsian tradition. Section two analyses properties and features of international courts that make public reason normatively relevant. Section three then sketches an ideal of public reason for ICs that suggests guidelines and principles to limit the discretion of judges when reasoning about morally and politically contentious issues. This ideal is designed to address a particular legitimacy concern raised against many new international courts, namely, that they engage in judicial activism, passing judgments on contentious moral and political issues without being sufficiently authorized and accountable. This ideal does not encourage the judges to engage in more judicial review, rather it seeks to restrict the judges' reasoning and judicial discretion when engaging in review and judicial development of the law. The final section compares and contrasts the proposed account of public reason to other adjudicative ideals, both from the general adjudicative accounts of Ronald Dworkin and Cass Sunstein, as well as the more ambitious and cosmopolitan accounts of public reason for ICs offered by the legal scholars Kumm, Sadurski, and Petersmann.

Deng Xiaoping once said, “Let some get rich first, the others will follow.” This is Angus Deaton's basic view in The Great Escape. Deaton, co-winner of the Leontief Prize in 2014 and winner of the Nobel Prize in 2015, chronicles the rise of almost all of humanity out of conditions of widespread hunger, disease, destitution, and premature death, and into a world where infant and child mortality has fallen sharply, and where heart diseases and even cancers are declining. Consequently, with exceptions related to AIDS and in the poorest countries, life overall is longer and health better than ever before.

The regulation of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) is widely seen as an important dimension of global atmospheric pollution control and climate change governance. SLCPs emitted outside the Arctic influence the Arctic atmosphere, Arctic communities, and the rate of ice melt. As an intergovernmental forum that brings together three of the world’s major petroleum producers (Russia, the United States, and Canada), the Arctic Council has a pivotal role in reducing the rate of Arctic warming through SLCP mitigation. This article explores the Arctic Council’s approach to SLCP mitigation. It begins by addressing the current status of black carbon and methane in international legal instruments, and goes on to explore the important regime linkages that are set in place through the Arctic Council’s Framework for Action on Enhanced Black Carbon and Methane Emission Reductions. The article suggests that the Arctic Council provides an experimental platform that may catalyze SLCP regulation not only in Arctic jurisdictions but also in Arctic Council observer states, such as China and India. The transnational and inclusive character of the Arctic Council’s constitutional framework and knowledge-generating mechanisms enables new pathways for global action on climate change and air pollution governance.

Habeas corpus arrived in the Hawaiian Kingdom in the 1840s and 1850s when it appeared in the kingdom's legislative proceedings, in the 1852 Constitution, and in a published legal decision. However, a description of the transmission and transplantation of a common-law concept to a particular place in the Pacific Ocean does little to explain how people in the kingdom used habeas corpus. Habeas corpus circulated widely in the kingdom between 1852 and 1892. Did the application of the writ in Hawai'i change the conceptual architecture of habeas corpus? Legal historians have several different methods to find out how habeas corpus functioned and how judges, lawyers, and litigants molded the writ's legal identity. Reading the published judicial opinions preserved in print volumes or subsequently digitized in databases provides a window into the way judges construed habeas corpus. The archival records of the legal cases illuminate how local lawyers and ordinary litigants wielded habeas corpus to achieve their goals. In addition to these traditional methods of legal and historical research, computer code identifies conceptual patterns in a digitized corpus of the kingdom's legal decisions. Each of these methods—close reading, archival research, and computational analysis—represent different angles on the operation and legal content of the writ.

Most colonial Hispanic American cities were originally planned around a main plaza, which was a multifunctional square crucial for urban life. This spatial model for the whole city based on a main square is termed the Plaza Mayor model. Bourbon reforms of the second half of the eighteenth century aimed at transforming this model according to a Plaza de Armas organization. Here, these two models (Plaza Mayor and Plaza de Armas) are characterized, and their contradictions in terms of political projects and quotidian city life are analysed. For late colonial Lima, Bourbon efforts to introduce the Plaza de Armas are shown to have affected both the main function of the central square and the entire urban system.

Early modern European capitals competed to demonstrate their imperial status, and contemporary urban praise often drew comparisons between them, situating these cities within a shifting hierarchy. Authors frequently combined actual perceptions of cities with metaphors of a New Rome and other classical motifs. This article explores how various writers asserted Lisbon's greatness and civic identity within this shared comparative European discourse. More particularly, it shows how they defended its changing political status as a capital while also developing a strong commercial discourse that centred on the city as an emporium. Views and descriptions of Lisbon and its port paralleled contemporary descriptions of London in particular, as both cities were increasingly defined as paradigms of imperial commerce.

This article reviews and reflects on the use of the geographic information system (GIS) as a tool, or geographic information science (GIScience) as a research methodology, and associated techniques of analysis in an empirical study-in-progress on the law and history of early twentieth century British Hong Kong. The article begins by introducing the study and its objectives, as well as the rationale for adopting GIS/GIScience as one of its research methodologies. It then highlights the preliminary findings of the current project and compares them with those of earlier research on the legal history of early twentieth century Beijing using GIS. The article also discusses the difficulties involved in adopting such a digital tool and methodology in historical research. It concludes by reflecting on what GIS can help scholars understand about the social history of law in Hong Kong, beyond what is already known, and how specialists in law, history, and geography can collaborate in a digital law and history project involving the use of GIS. This article also gives an overview of the use of GIS in conducting empirical research in the humanities (including but not limited to history and legal history research) and points to digital sources and web sites useful to researchers who may need tools and data to launch a GIS study in law and history.

As the fields of digital humanities and digital history have grown in scale and visibility since the 1990s, legal history has largely remained on the margins of those fields. The move to make material available online in the first decade of the web featured only a small number of legal history projects: Famous Trials; Anglo-American Legal Tradition; The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, 1674–1913. Early efforts to construct hypertext narratives and scholarship also included some works of legal history: “Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century Courts,” in Hypertext Scholarship in American Studies; Who Killed William Robinson? and Gilded Age Plains City: The Great Sheedy Murder Trial and the Booster Ethos of Lincoln, Nebraska. In the second decade of the web, the focus shifted from distributing material to exploring it using digital tools. The presence of digital history grew at the meetings of organizations of historians ranging from the American Historical Association to the Urban History Association, but not at the American Society for Legal History conferences, the annual meetings of the Law and Society Association, or the British Legal History Conference. Only a few Anglo-American legal historians took up computational tools for sorting and visualizing sources such as data mining, text mining, and topic modeling; network analysis; and mapping. Paul Craven and Douglas Hay's Master and Servant project text mined a comprehensive database of 2,000 statutes and 1,200,000 words to explore similarities and influence among statutes. Data Mining with Criminal Intent mined and visualized the words in trial records using structured data from The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, 1674–1913. Locating London's Past, a project that mapped resources relating to the early modern and eighteenth century city, and also made use of the Old Bailey records. Digital Harlem mapped crime in the context of everyday life in the 1920s. Only in the past few years has more digital legal history using computational tools begun to appear, and like many of the projects discussed in this special issue, most remain at a preliminary stage. This article seeks to bring into focus the constraints, possibilities, and choices that shape digital legal history, in order to create a context for the work in this special issue, and to promote discussion of what it means to do legal history in the digital age.