Moving between Elon Musk’s ethical commitment to human-species futures by initiating Mars settlements and his role in Trump’s 2025 “government efficiency” purge of federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, I reexamine ethics in left- and right-utopian thinking about outer-space settlement from the perspective of a future Mars settlement. I argue that utopian thinking across the political spectrum presumes some people’s suffering for the sake of universal social goods, but that utopia’s spatial presumption of a “no” place and its temporal presumption of an enduring, open future restricts its analytic value to Earth, where planetary scaled conditions buffer the consequence of others’ suffering for the beneficiaries of utopia’s promised goods. In contrast, I speculate ethnographically on Mars’s material demands on future human settlers via the 2012 entry, descent, and landing (EDL) of NASA’s Curiosity rover. On Mars, unanticipated or planned human or nonhuman action could scale to an immediate apocalypse of an entire martian world, suggesting that any nonterrestrial place demands autopian and autochronic stances, reuniting space and time, radically equalizing human and nonhuman agencies, and requiring extraterrestrial transformation of terrestrial concepts including “suffering,” “ethics,” “social,” “governance,” and even “human.” I argue that critical Black and Indigenous thinking—emerging from apocalyptic, dehumanizing historical processes on Earth but derided by conservatives as self-interested “DEI”—are thus the aptest starting frames for thriving, off-Earth human futures. I take this ethical stance because contemporary debates about Earth’s futures already speculatively invoke not-yet martian settlers but without acknowledging the material demands of their worlds, from which—moreover—we may yet learn something about how to live better on Earth.
This conceptual paper introduces the Legal Language Zone (LLZ) as a framework for analysing professional legal correspondence in the age of artificial intelligence. Drawing on the Businesslike Zone from business communication pedagogy, the LLZ is theorised as a multidimensional communicative continuum structured by six interrelated dimensions: text organisation and structural cohesion; lexical specificity and terminological precision; politeness and relational distance; correctness; professional credibility; and anticipatory interpretation and strategic indeterminacy. The framework adapts the communicative calibration underlying the Businesslike Zone to the interpretive, and strategic demands of legal communication. The paper examines how large language models (LLMs) may both support and destabilise communication within the LLZ. It argues that AI can enhance drafting efficiency, structural consistency, terminological precision, and surface-level correctness, while remaining limited in context-sensitive interpretation, strategic judgment, and anticipation of future interpretive consequences. Particular attention is given to legal indeterminacy and the distinction between strategic interpretive openness and unintended ambiguity. These limitations raise questions of professional responsibility, accountability, and supervision, particularly as AI develops towards more autonomous forms of agency. The paper therefore argues for a collaborative rather than substitutive model of human–AI drafting in which legal professionals retain responsibility for contextual interpretation, communicative risk, ethical judgment, and professional accountability.
This paper examines the political-philosophical values shaping Greek citizenship law and policy and how they institutionalized norms of inclusion, exclusion, civic worth, and equality within the democratic community. Using discourse analysis, it treats citizenship policies not merely as legal instruments but as expressions of underlying philosophical commitments that structure society’s understanding of membership and regulate access to rights. The study has two main objectives: to identify the dominant philosophical frameworks influencing political and legal commitments and institutional practices, and to explore the relationship between citizenship policies and the principles of property-based liberalism and conservatism, on one hand, and liberal egalitarianism, on the other. Findings show that Greece has historically followed an ethnic-based (ius sanguinis) approach. Reforms proposed in 2010 and enacted in 2015 partially adopted an ius soli model aligned with liberal egalitarian ideals, aiming to reduce social and economic inequalities and foster inclusion for second-generation residents. In contrast, 2020 reforms reflect a return to property-liberal and conservative values, emphasizing financial criteria, national identity, and tradition, thereby reinforcing ius sanguinis and linking economic status to civic worth. The study highlights the tension between egalitarian inclusion and conservative-exclusionary principles, showing how philosophical values shape legal frameworks and the symbolic construction of membership.
This article examines hedging as a source of unclarity in Korean lower‑court civil judgments and analyzes how an institutional AI system introduced by the Supreme Court Library of Korea in 2025 translates these hedging devices into English. Building mainly on Hyland’s framework, the study identifies discoursal hedging linked to integrated findings‑of‑fact sections, macro‑structural hedging arising from inverted syllogistic and tail‑final reasoning patterns, micro‑structural hedging involving agentless passives and impersonal subjects, and a range of lexical and formulaic hedges, many influenced by Japanese judgment phraseology. Unlike U.S. trial‑court practice, where hedging has been shown to operate as a deliberate, judge‑specific strategy to minimize reversal risk, hedging in Korean judgments is largely institutionalized through the 1998 Recommendations on the Drafting of Judgments and judgment‑writing manuals issued by the Judicial Research and Training Institute, and thus functions predominantly as norm‑governed, reader‑oriented practice. A small corpus study of AI‑generated English translations of selected civil judgments shows that the system tends to mirror the complex structural hedging of the Korean originals and to render key lexical and formulaic hedges in divergent ways, thereby obscuring gradations in fact‑finding and creating interpretive difficulties for foreign readers. The article argues that improving the handling of hedging in institutional AI translation requires both refinements to Korean judgment‑drafting conventions and explicit, consistently applied translation guidelines within a human‑in‑the‑loop quality‑assurance framework.
