This article examines the Indonesian Constitutional Court’s use of international law in its decisions between 2003 and 2023, when it referred to international legal instruments in approximately 10% of its constitutional review cases. However, it has not clearly explained why or how it uses international law. The article develops a typology of the Court’s use of international law, categorising it into four areas: bolstering domestic law, interpreting domestic law, rejecting international law, and misconstruing international law. The Court primarily uses international law to support or confirm domestic constitutional and statutory provisions, especially when they are similar (or universal, as the Court sometimes observes). However, the Court sometimes uses international law to interpret domestic law, and occasionally, it even appears to misconstrue international law to reach a desired outcome. We conclude that, if anything, the Court practices pragmatic dualism, rather than pragmatic monism, as Palguna and Wardana argued in this Journal in 2024.

Reciprocal Freedom: Private Law and Public Right is an account of how the law can coherently concretize ‘the juridical’, understood as the internal morality specific to legal relationships. The book elucidates the relationship between private law and the state, presenting the Kantian notion of reciprocal freedom as the normative idea implicit in a legal order in which private law occupies a distinctive place. Emphasizing that the juridical—as the morality specific to legal relationships—does not involve an appeal to morality at large, this article responds to critical comments about the correlative structure of corrective justice, the Kantian conception of ownership, and the book’s treatment of distributive justice and of the rule of law. It also outlines the jurisprudentially fundamental difference between the scope of a right and the operation of a right, which lies at the heart of Kant’s distinction between the state of nature and the civil condition.

This study investigates the impact of tourist activities on penguin behaviour on Barrientos Island, an intensively visited site in the Antarctic Peninsula. By simulating tourist presence and activities, we assessed the behavioural responses of two species, Pygoscelis antarcticus and Pygoscelis papua, and their differences with regard to two specific factors: nest position (perimetral/non-perimetral) and nesting site size (large/small). The findings reveal that both species were sensitive to human presence, especially when visitors talked while approaching the nesting sites. We observed greater behavioural differences regarding the position within the colony for gentoo penguins (P. papua). For this species, the size of the nesting sites was also an important factor affecting its response to human presence, with the large nesting sites being less affected. This trend was not shared by chinstrap penguins (P. antarcticus), whose behaviour towards visitors was not affected significantly by either factor. We recommend mitigating tourists’ impact by maintaining their viewing distance at greater than 10 m and by having them move quietly and slowly around these penguin species.

This paper empirically examines the conflict between official and unofficial law, focusing on cases where discrepancies arise between registered titleholders and owners based on customary rights in Japan’s common forests. In Japan, compliance-oriented legalization has progressed, and recent legal reforms have framed common forests with irregular registrations as “abandoned lands with unknown owners.” Interviews with commoners revealed a weakening confidence in their customary rights, leading to a lack of resistance to demands for registration regularization. However, a nationwide survey of forestry cooperatives showed that common forests are often well-managed due to economies of scale. In practice, legal relationships are frequently established with representatives of commoner groups, bypassing the need to trace all heirs of outdated titleholders, thereby mitigating the tragedy of the anti-commons. However, this practice stems from the high costs of complying with official law and does not signify a revival of customary rights. In fact, forestry cooperatives that placed emphasis on registration were confronted with difficulties in managing common forests.

Using serum biomarkers that reflect fruit and vegetable (FV) intake offers a significant advantage over traditional dietary assessments by providing a more objective, accurate measure, meaningfully minimizing recall bias and misreporting common in self-reported dietary data. This study investigated the relationship between these serum biomarkers and mortality risk using data from 19,168 adults aged 30 and older who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 1988 to 2006. Mortality follow-up was determined by linkage to the National Death Index through December 31, 2019, and diet by 24-h recalls. Cox proportional hazards models were employed to calculate hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for mortality outcomes by tertiles of serum biomarkers of FV intake. Higher serum concentrations of total carotenoids were associated with a reduced risk of all-cause (Tertile 3 vs. Tertile 1 HR=0.69, 95% CI=0.61-0.78) and cancer mortality (HR=0.53, 95% CI=0.39-0.71). Greater serum concentrations of individual carotenoids, such as α-carotene, β-carotene, β-cryptoxanthin, lycopene, lutein and zeaxanthin, were also linked to lower risks of all-cause and cancer mortality. Higher serum potassium concentrations showed a trend toward an association with a greater risk of all-cause mortality. No significant associations were found between serum vitamin C concentrations and mortality outcomes in the overall analysis; however, in sex-stratified analyses, higher vitamin C concentrations were associated with reduced risk of all-cause and cancer mortality in women. These findings suggest that specific serum biomarkers of FV intake, particularly carotenoids and vitamin C, may serve as indicators of reduced mortality risk.

We construct efficient topological cobordisms between torus links and large connected sums of trefoil knots. As an application, we show that the signature invariant $\sigma_\omega$ at $\omega=\zeta_6$ takes essentially minimal values on torus links among all concordance homomorphisms with the same normalisation on the trefoil knot.

Christian Connection women – Deborah Peirce, Harriet Livermore, and Rebecca Miller – who penned three of America’s earliest defenses of a woman’s right to preach from 1820 to 1841, conceived of themselves not only as exhorters, evangelists, and preachers but also as interpreters of the Bible. This analysis of their distinctive hermeneutical strategies demonstrates how they interpreted Philippians 4:2–3 as ballast for Christian Connection female laborers to preach and how they exploited the church’s distinction between worship and business meetings to limit Paul’s injunction to silence (1 Corinthians 14:34–35) to business meetings only. It illuminates their distinctive contributions as biblical interpreters by setting their defenses alongside influential commentaries written by men, Sarah Grimké’s defense of women’s preaching (1838), and memoirs authored by early American women preachers. Without the writings of Peirce, Livermore, and Miller, it might be possible to draw an artificial bifurcation in antebellum Christianity between interpretation and experience, that is, between commentaries and Grimké’s Letters, whose primary purpose is to interpret the Bible without explicit reference to experience, and the memoirs of women called to preach, for whom the ascendant attribute of their call was an experience that no text or interpretation could invalidate. These Christian Connection defenses mitigate such a dichotomy.

Politicians’ presentation of self is central to election efforts. For these efforts to be successful, they need voters to receive and believe the messages they communicate. We examine the relationship between politicians’ communications and voters’ perceptions of their ideology. Using the content of politicians’ ideological presentation of self through social media communications, we create a measure of messaging ideology for all congressional candidates between 2018 and 2022 and all congressional officeholders between 2012 and 2022 along with voter perceptions of candidate ideology during the same time period. Using these measures, our work shows voters’ perceptions of candidate ideology are strongly related to messaging, even after controlling for incumbent voting behavior. We also examine how the relationship between politician messaging and voter perceptions changes relative to other information about the politician and in different electoral contexts. On the whole, voters’ perceptions of candidate ideology are strongly correlated with politician communications.

The French poet Henri Chopin (1922–2008) was one of a generation of experimental young artists around 1955 who recognised new possibilities for innovation in the realm of expanded sonic assemblage that is at once viscerally embodied and highly mediated. The catalyst: the newfound availability and affordability of the portable reel-to-reel tape recorder. This article examines the relation between Chopin’s recorded ‘audiopoems’, which were built up over time by means of distortion, layering and looping, and the artist’s unusual approach to performing live with these recorded compositions. Through strategies of aural assemblage, including physically tampering with the tape, randomly cutting and splicing the reels, and accentuating feedback, Chopin circulated the voice in new ways, both intimate and collective. This article considers how he experimented with live performance as mediation par excellence, harmoniously juxtaposing live improvisation with the preceding mediation of sound recording technology, to create a ‘double extension’ that generated feedback as well as improvisatory spaces of encounter. This article examines several projects – both realised and speculative – as well as archival accounts of performances in the 1960s and 1970s to reflect on Chopin’s unwavering commitment to the very human scale, individual and collective, of mediated expression.

Marriage rates in Korea have been declining at an unprecedented pace in the recent two decades. Drawing on the classical economic theory of marriage as a rational choice, we compute local aggregate economic values of prime-age working men and women to examine the relationship between the relative values of men and marriage rates. The relative values of men fell dramatically by 40% during this period, undermining the economic justification of marriage under unequal allocation of housework. The two-way fixed effects estimation using region-year transitory variations shows that a 1% decrease in the relative values of men was associated with a 0.088% decrease in marriage rates. To explain the precipitous convergence of economic values between the two genders, we decompose the changes in the relative values into four components – (gender-neutral) structural changes, (gender-specific) industrial segregation, (gender-neutral) wage growth, and (gender-specific) wage gaps within industries – to measure their contributions to secular marriage decline. In the 2000s, both the alleviated industrial segregation and the structural changes toward industries with higher female proportions played a major role. On the other hand, the impact of reduced gender wage gaps within industries also became prominent in the 2010s.