This special issue is devoted to the question of sentience and its ethical implications. Sparked by debates in contemporary science and bioethics, the theme addresses one of the most fundamental and contested concepts in moral philosophy: what it means to be sentient, why it matters, and how our understanding of it should guide practices, policies, and ethical reasoning. While the idea of sentience has long been central to questions of moral standing, recent developments—from neuroscientific models to artificial intelligence—have made it increasingly urgent to clarify its nature, scope, and significance. The contributions in this volume approach these issues from a range of philosophical, scientific, and applied perspectives, showing how the concept of sentience both challenges and enriches contemporary ethics.

This article considers how married women’s legal status under coverture shaped retail credit practices in the twentieth-century United States, as a mass consumer economy began to take shape. It focuses particularly on the law of necessaries, which made husbands liable for the “necessary” purchases of their wives. Rooted in English common law, this doctrine had long facilitated the flow of commerce by enabling married women—who lacked the legal capacity to pledge credit in their own names—to trade on their husbands’ credit. Yet at the dawn of the twentieth century, when women’s preferences were increasingly determining retailer practices, the law of necessaries provoked new tensions among merchants, wives, and bill-paying husbands. What counted as necessary in an expanding world of goods, and who had the right to decide? Conflict over these questions lay at the heart of numerous lawsuits from the period, including one brought in 1901 by famed Philadelphia retailer Wanamaker & Co. against a New York businessman who refused to settle his wife’s charge account. In probing Wanamaker v. Weaver, this article casts light on a key inflection point in the development of modern consumer credit, when American women’s growing importance as consumers collided with a legal foundation that diluted their financial autonomy. The conflict generated confusion for credit-granting retailers in the early twentieth century and would ultimately influence their approach to consumer credit in decades to come.

When does legal mobilisation democratise institutions rather than instrumentalise them? Existing frameworks cannot answer this question: deliberative democracy theory evaluates political engagement without addressing legal mobilisation; socio-legal scholarship documents litigation’s effects without providing normative criteria. This article develops reflexive juridification as a framework for evaluating democratic legitimacy across institutional domains. Democratic legitimacy, I argue, requires movements to fulfil three copulative requirements: communicative translation, functional differentiation and identity preservation. These requirements – grounded in Habermasian discourse theory and operationalised through comparative analysis of Chilean and United States cases – specify procedural standards for assessing how movements navigate political deliberation and legal interpretation simultaneously. Comparative analysis reveals that instrumental juridification emerges symmetrically across ideological orientations: progressive movements through the judicialisation of politics (Chile’s Constitutional Convention), conservative movements through the politicisation of law (Dobbs). The framework advances interdisciplinary legal studies by providing normative criteria independent of ideological content, evaluating process rather than substance.

This essay explains how Junot Díaz’s stories show the lasting impact of colonialism and dictatorship on everyday life, especially for immigrants and their children living between cultures. I argue that struggles over belonging, love, and identity are shaped by history and power even when characters do not name those forces directly. I interpret Junot Díaz’s fiction as an account of “the other side”: a peripheral perspective produced by migration, racialization, and the enduring afterlife of colonial violence. Dominican and U.S. histories, especially dictatorship, imperial entanglements, and postindustrial economic restructuring, shape the motives, relationships, and moral horizons of Díaz’s characters. Methodologically, the essay combines close reading with interdisciplinary framing: using diaspora theory to parse displacement, decolonial theory (via the concept of coloniality) to track the persistence of power/knowledge hierarchies, and comparative literary analysis to set Díaz alongside Gloria Anzaldúa and Rudolfo Anaya. Díaz’s “third place,” language, and genre play (fabulism, fantasy/science fiction) render colonial history as lived structure. Díaz shows how coloniality distorts intimacy, masculinity, and community through both material constraint and epistemic domination, and that “decolonial love” names a fragile but real form of resistance and healing. I conclude that colonialism is first a material enterprise whose cultural residues persist, and that reading the “carnality of knowledge” in Díaz clarifies how agency can emerge, even in exile, as a world-making practice.