According to relational egalitarianism, justice requires equal relations. In this paper, I ask the question: can equal relations be unjust according to relational egalitarianism? I argue that while on some conceptions of relational egalitarianism, equal relations cannot be unjust, there are conceptions in which equal relations can be unjust. Surprisingly, whether equal relations can be unjust cuts across the distinction between responsibility-sensitive and non-responsibility-sensitive conceptions of relational egalitarianism. I then show what follows if one accepts a conception in which equal relations can be unjust, including why it provides a reason to grant some people less political power than others.

The 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath provided fertile soil for criticism of and alternatives to the international liberal order, including the rise of financial nationalism. Contemporary financial nationalism is a view of the world that is nationalist in its motivation for political action, financial in its policy focus, and illiberal in its conception of political economy. At the same time, it is fundamentally shaped by its emergence from within the international liberal order, which both constrains the policy options of financial nationalists and provides opportunities for them to draw on transnational financial resources and institutions to advance nationalist causes. This article offers a conceptual analysis of contemporary financial nationalism that explores its fundamental characteristics, explains what is distinctive about it, delineates its four major policy subtypes, identifies the resources and capabilities required to successfully engage in it, and discusses the implications of doing so. It aids researchers in thinking about financial nationalism’s internal workings across different contexts, in understanding why it has lasted as long and spread as far as it has, in considering how it may evolve, and in contemplating how it can affect domestic and international political economies.

In the wake of Brexit, how has the framing of the EU and independence evolved among regionalist parties in the devolved regions of the UK? The effects of a multilevel structure such as the EU on regionalist parties has been examined, yet European disintegration is novel and thus yet to be fully explored. Has the framing of the EU by these parties shifted, and if so, how? In this article, I analyze 19 regionalist party manifestos between 2011 and 2022 through the lens of rational choice and discursive institutionalism to examine the effects of Brexit on the framing of the EU. At a rhetorical level, these parties have engaged in the subsuming of the EU, rhetorically tying their independence or enhanced autonomy to Brexit. Sinn Féin, Scottish Nationalist Party, and Plaid Cymru have used the critical juncture of Brexit to incorporate the EU into their regionalist rhetoric. By examining the effects of European disintegration on regionalist political parties, we can better understand the role that current events play in the fluidity of party positions as presented in manifestos.

Egor Lazarev has offered us a book of uncommon ambition and erudition. At its core, State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya explores how elites and ordinary citizens pursue their interests by weighing the costs and benefits of using alternative legal frameworks in postwar Chechnya. By describing how politicians encourage nonstate legal remedies to build political coalitions—and how everyday Chechens engage in forum shopping when trying to manage their own legal issues—Lazarev teaches us about the challenges associated with the extension of state legal institutions in the wake of prolonged, nationalist conflict. Although Lazarev treats his exploration of legal pluralism as the theoretical framing for the book, such a reading belies what I view as his primary empirical contribution: a meticulous exploration of gender politics in the North Caucasus. In this review, I describe Lazarev’s arguments about elite and citizen legal strategies, discuss his understanding of gender disputes in a postconflict Muslim society, and offer a provocation for future research that would situate the study of Chechnya in a broader literature on autocratic politics.

In the past decade, philosophers have devoted a great deal of attention to the practice of petitionary prayer. Philosophical inquiries have posed a priori problems – issues that arise from an analytical investigation of the concept of God, the concept of petitionary prayer, and the relationship between the two. Taking a different direction, this article shifts the focus from possibility to actuality. Accordingly, this article does not deal with the question ‘Can God answer petitionary prayers?’ but rather with the question ‘Does God answer petitionary prayers?’ and, mainly, its implications. More accurately, I will present the tension between the religious belief that petitionary prayers can be effective and the fact that this does not seem to be so in reality, a claim that has been the conclusion of several empirical studies. Then I will present and examine several solutions to this tension. Although I will try to promote my preferred solution, my main aim is to clarify the problem and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the solutions offered to solve the problem under discussion.

Sceptical theists respond to the problem of evil by arguing that we should be sceptical of our abilities to understand God's plan and the justifying reasons for his actions. A major difficulty faced by sceptical theism is the problem of moral paralysis. Some sceptical theists have proposed a divine command response: theists can appeal to God's commands in acting, and this circumvents the need to exercise value judgement in moral deliberations. This article provides an objection to the divine command response by arguing that it renders love impossible and practically undermines the possibility of the theistic way of life. As a result, this article demonstrates a constraint on any potential solution to the problem of moral paralysis in sceptical theism: the access to values of loving relationship and human well-being, as well as their role to play in agents’ deliberative process, should be safeguarded.

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).

Theological voluntarism is a family of metaethical views that share the claim that deontological statuses of actions are dependent on or identical with some divine feature. Adams's version of this theistic metaethical view is a divine command theory (DCT). According to Adams's DCT, the property being-morally-obligated is identical to the property being-commanded-by-God. Thus, a natural consequence of Adams's DCT is that an agent is morally obligated to do something just in case God commands that agent to do such a thing. From Adams's DCT, it follows that God is morally obligated to act just in case God commands himself to act. Quinn argued that commanding oneself is incoherent and, therefore, that God cannot be morally obligated to act. The claim that commanding oneself is incoherent has seldom been discussed in the divine command theory literature. This article is an attempt to change that. Here, I argue (contra Quinn) that that no constitutive rule (or condition of satisfaction) of self-commands is incoherent, from which it follows that self-commanding is not an incoherent speech act. I conclude that divine command theorists can, without the charge of incoherence, affirm that God can be morally obligated because God can command himself.

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.

The primary objective of this paper is to contribute to the advancement of second language (L2) fluency research by outlining a specific proposal for future replication studies. The overarching goal is to assess the generalisability of the original findings of the two influential studies in the area of perceived fluency: Kormos and Dénes (2004) and Rossiter (2009). This objective will be achieved by first introducing the concept of L2 fluency that often conflates two categories: (1) overall language proficiency; (2) temporal features of speech production. The paper then highlights limitations in the current fluency research paradigm emphasising the variability in the methods employed for speech analysis and rating data collection. This diversity makes it somewhat challenging to compare results across various studies. In response to these challenges, the second part of the paper proposes several close and approximate replications of the two studies.

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.