The relationship between the United Nations Security Council and the International Criminal Court reflects a central unresolved tension in international law. Under Articles 13(b) and 16 of the Rome Statute, the Council may trigger ICC jurisdiction over non-States Parties and suspend investigations, yet the Statute provides no legal criteria governing the exercise of these powers. This article argues that this absence is structural rather than accidental, producing asymmetry in accountability even where the Council does not act, but merely retains the option to act. The argument is developed through four cases: Darfur, Syria, and Ukraine, which illustrate referral, veto, and procedural reform, and Kenya, which demonstrates the accountability effects of the latent possibility of Article 16 intervention. Together, they show that the deficit is systemic, not episodic. The article proposes two reforms: an ICJ advisory opinion clarifying interpretive standards of necessity and good faith, and ICC reasoned opinions on Article 16 compliance before deferral is applied. Both aim to introduce legal reasoning into an area governed by political discretion, without altering the Council’s formal authority.
This paper examines how political authority can reconcile the demands of sovereign unity with the normative significance of social associations. Existing accounts of sovereignty often face a dilemma: theories emphasizing centralized authority risk reducing social institutions to extensions of the state, while theories emphasizing individual autonomy struggle to explain the authority of collective institutions that mediate between individuals and political power. Drawing on Samuel Pufendorf’s political philosophy, this paper develops the concept of conditioned absolutism as a model of embedded sovereignty. I argue that sovereignty must remain absolute in the sense that political communities require a final and unified authority over public coercion, but it is conditioned by the associative structures and moral relations that precede and justify political authority. Associations possess genuine normative significance because they embody forms of social cooperation, yet their autonomy remains conditional rather than unlimited. By reconstructing the relationship between socialitas, personae morales, and imperium, this paper shows how Pufendorf provides a conceptual framework that avoids both sovereign absorption and individualist reduction, offering new resources for contemporary debates on institutional authority and civil society.
A deceased person leaves not only tangible and intangible possessions, such as intellectual property like patents or copyrights, but also digital footprints. Search history, email, social media posts, etc., may lead to data leaks or unauthorised access by others, thereby infringing the deceased person’s right to privacy. This research aims to extend the scope of a data privacy law to include deceased persons exercising the Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF). While the RTBF for the deceased persons have gained recognition in various jurisdictions, its regulation remains amorphous in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, as it is part of the right to privacy, which is considered a personal right. This right is granted to individuals from birth until their death and does not extend after that. Even if the GCC countries’ data privacy laws include deceased persons and regulate the RTBF, emerging digital technologies, such as AI-generated content and blockchain, and the inconsistent privacy policies of tech companies, have intensified debates surrounding the RTBF for the deceased, whose digital footprints persist indefinitely. This paper examines the regulation of RTBF for deceased persons in GCC countries through an integrated framework that encompasses technological challenges, such as the permanence of deceased persons’ data and the inconsistency of tech companies’ privacy policies. The evaluation of existing GCC data protection laws to identify gaps and inconsistencies in the application of the deceased persons’ RTBF, particularly in light of advanced technology. By adopting a doctrinal and comparative approach, this study highlights the need for a coherent, unified data privacy regulatory framework across GCC countries that safeguards the dignity of deceased persons, their right to privacy and the sanctity of reputation within the GCC context.
The application of ideology as a concept has long been a feature of the Marxist analysis of law. Marxist scholars have used ideology to investigate the various ways law features as a part of capitalism’s epiphenomenal superstructure which reproduces its economic base. In the years following globalisation’s rabid expansion of capitalist social relations across time and space, this formulation of both ideology and law has grown increasingly obsolete in capturing the various ways in which concept, practice, time and power relations overlap to reproduce our material world. This paper contributes to the reformulation of ideology and (international) law by offering an international legal theory of reification. In Marx’s words, reification describes how social relations between people take on ‘the fantastic form of a relation between things.’ By formulating an international legal theory of reification, this paper theorises ideology not as a definable concept or thing, but as a process. The ideological process occurs as a dialectical relationship between the material practices of actors and their conceptualisation of these practices under the hegemonic power relations of a given time and space. Specific to the practice of international law, the ideological process reifies the exploitative social relations found in globalised capitalism. The paper provides an example of the ideological process by examining the reification of ‘development’ as it is found in the practice and conceptualisation of international investment law.
Player data has become a vital element of the modern sports industry, serving medical, commercial, and entertainment purposes. Sports organisations and businesses increasingly treat such data as a valuable economic asset, similar to athletes’ image rights, as highlighted in the Project Red Card case. Player data is used to improve fan engagement and enable objective performance analysis, often through technological devices and medical interventions that collect biometric and health-related information directly from athletes. Despite the significant commercial and sporting benefits derived from this data, athletes frequently receive neither fair compensation nor sufficient privacy protection. This raises important legal concerns regarding the ownership, control, and protection of player data, particularly against unlawful or non-consensual use by sports organisations and businesses. The article therefore examines how lawfulness and transparency can be ensured in the handling of player data within the sports ecosystem. Its primary aim is to explore the application of data protection law, especially the EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR), by proposing a reclassification of player data through the analysis of academic literature, sporting regulations and documents, arbitral awards rendered by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), and judgments delivered by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) concerning sports-related data. Through this approach, the research seeks to prevent the exploitation of athletes’ data, strengthen privacy protections, and promote greater fairness and accountability across the sports industry.
This paper argues that Jean Bodin’s account of property provides a useful framework for understanding environmental commons. Against traditions that treat property as a prepolitical and individual right, Bodin conceives ownership as a politically constituted and relational institution embedded within the commonwealth. On this view, property, sovereignty, and the common good are intrinsically connected. The paper first reconstructs Bodin’s account of property and highlights its distinctive features in contrast to liberal theories of ownership. It then argues that both private-property and commons-based approaches face conceptual limitations in addressing environmental goods. Building on Bodin’s account, the paper develops a framework for environmental commons based on three interconnected dimensions: individual use rights, collective ecological interests, and political stewardship. The contribution of the paper is to show that environmental stewardship can be understood as arising from the political foundations of property itself rather than as an external restriction imposed upon ownership. While Bodin does not offer a theory of environmental governance, his conception of property provides important conceptual resources for rethinking the relationship between ownership, collective welfare, and ecological responsibility.
This article examines the conditions under which artificial intelligence can be integrated into legal processes without displacing the normative structure on which legal decision-making depends. Its central claim is that the main difficulty raised by AI in law is not primarily technical but theoretical. It concerns the location of legal normativity and the process through which legal norms are produced from legal texts in relation to social reality. The article argues that Friedrich Müller’s Structuring Theory of Law provides an especially fruitful framework for addressing this difficulty because it distinguishes between the normtext, the normative programme, the normative sphere, and the concretisation process through which a legal norm is produced. On that basis, the article proceeds in four steps. First, it revisits the distinction between vagueness and open texture in legal language, arguing that large language models can sometimes mitigate lexical instability but cannot resolve the open texture that arises from the relation between legal language and social reality. Second, it clarifies the principal concepts of the Structuring Theory for readers unfamiliar with that tradition. Third, it develops a typology of legal automation consisting of automation of access, automation of subsumption workflows, and automation of authoritative decisions. Fourth, it analyses the way AI systems increasingly shape the social reality that legal actors subsequently encounter as the normative sphere of legal norms. The conclusion is not that law must reject automation, but that the compatibility of automation with law depends on the stage of concretisation at which it intervenes and on whether accountability, contestability, revisability, and institutional attribution are preserved.
This article critically examines whether access to legal services and family law justice for victims of domestic abuse (DA) in England and Wales can meaningfully be described as “existent” in the post-Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) landscape. It argues that, despite the introduction of the domestic abuse gateway to legal aid, access to legal services remains significantly constrained in practice. While subsequent reforms have removed some of the most restrictive procedural barriers, these changes have not addressed the deeper structural issues that continue to limit meaningful access.This article advances two interrelated claims. Firstly, that access to legal services for DA victims largely exists as a commodity for those with the financial means to afford it. For the remainder, they must navigate a series of state-prescribed bureaucratic hurdles, often at a time of extreme personal crisis. While the gateway was intended to direct resources to those most in need, in practice it continues to function as a restrictive filter rather than a genuine route to justice.Secondly, it argues that even where legal representation is secured, family law justice is far from guaranteed. Drawing on case law, government reports, and empirical research, this article demonstrates how adversarial court processes, inconsistent procedural safeguards, and a persistent failure to properly understand domestic abuse contribute to re-traumatisation and, in some cases, unsafe outcomes. Central to this is the continued influence of misogynistic and gender-biased attitudes within the judiciary, including the minimisation of abuse and the prioritisation of parental contact over victim safety.While recent reforms, including the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 and the introduction of Pathfinder courts, represent important progress, their impact remains uneven and highly dependent on judicial attitudes and effective implementation.Ultimately, this article argues that incremental legislative reform is insufficient. Without meaningful cultural change, improved judicial understanding, and greater accountability within the family justice system, access to legal services and family law justice for domestic abuse victims will remain fundamentally constrained.
As the international community grapples with the complex challenges posed by climate change and its implications on transboundary agreements, questions surrounding the modification and termination of treaties gain importance. This article investigates the complexities surrounding the application of Article 62 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, 1969 — which permits withdrawal from a treaty due to “unforeseen fundamental changes of circumstances”— in the context of the Indus Waters Treaty, 1960. Existing literature on Article 62 is influenced by the Gabčíkovo–Nagymaros decision, which dismisses climate change as a valid ground for terminating a treaty. This is by virtue of climate change not being “unforeseen” and leads to potential limitations in addressing the dynamic challenges faced by treaties. This article highlights the lacunae in existing scholarship. We argue that the stringency in the determination of “unforeseen” as set by the International Court of Justice in the Gabčíkovo–Nagymaros decision significantly limits the practical application of Article 62; the judgment must be read in the context in which it was made; and propose a more attainable threshold of unforeseeability. We argue that a lower, more practicable threshold is a pragmatic alternative to the high threshold, which makes Article 62 redundant as it currently stands. In doing so, we also address concerns this standard may raise regarding treaty stability. Subsequently, we apply this lower threshold to the Indus Waters Treaty. We argue that changes to the Indus Basin’s hydrological landscape, attributed to factors like glacial melt and changing precipitation patterns, necessitate a re-evaluation of the long-term interstate water-sharing agreement. In doing so, we address additional concerns, such as India’s duties as an upper-riparian state under customary international law. The implications of this article extend beyond the legal field: they highlight the urgency of adapting international agreements to the evolving realities of climate change.
In this editorial introduction the overall theme of the special issue is introduced. The emergence of elements of a specific form of authoritarian lawlessness, and the ‘End of Law’ that seems to be part and parcel of it, are introduced with the aid of W.G. Sebald’s (semi-)autobiographical Vertigo, which was published in the year just before the turn of this century. It is very hard to put a finger on what exactly is going on in this vertiginous century of ours. Where Academia often fails though, novelists might be better placed to make sense of it all, as the five contributions to this issue make serious attempts to demonstrate.
Contemporary Western societies are marked by a striking paradox: unprecedented material comfort coexists with rising depression, social alienation, and the commodification of intimacy. This paper examines how Michel Houellebecq’s fiction captures and interrogates these late-modern tensions. His novels offer a sharp literary diagnosis of contemporary Western life, depicting societies shaped by exhaustion, fragmentation, and a pervasive loss of meaning, in which individuals struggle to sustain stable identities, relationships, and purposes. Drawing on philosophical, sociological, and anthropological theories of decline, the paper situates Houellebecq’s work within broader debates on civilizational fatigue, institutional weakening, and emotional and symbolic depletion. It argues that Houellebecq’s fiction resonates strongly with contemporary social and socio-economic conditions in Western societies. By linking his literary worlds to theories of civilizational decline and metaphysical fatigue, the analysis shows how Houellebecq renders the lived consequences of late modernity visible and concrete.
To be female in today’s world is to know that one belongs to the near-50 https://www.ohchr.org/en/treaty-bodies/cedaw ) to the #Metoo movement (2. https://metoomvmt.org/ ), women continue to be subject to femicide, domestic violence, discrimination, misogyny and rape – as a weapon of war and of peace. Domestic violence around the world continues to increase, social media and the dark web reveals ever more violent forms of abuse and the case of Dobbs v Jackson (2022) (3. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022)) reverberates throughout the Western world as a further indication that ‘civilisation’ and the rights gained under its laws are as easily overturned as the dark dawn in The Handmaid’s Tale(Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Random House, 1985). In The Vegetarian (The Vegetarian, Han Kang, Changbi Publishers, South Korea (2007); Portobello Books (now Granta Publications) London, UK (2015))—the 2024 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Han Kang reflects the surreal burden this environment imposes upon the female psyche as she depicts a woman whose dream leads her to renounce not only meat eating as symbol of violence, but over time, her domestic identity, family identity, social identity, the wearing of clothes and eventually, all food as she aligns more and more with plants and trees in their quest for sunlight. Rich in psychoanalytic meaning, the symbolism of the text—the dream, the body as a site of subjectivity, sexuality, struggle, anorexia, the withdrawal from social and cultural norms (norms which constrain men too) the implicit and explicit violence abuse and voyeurism towards women, the body as contested site and sign in a world where only breasts can be trusted as ‘hand, foot, tongue, gaze, all weapons from which nothing is safe’ (The Vegetarian, 2018: 33)—is a rebuke to the failure of the global order, of humankind itself: as Luce Irigaray suggested many years ago, ‘In the absence of such an order, many people are nowadays looking for an identity-space other than the human one’ (Je, Tu, Nous, 1993i: 83).
The work of Erich Fromm has provided valuable insights into why people engage in violent, aggressive, and destructive behaviour. Fromm is known for his analysis of sadism, masochism, conformity and authoritarianism and he was particularly interested in how people maintain a strong sense of security and belonging. In Escape from Freedom ([1941] 1969), he examined the psychological strategies people employ to help alleviate feelings of existential uncertainty and ontological insecurity. These include authoritarianism (involving a sacrifice of freedom and personal autonomy), destructiveness (a defence that aims to eliminate and control), and automaton conformity (the uncritical internalisation of prevailing norms, values, desires, and expectations). Fromm posits that all escape mechanisms are rooted in the need to escape feelings of isolation, self-doubt, uncertainty, and powerlessness. This article specifically focuses on his work on destructiveness by examining Haruki Murakami’s ([1993] 2003a) mysterious story Barn Burning, where one of the protagonists confesses his enjoyment of secretly burning down barns. The overall aim of the article is to explore Fromm’s notion that destructiveness results from a suppressed and unlived life.
The 21st century is rapidly emerging as an era of entropy, of multi-polar power struggles, of concurrent crises the causes of which are little understood, and of catastrophic vulnerability to phenomena such as climate change and artificial intelligence. This is the world into which war correspondent James Brabazon throws Major Max McLean, a UK Special Forces operator, in his 2018 novel, The Break Line. McLean is a hardened veteran of what criminologist Vincenzo Ruggiero (2019) calls the chaotic murder of war, but his mission takes an unexpected turn when Brabazon switches genre from action adventure to supernatural thriller at the narrative’s crisis. This article situates the novel in the philosophical approach to answering the question of moral impact of literature, as proposed by Richard Rorty (1978, 1989) and Iris Murdoch (1999, 2014). Rorty argues that literature expresses the perspective of the victims of cruelty, which is why it has a great importance for helping to eliminate cruelty and improve solidarity in society. Murdoch emphasises the value of individual moral development facilitated by literature’s potential to support ‘unselfing’, i.e. detachment from one’s own personal feelings or interests. In keeping with Rorty and Murdoch, we argue that The Break Line is an exemplary exercise in psychological and political sensemaking, staging the epistemic and ethical challenges of contemporary authoritarian lawlessness in terms of Jacques Lacan’s (1949, 1955, 1973) register theory, specifically the collapse of the Symbolic in the face of pressure from the Real and a retreat to the Imaginary.
This article examines the consequences of adaptation as the primary response to social, systemic, and moral crisis. Utilising Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road as a point of analytical departure and return throughout, we develop the idea of humans as ‘adaptation machines’ and situate this within the contextual chaos and brutality of 21st century governance. The article first focuses on individual and interpersonal responses to crisis. Humans exhibit incredible adaptive capacities. Yet when adaptation is asserted or assumed as an ethical end-in-itself, it invites a series of questions. What is the political status of adaptability? How does the status of adaptability change under conditions of authoritarian lawlessness? Can adaptation exacerbate states of social and moral decay? Should we be able to adapt to anything? In grappling with these questions and aided by the novel, we develop a second line of interpretation concerning human adaptation and adaptability as a moral ideal at the collective level in the 21st century. We conclude by questioning forms of governance which place the unbounded pursuit of adaptability at their core. Under forms of contemporary governance characterised by permanent crisis, adaptation becomes a demand placed upon individuals and populations to endure, absorb, and continue to function within systems that normalise insecurity and harm.
Suzanne Vega’s Luka (A M Records, 1987) was one of the first mainstream pop songs to speak from the perspective of a child experiencing domestic abuse. Its calm delivery and matter-of-fact lyrics hint at an environment in which violence has become normalised. This article uses Luka as a jurisprudential device to illuminate a central tension within English safeguarding law: the gap between statutory protection and emotional recognition. Drawing on Therapeutic Jurisprudence (TJ), it argues that law’s formal structures, while well-intentioned, can be anti-therapeutic when they prioritise procedure over presence, investigation over listening. The analysis situates the song’s narrative within the current legal framework under the Children 1989; s. 47, the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, s. 3, and the Department for Education’s Working Together to Safeguard Children (2023) guidance. It considers the leading authorities, Re W (Children) [2010] UKSC 12, In re B (Children) (FC) [2008] UKHL 35, and Re H (Minors) Sexual Abuse: Standard of Proof [1996] AC 563 and evaluates whether the law’s promise of child-centred protection is realised in practice. The article proposes a TJ “listening ethic,” reframing the duty to investigate as a duty to hear. By placing a pop song in dialogue with doctrine, the article demonstrates that culture often reveals the emotional deficits of law. Safeguarding becomes therapeutic only when it enables children not simply to be questioned, but to be heard.
Law and space are mutually constitutive of each other. An inquiry into this inescapable relationship, therefore, demands a critical engagement with how both intersect. Legal geography, in this regard, provides an analytical spatial lens for diagnosing this intersection and determining the territorial impacts of law on the people inhabiting the spaces. It thus helps ascertain whether the formal application of law results in meaningful spatial justice for the vulnerable people. In this context, India presents a critical site for the legal-spatial inquiry, where the legalities, as applied from above, do not merely regulate space, but routinely produce spatial orderings, hierarchies, and, consequently, inequalities below. The paper argues that laws, particularly those concerning land acquisition and eviction in India, function as abstract rules that often conceal exclusionary spatial outcomes. It is therefore further argued that legal reasonings and formal processes must account for their spatial implications and reimagine justice that is attuned to the lived geographies of the people.
