This article examines the intersection between extraterritoriality--privileges afforded to European subjects in the Islamic Mediterranean--and various forms of state membership. To capture the multiplicity and instability of state membership, I introduce the phrase “legal belonging”--a neutral, umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of bonds between individuals and states (usually referred to as subjecthood, nationality, or citizenship). Adopting the methods of global legal history, I look at how laws regulating legal belonging responded to the extraterritorial context of the Mediterranean in both European and Middle Eastern states. In so doing, I offer an alternative to the centrifugal narrative of modernization, which presumes that modern citizenship was invented in Europe and then exported to the Islamic world. Instead, I contend that the evolution of legal belonging on both sides of the Mediterranean developed in response to the challenges and opportunities presented by extraterritoriality. The article consists of two cases studies: first, I look at the regulation of legal belonging in Tunisia, the Ottoman Empire, and Morocco, arguing that this legislation responded to the challenges posed by extraterritoriality. Second, I examine the influence of extraterritorial regimes on the nationality of Algerians under French colonial rule.

This article addresses how French academics, doctors and state bureaucrats formulated sex work as a pathology, an area of inquiry that had to be studied in the interest of public safety. French colonisation in the Levant extended the reach of this ‘expertise’ from the metropole to Lebanon under the guise of public health. Knowledge produced by academics was used to buttress colonial state policy, which demanded that sex workers be contained to protect society against medical contagion. No longer drawing conclusions based on speculation, the medical establishment asserted its authority by harnessing modern advances in science and uniting them with extensive observation. ‘Empirical facts’ replaced ‘opinions’, as doctors forged new approaches to studying and containing venereal disease. They accomplished this through the use of statistics and new methods of diagnosing and treating maladies. Their novel approach was used to treat sex workers and to support commercial sex work policy both at home and abroad. Sex workers became the objects of scientific study and were consequently problematised by the state in medicalised terms.

In the years after independence, former British colonies in eastern and southern Africa struggled to fill the ranks of their judiciaries with African judges. Beginning in the mid-1960s, states including Uganda, Tanzania, and Botswana solved this problem by retaining judges from the Caribbean and West Africa, especially Nigeria. In this same period, a wave of coups brought many independent states under the rule of their militaries (or authoritarian civilian regimes). Foreign judges who had been appointed in the name of pan-African cooperation were tasked with interpreting the laws that soldiers imposed, and assessing the legitimacy of regimes born of coups. The decisions they rendered usually accommodated authoritarianism, but they could also be turned against it. To understand how colonial law and postcolonial solidarities shaped Africa's military dictatorships, this article focuses on one judge, Sir Egbert Udo Udoma of Nigeria, who served as Uganda's first African chief justice and was an influential member of the Nigerian Supreme Court. Udoma and other judges like him traversed the continent in the name of African cooperation, making a new body of jurisprudence as they did so. Their rulings were portable, and they came to underpin military rule in many states, both in Africa and in the wider Commonwealth.

COVID-19 vaccines are likely to be scarce for years to come. Many countries, from India to the U.K., have demonstrated vaccine nationalism. What are the ethical limits to this vaccine nationalism? Neither extreme nationalism nor extreme cosmopolitanism is ethically justifiable. Instead, we propose the fair priority for residents (FPR) framework, in which governments can retain COVID-19 vaccine doses for their residents only to the extent that they are needed to maintain a noncrisis level of mortality while they are implementing reasonable public health interventions. Practically, a noncrisis level of mortality is that experienced during a bad influenza season, which society considers an acceptable background risk. Governments take action to limit mortality from influenza, but there is no emergency that includes severe lockdowns. This “flu-risk standard” is a nonarbitrary and generally accepted heuristic. Mortality above the flu-risk standard justifies greater governmental interventions, including retaining vaccines for a country's own citizens over global need. The precise level of vaccination needed to meet the flu-risk standard will depend upon empirical factors related to the pandemic. This links the ethical principles to the scientific data emerging from the emergency. Thus, the FPR framework recognizes that governments should prioritize procuring vaccines for their country when doing so is necessary to reduce mortality to noncrisis flu-like levels. But after that, a government is obligated to do its part to share vaccines to reduce risks of mortality for people in other countries. We consider and reject objections to the FPR framework based on a country: (1) having developed a vaccine, (2) raising taxes to pay for vaccine research and purchase, (3) wanting to eliminate economic and social burdens, and (4) being ineffective in combating COVID-19 through public health interventions.

Business and human rights (BHR) has been taught as an academic discipline and field of practice for thirty years.1 Since the first courses at business schools, law schools, and schools of public policy in North America and Western Europe, BHR curricula have proliferated worldwide. BHR course content has expanded to include new international standards, such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs); tools for corporate accountability; 2 and examples from the growing body of corporate BHR practice. BHR pedagogy has evolved to embrace multidisciplinary teaching techniques, from business case studies to legal drafting exercises and experiential role plays.3 BHR teaching is taking place in every region, from Africa and Asia to the Middle East and Latin America. Over 350 individuals teach the subject in some form at more than 200 institutions in 45 countries.4 More than 100 universities have added BHR courses to their curricula in the past decade alone. BHR is also taught outside traditional university settings in dedicated workshops and training programmes for professionals, academics and students.5

Responses to brain injury sit in the intersection between neuroscience and an ethic of care, and require sensitive and dynamic indicators of how an individual with brain injury can learn how to live in the context of a changing environment and multiple timescales. Therapeutic relationships and rhythms underpinning such a dynamic approach are currently obscured by existing models of brain function. Something older is required and we put forward narrative types articulating outcomes of brain injury over various periods and starting points in time. Such storytelling challenges a static neuropsychological paradigm and moves from an ethics that focuses on patient autonomy into one that is reflective of the cognitive supports and therapeutic relationships that underpin ways that the patient can re-find the beat that proves the music is not over.

The current debate on closed-loop brain devices (CBDs) mainly focuses on their use in a medical context; possible criminal justice applications have only received incidental scholarly attention. Unlike in medicine, in criminal justice, CBDs might be offered on behalf of the State and for the purpose of protecting security, rather than realizing healthcare aims. It would be possible to deploy CBDs in the rehabilitation of convicted offenders, similarly to the much-debated possibility of employing other brain interventions in this context. Although such use of CBDs could in principle be consensual, there are significant differences between the choice faced by a criminal offender offered a CBD in the context of criminal justice, and that faced by a patient offered a CBD in an ordinary healthcare context. Employment of CBDs in criminal justice thus raises ethical and legal intricacies not raised by healthcare applications. This paper examines some of these issues under three heads: autonomy, human rights, and accountability.