By foregrounding a widened view of the rule of law in transnational legal processes, the works under discussion in this symposium can support innovative critical perspectives on global health law –a field that has gained wide attention due to the spread of COVID-19 around the world (Lander, 2020; Bhatt, 2020). Legal and socio-legal scholars in the decade and a half before the pandemic worked on locating global health law and articulating its underlying principles. Lawrence Gostin's 2014 monograph offers a synoptic view centred on international institutions (e.g. the World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, UN Human Rights Council) and problems (e.g. infectious-disease response, tobacco control), along with an elaboration of its normative basis in universal moral principle and international human rights law (Gostin, 2014). Struggles over access to essential medicines and intellectual property in the early 2000s are, for example, represented in terms of the right to health constraining international trade law. Andreas Fischer-Lescano and Guenther Teubner's 2004 reading is oriented more by social theory than by doctrinal or ethical frames (Fischer-Lescano and Teubner, 2004, pp. 1006, 1008). A functional health regime has ‘differentiated out’, they observe, and operates as a discrete communication system across borders, albeit one that is threatened by the preponderant economic system. On this model, the battle for access to medicines amounts to ensuring, via human rights guarantees, that the rationality of the health system is not replaced by that of its economic rival in legal and policy communications (Fischer-Lescano and Teubner, 2004, pp. 1030, 1046).

Mendelian Inheritance in Man (MIM), a computerized catalogue of human genetic disorders authored and maintained by cardiologist and medical genetics pioneer Victor A. McKusick, played a major part in demarcating between a novel biomedical science and the eugenic projects of racial betterment which existed prior to its emergence. Nonetheless, it built upon prior efforts to systematize genetic knowledge tied to individuals and institutions invested in eugenics. By unpacking the process of digitizing a homespun cataloguing project and charting its development into an online database, this article aims to illuminate how the institution-building efforts of one individual created an ‘information order’ for accessing genetic information that tacitly shaped the norms and priorities of the field toward the pursuit of specific genes associated with discernible genetic disorders. This was not by design, but rather arose through negotiation with the catalogue's users; it accommodated further changes as biomedical research displaced the Mendelian paradigm. While great effort was expended toward making sequence data available to investigators during the Human Genome Project, MIM was largely taken for granted as a ‘legacy system’, McKusick's own labour of love. Drawing on recent histories of biomedical data, the article suggests that the bibliographical work of curation and translation is a central feature of value production in the life sciences meriting attention in its own right.

This essay sketches the lineaments of the relationship between international law and the jurisprudence of Peter Fitzpatrick. It argues that Fitzpatrick was a model ‘transnational jurisprudent’ who accepted responsibility for the ongoing conduct of lawful relations, even as he offered a thoroughgoing critique of occidental law. For the occidentally trained international lawyer, Fitzpatrick's work offers a way to take up that responsibility by reimagining international law through its historical roots as a parochial law of encounter.

In the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the British state enacted a series of restrictive legal measures designed to pacify the Scottish Highlands and crush the military power of the Gael. With the evolution of scholarly work on the British state, these measures are increasingly seen through the prism of state power, with the Scottish Gàidhealtachd cast as the victim of a fiscal-military system determined to impose obedience on its territory and peoples. In analyzing the implementation and enforcement of the laws passed between 1746 and 1752, this article challenges this narrative. By focusing attention on the legal system—particularly with regards enforcement—this article considers the local reception of the laws and the ideological, legal, and bureaucratic limitations to state authority. Yet it also explores how clan chiefs and traditional elites, who were the primary target of the legislation, quickly turned the laws to their own advantage. This analysis challenges the idea of effective state intervention in the Gàidhealtachd after 1746 and instead brings attention to how parliamentary legislation was mobilized by regional actors to local ends in ways that cast a long shadow over the history of the Scottish Highlands.

While private corporations have become increasingly influential in the global economy, a comprehensive legal framework for their activities is missing. Although international and regional legal instruments may govern some aspects of, for instance, international investments and the supply of goods and services, there is no overarching structure for assessing the impact of large-scale private projects. In the absence of such a comprehensive framework, specific rules of private law allow profit-seeking companies to expand their activities on an economic basis, mostly without having to heed social concerns (Pistor, 2019). This is particularly problematic insofar as multinational companies have obtained power to set the rules for their engagement with states, organisations and individuals, for instance in the form of transnational investment contracts. Given the fragmented nature of the legal sphere in which such contracts are elaborated and performed, those who face the harmful consequences of such investments may not be able to participate in decision-making processes. The contracts remain in ‘wild zones’ of globalisation (Fraser, 2014, p. 150), where powerful private companies rule.

When listening to a recently rediscovered home cassette recording of South African musician and activist Hugh Masekela, which was a gift from the late legal theorist Peter Fitzpatrick in 2004, unleashed are a series of recollections and reflections on the distinctiveness and significance of Fitzpatrick's scholarship, especially in relation to the emerging field of critical legal studies in improvisation. This short piece recalls Peter's boundless wisdom, kindness and generosity, and the lasting impact that his thought and texts have had on his students, colleagues and readers the world over.

This is the edited transcript of a seminar on 27 February 2020 organised at Warwick Law School in appreciation of the work of Peter Fitzpatrick. Peter was seriously ill at the time but was desirous of online participation. Sadly, the seminar was the last public performance by Peter prior to his death. A variety of themes in Peter's work are discussed, including his critique of H.L.A. Hart, his notion of ‘slow reading’, the relationship between theory and grounded engagement with people, the idea of community and relationality, the role of the critic, self-criticism, the impossibility of law, decoloniality, occidentalism, mythologies and governmentality, and the significance of narratives.

In this brief tribute, I pursue the long-promised imaginary conversation with Peter Fitzpatrick and engage two themes: the nature of an abyss and the conversion of Karl Marx from a revolutionary thinker to a best exemplar of evolutionary thought. If these themes make some sense, a good way of being with Peter is a further exploration amidst us all.

In this essay, I discuss the legal theorist, Peter Fitzpatrick's, reading of philosopher Michel Foucault. My intent is to show how and why Foucault was important to Fitzpatrick and what this reveals about the latter's practices of reading. I characterise this particular reading in three ways. First, against the disciplinary tendency to assume that Foucault is more useful to lawyers for how he approaches law (as method), Fitzpatrick takes seriously what Foucault has to say about law as a conceptual matter. Fitzpatrick hence reads Foucault as a legal thinker. Second, Fitzpatrick does not restrict himself to the conventional archive of Foucauldian texts that legal scholars routinely consult, but reads more widely and creatively in his search for law. Third, Fitzpatrick reads Foucault open-endedly and generously rather than instrumentally or dismissively – textual ambivalence and contradiction are always, in his hands, sources of creative possibility and insight. This leads into some concluding reflections about Fitzpatrick's practice of critically rereading thinkers – all thinkers, not simply Foucault.

This article investigates the history of coffee culture across three continents during the Fascist ventennio (1922–45.) By using the novel framework of coffee, from the bean in the field to the machine in the caffè, it connects interwar histories that previously have been explored independently. Specifically, it examines the transnational economics of coffee bean trade routes and the colonial imagery of coffee advertising to argue that caffès emerged as key sites for promoting the Fascist imperial projects in East Africa – an architectural and artistic legacy that remains in place today. Ultimately, this trajectory broadens the way that we understand how food and farming became politicised during the Fascist period. By untangling the interwar trade of beans and bodies between Italy, Brazil, and Ethiopia, this article brings to light an untold story of caffeinated imperial aggression and resistance.

This short paper intends to set out a general theory underpinning the process of contractualisation of public international law. In doing so, it explains that this has chiefly been engineered through the establishment of a third sphere of regulation – in addition to the spheres of domestic law(s) and international law – namely transnational law. Both private actors and states operate through this sphere, chiefly because of its flexibility, decreased transaction costs and access to capital (which is scarce in the other two spheres). These benefits of transacting in the transnational-law sphere and the contractualisation of pertinent relationships come at a cost. Such a cost, from the perspective of human rights and parliamentary sovereignty, is explored by reference to two case-studies. The second of these, on the outsourcing of indigenous land rights, is predicated on the research and observations offered by Bhatt (2020).

This paper provides an engagement with, and highlights the depth of, Peter Fitzpatrick's careful examination of myths that grounded modern law and its colonial instances. That grounding is shown to be premised on a concealment of basic contradictions behind fictions of a unified law, even though it only appears through negations of others. Intersecting patterns of marginalisation are shown to be constitutive of modern and colonial law, so it is not surprising that current protests should address a basic exclusionary racism that Fitzpatrick's work signalled. It concludes with some reflections on what his work might mean for three current debates.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Family Planning Association emerged in Britain as one of the largest providers of infertility diagnosis for men and women. In the early years of the century, women were coming to birth control centers seeking cures for their childlessness, well before those centers began officially offering infertility investigation and treatment. What changed by mid-century was the emergence of a determination not only to welcome infertility patients at birth control clinics but to establish the clinics as centers for infertility research and care. Beginning in the late 1930s, eugenicists concerned with the impact of population decline on the social acceptability of birth control formed an alliance with feminist medical professionals determined both to empower women in involuntarily childless marriages to understand and address the causes of their infertility and to shift the paradigm of infertility treatment away from its over-focus on the female body. This political marriage of convenience gave birth to a large-scale movement to diagnose both male and female infertility through the auspices of the Family Planning Association. The organization's infertility program, in turn, spurred the development of infertility as a field of medical research in postwar Britain and encouraged the expansion of National Health Service provision of infertility care.

The contributions to this Special Issue, and the books to which they relate, are premised on the idea that the Rule of Law relates to private relationships. I challenge that idea. By exploring solely theoretical ideas, I argue that the Rule of Law – as it is usually defined – does not relate to private relationships and, in consequence, the nexus necessary to invoke a Rule of Law-solution in the circumstances outlined in the books is absent.