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.

When is it justified to use opaque artificial intelligence (AI) output in medical decision-making? Consideration of this question is of central importance for the responsible use of opaque machine learning (ML) models, which have been shown to produce accurate and reliable diagnoses, prognoses, and treatment suggestions in medicine. In this article, I discuss the merits of two answers to the question. According to the Explanation View, clinicians must have access to an explanation of why an output was produced. According to the Validation View, it is sufficient that the AI system has been validated using established standards for safety and reliability. I defend the Explanation View against two lines of criticism, and I argue that within the framework of evidence-based medicine mere validation seems insufficient for the use of AI output. I end by characterizing the epistemic responsibility of clinicians and point out how a mere AI output cannot in itself ground a practical conclusion about what to do.

This article seeks to investigate the claim that South Georgia may have been first discovered in April 1675 by an English merchant called Antonio de la Roche. There are two unresolved questions: whether La Roche was the first to see the island, and whether the island that he saw was South Georgia. I introduce a third uncertainly by questioning whether Antonio de la Roche ever existed. He does not appear in the records of the French churches in London, and the sole source of his biography is the work of a fabricator, Francisco de Seyxas.

This article interrogates the concept of legal pluralism, as it currently tends to function within contemporary legal and historical scholarship. It argues that the concept of legal pluralism cannot ‘liberate’ positivist analytical legal theory from monist (municipal, state-centric, etc.) straightjackets, but rather itself presumes the primacy of centralized state-issued law—at the same time as masking that primacy within a pluralist discourse. The concept of legal pluralism should be properly understood—and analyzed—as part of the mythology of modern law, not as an alternative to it. The first two sections develop this argument via a critical tour of legal-pluralist historiography, focusing on 1986 to the present day. The final section then moves on to explore what is at stake for the pre-modern historian when they apply (modern) concept(s) of legal pluralism to try to explain the multiplicity of legal orders that they invariably encounter in their own source material.

This article takes up the short work of fiction Salam, written in Japanese in 2006 by Shirin Nezammafi, and deploys it as a primary source in the history of the Japanese present. Salam tells the tale of Layla, an Afghan migrant detained in and then expelled from Japan in 2001. The article argues that Salam exposes the unmaking of postcolonial Japan: if postcolonial Japan meant a territorial, sovereign nation-state built on hegemonic national myths, then now it is unsustainable. Salam calls to an inevitable if uncharted post-national, post-territorial future. To advance this argument, the article focuses on Nezammafi's treatment of three humanistic categories tied up with geopolitical territoriality: language, art, and gender. These categories, when associated with the nation-state, generate irony in Salam. That irony stems from the anachronism of nations: territorial nations, Japanese or otherwise, appear as past entities that have outlived their possibility.

There is much literature about the licensing of complement clauses by complement-taking predicates. However, less has been written about the licensing of adverbs in a complement clause. This article addresses the licensing of English evidential adverbs in complement clauses extracted from the NOW corpus. The article discusses three factors that determine the distribution of evidential adverbs in complement clauses. These are the nature of the evidential adverbs, the constraints of the complement clause and the anchor of the evidential adverb. To explore the role of these three factors, I adopt the hierarchical scopal theory of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). If a complement clause licenses the inclusion of the evidential adverb, then there is a match. Should there be no alignment between the complement clause and the adverb, there will be a mismatch. The results of the analysis of the data show that there are mostly matches, which occur with either a current speaker anchor or an actor anchor. Secondly, it appears that in cases of mismatches, there is always a current speaker. It thus appears that a current speaker anchor can override the constraints of the complement clause.