Following Heath White, let ‘divine determinism’ denote the pairing of the following theses: ‘(1) the facts about God’s will entail every other contingent fact, and (2) the facts about God’s will are explanatorily prior to every other fact’. In the article, we develop a theological version of Peter van Inwagen’s so-called Direct Argument and show that, if sound, the Theological Direct Argument leads to the conclusion that divine determinism is incompatible with human moral responsibility. But, the soundness of the argument depends upon two inference rules, one of which, called Rule B, is controversial. So, in the third section of the article, we offer a novel, two-part defence of Rule B. This defence, in the first part, has to do with how truth, in a fairly trivial way, depends on the world. The second part of the defence has to do with the way that the logic of conditionals works. The upshot of this defence is that counter-examples to Rule B are impossible. Even so, should that defence fail, we also consider, in section four, a way of reformulating Rule B that, if successful, circumvents alleged counter-examples to the original statement of Rule B.

The question of how digital health is regulated has become increasingly important within debates on technology, inequality and global health. While digital health is frequently celebrated for its capacity to expand access, build resilient systems and advance equity, scholars have raised critical concerns about its role in reproducing asymmetries of power. The potential for reproducing rather than curbing inequality is particularly relevant for the Global South. This Special Issue of the International Journal of Law in Context interrogates the ways in which digital health infrastructures, regulatory frameworks and transnational data flows are constitutive of coloniality and neoliberal capitalism. Bringing together socio-legal, feminist and decolonial perspectives, the contributions examine regulation as a terrain in which vulnerabilities, exclusions and structural inequalities are reinforced. Against the celebratory rhetoric of innovation, this collection situates regulation as a key site for understanding the entanglement of digital health with broader histories of coloniality and capitalism.

This article analyses the representation of Spanish history in the operas ‘Fernand Cortez’ (1809) and ‘Pélage’ (1814), along with their ambivalent political uses and economic dynamics at the Paris Opéra during the transition from the First Empire to the Bourbon Restoration. It seeks to complement historiographical interpretations that often view these operas primarily as vehicles of Napoleonic or Bourbon propaganda, by examining the artistic careers of their authors – especially the composer Gaspare Spontini (1774–1851) and librettist Etienne de Jouy (1764–1846). A closer look at their personal and professional paths reveals a multi-layered space of symbolic conflict, shaped by disputes over reputation and competition for positions within the Parisian musical milieu. Drawing on archival and press sources, this paper studies the interplay between official political agendas and individual ambitions, considering how the self-serving staging of Spanish medieval and imperial history was incorporated into French narratives of power.

Urban tourism has expanded dramatically in recent decades, reshaping European cities economically, socially and culturally. Yet its roots run much deeper, as (early) modern urban centres – especially in the Low Countries – developed distinctive traditions of tourism and place promotion. This special issue highlights how civic boosterism, marketing innovations and inter-urban competition shaped these early practices. Bringing together new research on Belgium and the Netherlands, the special issue uncovers the actors, tools and narratives that fashioned urban tourism long before the late twentieth-century boom. Collectively, the contributions rethink the genealogy of urban tourism by analysing its ‘orgware’, ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ from the late eighteenth to twentieth centuries.

Revolutionary-era state constitutions reflected an unsettling tension in the history of American liberty. This article captures how revolutionary-era Americans accommodated moral liberty with religious establishment. Their notions of liberty were paradoxical, but it is possible to track their moral reasoning.

This article reassesses the history of reparations after World War I from the perspective of organized labour in early Weimar Germany. It does so by investigating trade union proposals to send German construction workers to Northern France in an effort to rebuild French villages damaged or destroyed in the war. The article argues that organized workers in early Weimar Germany rallied behind these proposals not only because they hoped that sending fellow workers abroad would contribute to international reconciliation, ease the overall reparations burden, and create employment opportunities, as previous research has suggested. Rather, it shows that Weimar’s “free” (that is, socialist) trade union movement supported the idea of “reparation through labour power” because its members were convinced that it would prevent the rebuilding of Northern France from becoming a playground for private builders. Analysing various German trade union sources, the article suggests that, by involving the country’s nascent Bauhütten movement, a network of building companies owned and controlled by organized labour, trade union functionaries hoped to turn Northern France into a laboratory for non-profit construction. In doing so, they sought to advance a broader transformation of the building sector from a profit-seeking industry benefiting a few wealthy builders into a public service that promoted the interests of workers and the wider community alike. By exploring these trade union proposals for the reconstruction of Northern France, the article also sheds light on a neglected episode in transnational labour history that witnessed the first timid attempts at trade union representation across borders.

This article examines the work of Emil Schlagintweit (1835–1904), one of Germany's most prominent nineteenth-century Tibetologists in order to challenge some common assumptions regarding Orientalist scholarship and its relationship to nineteenth-century nationalism and imperialism. Schlagintweit began to work on Tibetan religion and language in the wake of an expedition led by three of his brothers in the 1850s, and his work can provide important nuances to existing understandings of German Orientalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that German scholars did indeed emphasize rigorous analysis in line with the notion of Wissenschaftlichkeit, yet it also demonstrates that their work could go beyond this and rely on a wider array of methodologies and traditions. Interpretations which treat German Orientalists as fundamentally different from other European scholars should therefore be treated with caution. At the same time, the relationship between Orientalist knowledge and imperial realities remained ambivalent for scholars such as Schlagintweit.

Against a backdrop of rapidly expanding health artificial intelligence (AI) development, this paper examines how the European Union’s (EU) stringent digital regulations may incentivise the outsourcing of personal health data collection to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), fuelling a new form of AI ethics dumping. Drawing on parallels with the historical offshoring of clinical trials, we argue that current EU instruments, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) and Medical Devices Regulation, impose robust internal safeguards but do not prevent the use of health data collected unethically beyond EU borders. This regulatory gap enables data colonialism, whereby commercial actors exploit weaker legal environments abroad without equitable benefit-sharing. Building on earlier EU responses to ethics dumping in clinical trials, we propose legal and policy pathways to prevent similar harms in the context of AI.

This article explores the enactment of the Civil Wrongs Ordinance in Mandate Palestine in order to question the utility of “Anglicization” as a historical lens, and to suggest that it tends to crowd out more helpful framings, in particular those involving distributive or class motivations and effects. The Ordinance has been portrayed primarily as an instance of the codification of the common law of torts and its import to Palestine. Without denying the Englishness of the Ordinance, this article demonstrates that it did not codify the common law of tort but went considerably beyond it in reforming Palestine’s liability regime. It further argues that the “Anglicization” framing obscures more than it illuminates, missing the massive redistribution of risk, costs, liability, and welfare that resulted from the change in Palestine’s tort law. The study also complicates the commonly accepted chronology of the development of compensation for injuries in the common law world. In Palestine, English-style tort law was the product of progressive reform, designed to overcome the shortcomings of the preceding regime of workers’ compensation schemes. The significance of Anglicized tort law in this jurisdiction was thus very different, in some ways the polar opposite, of that in other, better-known contexts.

This article presents an analysis of two sheet gold ornaments of the Mycenaean post-palatial period (twelfth–eleventh centuries bc) found in two cemeteries on the island of Kefalonia. These unusual ornaments bear solar symbols of Nordic and central European type, the closest parallels being those on the contemporary gold discs from votive deposits on the Italian peninsula. The study considers the technological, morphological, and iconographic particularities of the Kefalonian ornaments and how they differ from each other and from other finds. The ornaments’ use in a funerary context is examined against Aegean practices, burial rites, and ideology. The examination of their iconographic and conceptual antecedents in the Aegean cultural sphere reveals that the exogenous input in their creation—linked to transcultural exchange within the Adriatic—was matched by indigenous engagement with aspects of cosmology.

The Arctic, once a climate victim, is now becoming a climate stressor. The melting ice has brought us closer to climate tipping points and, simultaneously, has made oil reserves in the Arctic more accessible. As a result, a clash has emerged between scientific warnings and climate change obstruction (CCO) discourses that prioritise economic ambitions over climate concerns. This study investigates whether, despite scientific warnings, Norway defends further oil extraction in the Arctic, thus aligning with CCO discourses by prioritising economic interests over climate urgency. Based on a qualitative inductive approach, we analyse four official White Papers from the Norwegian government, identify their discursive patterns and contrast them with CCO discourses found in the literature. We found that the Norwegian government exhibits an affinity with six CCO discourses: 1) Non-Transformative Discourse, 2) Responsibility Deflection Discourse, 3) Discourse of the Common Good, 4) Discourse of Higher Priorities or Loyalties, 5) The Legal Discourse, and 6) The Discourse of Good Intentions. We conclude that the Norwegian government has constructed a narrative where the recognition of climate urgency does not mean the renouncement of its long-term petroleum interests and further oil extraction in the Arctic. This narrative, named here as the “green oil” narrative, uses renewable energies to electrify the oil industry, thus presenting renewables as an ally of oil expansion rather than a step toward a fossil fuel phase-out. Overall, Norway’s current narrative fails to address oil dependency, defending and justifying oil extraction in the Arctic.

With the Directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence, the European Union strives to address the negative externalities of companies that arise in the global economy. The new Directive follows the example of national lawmakers by requiring large companies operating in their own jurisdiction to manage adverse impacts on human rights and the environment. These due diligence laws affect companies beyond European borders by cascading due diligence standards down transnational ownership ties and value chains. They are shifting gears in the complex engine of the global economy and have considerable impacts on stakeholders in third countries. These extraterritorial implications raise the question of what limits international law places on relevant unilateral legislation. This article assesses the Directive against the law of jurisdiction and international comity arguing that unilateral due diligence laws are an appropriate way to address transnational sustainability challenges, provided lawmakers take adequate precautions.