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.
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.
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.
