What exactly is a “wicked problem”? It is a social or economic problem that is so complex and so interconnected with other issues that it is extraordinarily difficult or impossible to resolve. This is because all proposed resolutions generate equally complex, equally wicked problems. In this essay, I argue that precision medicine, especially in the context of the U.S. healthcare system, generates numerous wicked problems related to distributive justice. Further, I argue that there are no easy solutions to these wicked problems. The need for trade-offs is inescapable. Rough justice is the best outcome we can hope for, and that outcome requires a commitment to processes of public reason that are fair and inclusive.

Numerous studies have investigated the kinds of verbs that can be used with there constructions. Generally, only existence and appearance verbs can occur in there constructions. However, some cases have been observed involving verbs not lexically expressing existence or appearance. This study focuses on there sentences with the verb become which are noteworthy in the following two respects. First, although the verb become is not an existence or appearance verb but a change-of-state verb, the verb is felicitously used with there constructions. Second, become is used without an adjectival or nominal complement, a unique argument realization pattern of the verb not found in other syntactic contexts. This study, based on a detailed examination of actual data in corpora, claims that there sentences with become express the appearance/occurrence of an entity. Although the postverbal noun is structurally a subject in there constructions and the subject of the verb become is usually interpreted as an entity undergoing a change, the postverbal noun of there sentences with become is an entity that has arisen as a result of the changing event.

The rapid and widespread establishment of domestic environmental courts and tribunals raises important questions regarding their implications for international environmental law and global environmental governance. I use an interdisciplinary, multi-method approach to consider the capacity of domestic environmental courts to identify and apply norms and principles of international environmental law in domestic opinions. I first review existing literature, identifying jurisdiction, judicial discretion, and a court's position in a legal system as key institutional determinants of this capacity. I then develop a typology of domestic environmental courts and tribunals, which suggests that, all else being equal, a court with national geographic jurisdiction that also enjoys attributes of broad subject-matter jurisdiction and discretion may be expected to be best equipped to implement norms and principles of international environmental law. Next, I integrate existing assessments of environmental court presence with original outreach and web research to identify all countries which possess environmental courts, and assess a subset of eight existing national-level institutions. The analysis of this subset highlights the diversity of institutional models that can incorporate theorized best practices. Based on these findings, I draw several theoretical conclusions: specifically (i) the relevance of environmental court research to individual- and institutional-level analysis in transnational and international environmental law, (ii) the need for further legal-institutional analysis in global environmental governance scholarship, and (iii) the opportunity for further interdisciplinary analysis of the role of domestic courts in environmental governance.

Governments sometimes adopt policies that are not aligned with their preferences or have not come onto their agendas when doing so is linked to a reward. International organizations can therefore set conditions for coveted membership that include adopting new human rights and regulatory policies. As international organizations increasingly converge around the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, how might they promote national uptake of these guidelines? This article considers the prospects of accession conditionality in answering this question. The focus of the article is on European Union and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) expansion in Central and Eastern Europe, where uptake of business and human rights policies remains comparatively low. The article argues that while these organizations increasingly include business and human rights conditionalities in accession negotiations, there remains significantly greater scope for promoting the Guiding Principles.

This article analyzes how the multidirectional movement of legal and popular printed texts, newspapers, letters, and citizens contributed to the political and legal influence of individual lawyers across the Atlantic. It is based on a case study of leading common law barrister and Whig MP Thomas Erskine (1750–1823). It examines the dissemination of Erskine's legal and political arguments, and other publications in support of freedom of the press and the constitutional importance of trial by jury in libel trials. Erskine's Country Whig politics, key role in the passage of the 1792 Libel Act, and support for American independence were admired by American lawyers, diplomats, and politicians. His disinterested public service as an advocate meant he personified the ideal of a patriot lawyer that underpinned the classical republican model of law, citizenship, and politics on both sides of the Atlantic. Erskine's powerful, often emotive forensic rhetoric was equally admired as part of a shared transatlantic legal culture, linking law, politics and literature. The speeches were reprinted and widely circulated in edited collections, texts on oratory, trial reports, newspapers, and periodicals; key arguments were also referenced in legal treatises on libel. Hence, parts of his most significant speeches in English libel trials came to be regarded as “usable” legal texts studied by students and re-cited by American defense lawyers in court.

Participatory methods have become essential for research with Indigenous Arctic peoples. To understand how researchers use such methods, we conducted a scoping review of participatory action research (PAR)—a classic qualitative methodology—with Inuit communities. Although other systematic reviews exist on participatory methodologies in the Arctic, our scoping review is the only one focusing only on the Inuit.

We reviewed 11 empirical studies published between 2000 and 2019 in peer-reviewed journals. Most of them had been conducted with Canadian Inuit. Although the authors came from a variety of disciplines, the studies were mostly about the health and well-being of Inuit communities. The authors did not use the same definition of PAR, but their definitions did share some key components: Inuit participation, Inuit engagement and a goal of social change. There were also a variety of methodologies of research and forms of Inuit participation, although the photovoice method was frequent.

Scoping reviews are most often used in the natural sciences. This one was a challenge because we were using it in the social sciences and because it concerned PAR, an approach with different definitions and uses. A remaining question is how to assess such a method, either by peers or by other stakeholders.

The DIMA Network (Developing Innovative Multi-proxy Analyses – in Siberia and the Russian Far East (SRFE)) started from a small nucleus of palaeoenvironmental researchers in the UK and SRFE at a workshop in 2008 and currently includes researchers from over 25 institutions. The mutual interest in creating long-term records of environmental change was rekindled during workshops in Magadan (2018), Tomsk (2018) and Southampton (2019). These events were organised to connect researchers from the UK and SRFE with these aims: (1) provide training in new techniques and methods, (2) facilitate knowledge transfer about local sites and conditions, (3) stimulate large-scale collaborative projects across SRFE and (4) inspire a new generation of palaeoenvironmental researchers.

The paper addresses the perpetual discontent evoked by the concept of legal pluralism, one which, in turn, brings about incessant efforts to “rethink” it. We suggest that one of the sources of this discontent is the erroneous view that legal pluralism is a theory, and the consequent misguided expectations that it should provide scholars of law and society with causal hypotheses and explanations. We argue that legal pluralism is not a theory but a research perspective, and, as such, is not meant to provide us with explanatory propositions, but rather to increase our awareness of the plurality and inter-relationality of socio-legal spheres and of the implications thereof. We further identify—and briefly discuss—the four core principles of a pluri-legal perspective: plurality, relationality, power, and agency. Taken together, these four premises constitute a manifesto of sorts for a pluri-legal perspective.