This introduction outlines a comprehensive study of the U.S. Constitution’s structure, marking its 237th year as the oldest modern constitution. It aims to equip readers – from law students to everyday Americans – with tools to understand its framework of representation, separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, and the Bill of Rights, addressing enduring questions like the legitimacy of secession, the scope of national powers, presidential authority in foreign affairs and war, judicial review’s origins, and Congress’s taxing and spending powers. The book challenges myths, such as the existence of a “general welfare clause,” and critiques both originalist and living constitutionalist views, arguing, for instance, that enumeration limited executive, not just national, power, and that functionalism fuels the imperial presidency. Organized into seven parts and eighteen chapters, the book explores the Constitution’s compound republic, the distribution of legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and federal-state dynamics. By engaging recent scholarship, it seeks to clarify the Constitution’s original design while advocating its continued relevance today.

Pakistan is one of the few countries worldwide whose Constitution does not explicitly address the environment. The higher courts have filled the vacuum by turning to the constitutional right to dignity, which the Constitution says is ‘inviolable’, as the basis for improving environmental outcomes to water, sanitation, and a stable climate, to name a few. This paper hazards an explanation as to the judicial reasoning behind this development. It posits that Pakistan takes the idea of dignity under law so seriously as to embrace environmental matters. In recent years, the courts have increasingly recognised the links between environmental protection and the enjoyment of human rights, including in particular, the human right to dignity. This article maintains that this is a positive development. As a conceptual matter, attention to human dignity foregrounds the impacts on human beings of environmental decisions, including decisions that contribute towards addressing climate change issues. It requires courts to address the ways in which those decisions diminish the ability of people to manage their own lives, often in ways that disproportionately affect those who are already the most vulnerable and marginalised.

In the absence of a targeted legal framework, the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary’s ‘Guidance for Judicial Office Holders’ remain the primary source of regulatory guidance determining how artificial intelligence (AI) ought to be appropriately used by the judiciary in the United Kingdom. This chapter critically reflects upon the content and effectiveness of these guidelines, ultimately concluding that more extensive – and legally binding – regulatory action is needed to ensure accurate and accountable judicial decision-making in the era of AI. The chapter first surveys general attitudes towards AI within the UK judiciary, before engaging directly with the technical foundations of AI and examples of its usage in administrative and judicial decision-making in the UK. It concludes with an analysis of the guidelines, following discussion of several key legal and constitutional issues that may arise where AI is deployed in judicial settings. Throughout this contribution, we caution that the regular use of AI to make decisions does not simply change the process of discrete procedures, but rather, challenge existing structures within the legal and political system at a broader level.

Religious codes possess social control effects that can potentially change the behaviour of their adherents towards becoming pro-environment. In the case of Islam, Muslim-majority states since the time of the Prophet Muhammad have implemented Islamic environmental law to this effect. Unfortunately, accounts of its implementation today in the legal literature are scant, thereby requiring fresh insights that consider changes in the application of Islamic law in modern states. Generally, this article observes that the implementation of Islamic environmental law today takes two forms: first, implementation through constitutions; and, second, implementation through non-binding religio-legal instruments. Focusing on the second form, application in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia is analysed and evaluated. In these three Southeast Asian states non-binding religious rulings (fatwa) and mosque sermons (khutbah) have been used to implement Islamic environmental law. There are two key factors which contribute to ensuring that these non-binding instruments achieve their social control objectives: first, local legal and political contexts shaped by religion-state relations that help their implementation and legitimation; and, second, the pursuit of post-fatwa/khutbah follow-up action by religious authorities to put Islamic environmental law into actual practice.

Advances in content analysis present significant opportunities for social scientists who develop and analyze concepts. This chapter introduces some basic approaches for formalizing and sharing conceptual frameworks (i.e., sets of terms, classes, properties, etc.) and demonstrates some dividends of such formalization for both scholars and their audiences in the field of comparative law. Specifically, the chapter describes an experiment in systematizing the concepts that represent ideas in national constitutions using a set of methods proposed for modern web design. In general, these machine-friendly approaches to concepts – which may be summarized as “digital semantics” – represent a natural extension of traditional concept analysis, much of which is focused on coordinating vocabulary among scholars. Since “concepts about concepts” can themselves be opaque, a glossary with key terms is appended.

The first chapter presents the central puzzle in the emerging jurisprudence about government pension benefits that this book seeks to solve. It explains how public sector pensions face persistent demographic upheaval and financial fragility amid a turbulent political context. With limited choices in how to shore up failing pension plans, state and local governments have been enacting legislation to trim pension benefits. Current and former government employees have challenged such reforms in state and federal courts across the United States. Focusing on the extent that pension benefits are contractual obligations protected under state and U.S. Contract Clauses as well as state Pension Clauses, this book furnishes a timely analytical lens for comprehending these contemporary constitutional controversies.

The third chapter details the development of Contract Clause doctrine throughout the United States. It surveys ten years of litigation in state and federal courts, organizing the decisions by the type of reform and their resolution. Challenged reform measures include increasing employee contribution rates, reducing or freezing cost of living allowances, eliminating pension spiking, changing benefit formulas and actuarial factors, redefining the earnable compensation criterion, imposing partial forfeiture of benefits upon conviction, and reducing or eliminating health care benefits. Adding an inclusive account of current court practice to the existing literature, the analysis tests the boundaries of government power to modify pension plans within multiple legal systems. Tracking cases across jurisdictions affords a unique window into contract principles and their application. Judicial lawmaking is not orderly. Decisional rules often lack the philosophical foundation necessary to achieve their purposes or accommodate existing social objectives. The relevant authorities are set out in an accessible way that makes sense of a rapidly developing area of law. Moreover, because most cases turn on the creation of a contractual obligation—an issue that is judicially determined—it provides context for an intensive evidentiary exploration of the contract criterion in subsequent chapters.

The sixth chapter explores changing contract coverage. Decisions determining the validity of public pension reforms under state and U.S. Contract Clauses depend on the contract condition. Over time, it might be expected that repeat resolutions would yield clarity and consistency on one or more contractual issues. But judicial opinions have proven far from predictable. The uncertainty is no doubt complicated by the fact that determinations about contracts cut across state courts and state laws. To help unify the field, this chapter maps pension contract along various criteria and uses California’s influential and controversial government pension law as a framework to evaluate conflicting approaches.

The eighth chapter concludes that synthesizing recent judicial opinions spanning the United States promotes public pension reform. A qualitative inquiry provides a fresh vantage point to guide policymakers and better enable informed decisions in the ongoing debate over retirement. Streamlining a complex array of constitutional contract issues in the context of pension reform litigation also supports legal practice by widening the perspective of judges, as well as the lawyers who argue before them. It similarly influences the theory of constitutional law protecting public pensions contracts by reflecting on their conceptual structure, doctrinal expression, and normative underpinnings. Ultimately, this book aims to enrich our larger social understanding of what the Contract Clause means, and thereby what retirement security signifies, in an ongoing age of austerity.

The seventh chapter arrives at a unified theory of public pension contracts that is fair to all stakeholders: governments, their employees, and the public. Scholars have concentrated on when a contract exists as central to understanding what changes will survive constitutional contests. Conventional wisdom commands that the earlier a contract is formed, such as upon employment, the less likely modifications can be made. Lawmakers have followed this assumption, leaving pension systems in peril by primarily restricting reforms to new hires. However, courts are stretching the contract concept to move beyond existing case law constraints that set the time of formation. The effect of an enlargement of the contractual commitment is counterintuitive: courts can recognize a pension contract but decide that the reform is not within its terms or, even so, that the terms are changeable. The latter outlook can be conceived as a question of contract duration: career or daily. Specifically, are pension benefits secured by a single career-long contract or a series of contracts earned each day through performance? Judges are only beginning to realize the choice and explain their conclusions. This chapter reframes pension contracts by arguing in favor of periodic agreements—a view it calls “contract minimalism.”

The second chapter analyzes the government pension question and the role of adjusting benefits as an important part of the answer. It charts constitutional constraints to public pension reform under state and U.S. Contract Clauses from unprotected gratuities to protected contracts, highlighting the concept of contract as an essential ingredient to constitutional protection. It cautions, however, that the contract element is in flux given the deluge of decisions challenging benefit reductions and emphasizes key challenges to examining contractual obstacles to public pension reform.

The fifth chapter continues the excavation and evaluation of evidence in the making of a government pension contract by describing the circumstances under which reforms have proven effective against constitutional contention. It probes the power of reservation clauses, the credence of contemporary commentary like employee handbooks, the impact of persuasive authority, and the influence of the Supreme Court of the United States. It identifies which forms of proof have been the most effective and why, along with what matters have been missed. In assessing the evidence for and against the creation of a contract, this chapter prioritizes sources, comments on their respective import, and otherwise argues for courts to undertake an expansive inquiry to determine whether government pension benefits receive contract protection.

Proposals for deploying monetary policy to fight climate change and reduce inequality rely on the use of the nation state’s monetary authority to allocate capital to different parts of the economy. Against those proposals stands the publicly stated commitments of central bankers to avoid ‘allocating credit’ by implementing ‘market-neutral’ policies. A review of the financial empirics of central banks’ market operations shows a historically consistent pattern of using monetary authority to allocate debt and equity capital to different sectors of the economy at critical moments. Legal frameworks impose no effective constraints on that state-guidance of investment and, when necessary, the law of central banking actively facilitates capital allocation in ways that allow policymakers to fight deflation, provide emergency fiscal support, and rescue crisis-stricken parts of the financial sector. Against those empirics, commitments to avoid capital allocation appear as communication strategies rather than descriptions of the reality of central bank operations. Given the position of central banks as statutory public agencies, this creates various types of constitutional problems, notably concerning the protection of liberal property rights from government interference. Understanding these legal, market, and political dynamics provides a principled basis to debate reform proposals regarding the constitutional status and institutional functions of central banks in market economies responding to climate change and destructive inequality.