Though the Polish rule of law crisis has been on the scholarly agenda since the Law and Justice Party (PiS) took power in 2015, the individual agents of legal disruption within the judiciary have been largely off the radar. This intervention aims to fill this gap. This article analyses the legal mobilisation practices of the Supreme Court (SC) judges appointed by the PiS party in a court-packing manner after 2017. It is argued that this is a specific type of legal mobilisation; because it is conducted from within the legal system by judges, it aims to challenge doctrinal views strategically and to legitimise the status of unlawfully elected judges, which consequently destabilises the legal system. Because the legal tools to solve the conflict appear to have been exhausted, new judges engage in public discourse to convince citizens that they have a right to sit on the bench. In the first part of this paper, I critically analyse this public discourse in order to explain the framing of the rule of law crisis. The analysis of this discourse is drawn from 106 texts produced by new SC judges between 2017 and 2023. It is argued that although the ‘populist’ group of SC judges is internally differentiated and does not exhibit clear ideological linkage with the PiS party, it strategically produces certain legal narratives in which their appointments and judicial practices at the SC conform to the Constitution and to relevant statutes and, as such, are legitimate in legal terms. The new judges’ narratives are based on four populist dichotomies that distinguish them from old judges (legitimacy–lack of legitimacy, autonomy–political dependence, formal rule of law–legal anarchy and accountability–corporatism). In the second part, the article proceeds to analyse selected case law of the Supreme Court to explore whether and how court-packing makes it more responsive to the legal mobilisation of the conservative Christian organisation Ordo Iuris (OI) and helps the governing party maintain its power. It is argued that the judicial mobilisation inside the packed Supreme Court is mostly of a discursive nature, as there is limited evidence that newly appointed judges side ideologically with the government and right-wing organisations in recent case law.

The day has arrived that genetic tests for educational outcomes are available to the public. Today parents and students alike can send off a sample of blood or saliva and receive a ‘genetic report’ for a range of characteristics relevant to education, including intelligence, math ability, reading ability, and educational attainment. DTC availability is compounded by a growing “precision education” initiative, which proposes the application of DNA tests in schools to tailor educational curricula to children’s genomic profiles. Here I argue that these happenings are a strong signal of the geneticization of education; the process by which educational abilities and outcomes come to be examined, understood, explained, and treated as primarily genetic characteristics. I clarify what it means to geneticize education, highlight the nature and limitations of the underlying science, explore both real and potential downstream bioethical implications, and make proposals for mitigating negative impacts.

This article examines the complex relationship between Sufism, secularity, and psychiatry through Refik Halid Karay’s 1956 novel, Kadınlar Tekkesi (Women’s Lodge). The article argues that Kadınlar Tekkesi recontextualizes Sufism by medicalizing and pathologizing it through psychiatry and psychopathology. This analysis draws upon discourse analysis and Michel Foucault’s exploration of abnormality and power dynamics. The article contends that this approach diverges from previous anti-Sufi agendas of Turkish novels, which were primarily motivated by religious and moralistic criticisms. The article argues that the application of psychiatric terminology to Sufism suggests a shift in Turkish secularism’s attitude toward Sufism, which transitions from dismissing Sufism as obsolete to engaging with it systematically through scientific study. Informed by modern scientific rationality, this shift signifies a redefined interaction between knowledge and power and the gendered aspects of the medicalization process. The article underscores that interactions between the discourses of secularism, Sufism, and psychopathology suggest a new regime of truth based on secular and scientific thought, while implicitly supported by orthodox Islamic principles.

Some recent work on populist conservative forces engaged in legal mobilization in Europe highlights the involvement of US-based conservative legal advocacy organizations and their European affiliates. These groups are linked to efforts to resist the integration of Europe and the power of the European courts to implement the projects of liberal, left-leaning pro-EU social forces. Little attention thus far has focused on the lawyers active in these advocacy groups, their ties to the American conservative legal movement and the transnational lawyer networks of which they are a part. This essay sketches an agenda for future research on the composition, operations, strategies and discourse of this complex constellation of conservative lawyers and their organizations.

The toolbox for resisting illiberalism is quite diverse. It includes high-level diplomatic negotiations concerning sanctions to enforce democracy and citizens’ mobilisation for local causes. This article focuses on strategic litigation as legal mobilisation, relying on the language of rights and the rule of law and addressing courts as defenders of liberal democracy. Such mobilisation leads to litigation before national and European courts concerning issues such as media freedom, judicial independence, minority rights or the rights of migrants. In order to be authoritative, however, courts need support from political institutions at national and EU levels from the transnational judicial community and from civil society. The embeddedness in structured civil causes and organisations seems particularly relevant in the context of strategic litigation. This article aims to map out particular factors in the EU legal and institutional systems that directly affect the prospects of strategic litigation against illiberal reforms using EU law.

On the one hand, the EU legal system does not provide direct access to the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU). The multilevel system of judicial protection in the EU means that litigation aimed at resisting illiberalism mostly needs to start before national courts, making it vulnerable to political capture of national judiciary. On the other hand, the EU law system is based on the purposive constitutional framework of the Treaties. The tendency to follow a teleological interpretation of the CJEU makes it a promising ground for advocating for new interpretations of the law in light of a changing social context. Finally, EU law is a system with a particular legal culture and a field of experts who are well-versed in applying that culture. This field does not directly overlap with the specialised lawyers who often initiate strategic litigation; who tend to be experts in the fields of migration, transparency or the environment; and who do not have a broader understanding of EU law and its integration logic.

Medical ethics education is crucial for medical students and trainees, helping to shape attitudes, beliefs, values, and professional identities. Exploration of ethical dilemmas and approaches to resolving them provides a broader understanding of the social and cultural contexts in which medicine is practiced, as well as the ethical implications of medical decisions, fostering critical thinking and self-reflection skills imperative to providing patient-centered care. However, exposure to medical ethics topics and their clinical applications can be limited by curricular constraints and the availability of institutional resources and expertise. Podcasts, among other Free Open Access Medical Education (FOAMed) resources, are a novel educational tool that offers particular advantages for self-directed learning, a process by which learners engage in asynchronous educational opportunities outside of traditional academic or clinical settings. Podcasts can be readily distributed to wide audiences and played at any time, reducing barriers to access and offering a level of flexibility that is not possible with traditional forms of education and is well-suited to busy schedules. Podcasts can also use real voices and storytelling to make the content memorable and eminently human. This paper describes the development, production process, and impact of Core IM’s “At the Bedside,” a podcast focusing on issues in medical ethics and the medical humanities, intending to supplement standard bioethics curricula in an accessible, relevant, and engaging way. The authors advocate for broad incorporation of podcasts into medical ethics education.

Many bioethicists have recently shifted from using “physician-assisted suicide” (PAS) to “medical aid-in-dying” (MAID) to refer to the act of voluntarily hastening one’s death with the assistance of a medical provider. This shift was made to obscure the practice’s connection to “suicide.” However, as the charge of “suicide” is fundamental to arguments against the practice, “MAID” can only be used by its proponents. The result has been the fragmentation of the bioethical debate. By highlighting the role of human agency—as opposed to natural processes—in causing death, the term “PAS” makes it easier both to perceive potential risks to vulnerable populations and to affirm suicide as a potentially autonomous choice. As such, “PAS” thus more transparently expresses the arguments of both supporters and opponents of the “right to die,” while avoiding the unnecessary stigmatization of suicide and suicidal people which is a result of the usage of “MAID.”

French is a typical verb-framed language, in which manner verbs cannot freely combine with result-denoting constituents in a single VP. Drawing on experimentally elicited production data on Hexagonal French, this study examines how the syntactic (in)flexibility of manner-of-creation verbs influences the lexicalization of the event result. As for result lexicalization within the VP headed by the manner verb, the study explores the occurrence of effected objects and resultative PPs. Thus, it addresses the availability of the material/product alternation (sculpter une poupée à partir du bois/sculpter le bois en (une) poupée) as a type of argument alternation, whose existence has been questioned for the Romance languages. Furthermore, it is explored how the verbs’ syntactic flexibility influences whether manner and result are lexicalized within a single VP at all or distributed onto different VPs. The results show that the material/product alternation does occur, but that only a limited set of verbs has the syntactic flexibility required for it. Additionally, it is shown that syntactic flexibility favors a denser packaging of conceptual components, since with verbs that admit an effected object, the result is realized more often in the VP than with verbs that do not.

In this article we explore the practical conditions of ritual practices of Hui and Uyghur Muslims in China. Ceaseless conflicts among different religious ideas and elements exist, but they are integrated into religious pluralism, which meets the needs of Muslims' daily practices. Furthermore, we probe the reasons for the resulting religious harmony through investigating the historical process of the formation of religious pluralism, and showing present ritual performances in which there is a hierarchically built ritual structure functioning to make religious integration possible, though different opinions regarding diverse religious elements occur elsewhere among Hui and Uyghur Muslims. Finally, the discussion supports the related assertion that rituals can be reliable and effective ways of understanding the sociological and psychological functions of religions, or religious beliefs, and other related socio-cultural realities.