Since the 1990s the effects of globalization on law and legal developments has been a central topic of scholarly debate. To date, the debate is however marked by three substantial deficiencies which this chapter seeks to remedy through a reconceptualization of global law as a law of inter-contextuality expressed through inter-legality and materialized through a particular body of legal norms which can be characterized as connectivity norms. The first deficiency is a historical and empirical one. Both critics as well (...) as advocates of ‘non-state law’ share the assumption that ‘law beyond the state’ and related legal norms have gained in centrality when compared with previous historical times. While global law, including both public and private global governance law as well as regional occurrences such as EU law, has undergone profound transformations since the structural transformations which followed the de-colonialization processes of the mid-twentieth century, we do not have more global law relatively to other types of law today than in previous historical times. The second deficiency is a methodological one. The vast majority of scholarship on global law is either of an analytical nature, drawing on insights from philosophy, or empirically observing the existence of global law and the degree of compliance with global legal norms at a given moment in time. While both approaches bring something to the table they remain static approaches incapable of explaining and evaluating the transformation of global law over time. The third deficiency is a conceptual-theoretical one. In most instances, global law is understood as a unitary law producing singular legal norms with a planetary reach, or, alternatively, a radical pluralist perspective is adopted dismissing the existence of singular global norms. Both of these approaches however misapprehend the structural characteristics, function and societal effects of global law. Instead a third positon between unitary and radical pluralist perspectives can be adopted through an understanding of global law and its related legal norms as a de-centred kind of inter-contextual law characterised by inter-legality. (shrink)

The Constitution is the highest law of the country, while international law is a field of law that deals with the rights and obligations between countries. The essence of international community is of decentralized nature, in which the legal order is formed according to the principle of sovereign equality. However, there are many perspectives that approach the international community and international law from a universalistic and idealistic viewpoint. In other words, if the positivist and pseudo-oriented view of international law is (...) the reality of international community and international law, the universalist or idealist perception of international law can be said to be their goals. It is true that those two perspectives on international community and international law are neither omnicient nor all-perceiving, but complexly intertwined. The Constitution and international law, which can be considered the two axes of public law, are closely interrelated to the formation of a modern absolute state and civic democracy. The absoluteness of state power and civic democracy are doomed to fate our present and our future. This is not only such fundamental political order, but it also has become a foundation for the development of modern and contemporary order of law. And the two dimensions of order, politics and law, are developing in a dialectical manner. Under this background, this paper aims to provide a harmonious view sprucing up the reality of public law that penetrates both of the international and domestic society within a large framework. It is for research purpose and needs an effort of work by reviewing and analyzing the essence, commonalities, and differences among various adjacent concepts of the Constitution and international law discourse. This paper first begins with a discussion by presenting the historical development of existing hard legal system that penetrates the Constitution and international law through their realistic framework. Furthermore, we look at the softness of international law, conceptual discourse on the international law and world law, international constitutionalism and constitutional theory, and a compendium of world administrative law. We look at the background for the development of these commentaries, the main topics of discussion, and their commonalities or differences. Finally we briefly diagnose and place the future of new sermons that needs to be adduced due to changes in the international community. (shrink)

Rights-based approaches and consequentialist approaches to ethics are often seen as being diametrically opposed to one another. In one sense, they are. In another sense, however, they can be reconciled: a ‘global’ form of consequentialism might supply consequentialist foundations for a derivative morality that is non-consequentialist, and perhaps rights-based, in content. By way of case study to illustrate how this might work, I survey what a global consequentialist should think about a recent dispute between Jeff McMahan and Henry (...) Shue on the morality and laws of war. (shrink)

Powerful, technically complex international compliance regimes have developed recently in certain professions that deal with risk: banking (the Basel II regime), accountancy (IFRS) and the actuarial profession. The need to deal with major risks has acted as a strong driver of international co-operation to create enforceable international semilegal systems, as happened earlier in such fields as international health regulations. This regulation in technical fields contrasts with the failure of an international general-purpose political and legal regime to develop. We survey the (...) new global regulatory systems in the actuarial, banking and accounting fields, with a view to showing how the need to deal reasonably with risk has resulted in an international de facto law solidly based on correct abstract principles of probability. (shrink)

Notwithstanding International Economic Law’s (IEL’s) inevitable distributional effects, IEL scholarship has had limited engagement with theoretical work on global distributive justice and fairness. In part this reflects the failure of global justice theorists to derive principles that can be readily applied to the concrete problems of IEL. This article bridges this gap, drawing on existing coercion-based accounts of global justice in political theory to propose a novel account of global distributive justice that both resolves problems within (...) the existing theoretical literature and can be directly applied to both explain and critique concrete issues in IEL, including in particular WTO law. By complementing existing coercion-based accounts with a more nuanced typology of international coercion, it distinguishes two morally salient classes of economically relevant measures: External Trade Measures (ETMs), which pursue their goals specifically through the regulation of international economic activity; and Domestic Economic Measures (DEMs), which do not. The distinctive intentional relationship between ETMs and the outsiders they affect means such measures require more stringent justification, in terms of global equality or other goals those outsiders themselves share; whereas DEMs can be justified under the principle of self-determination. Non-Product Related Production Processes and Methods (NPRPPMs) provide a case study to show how this framework can illuminate recurring problems in IEL. (shrink)

includes an examination of the tensions between reason and will in the history of legal and political philosophy.

This chapter explores global debunking arguments, debunking arguments that aim to give one a global defeater. I defend Alvin Plantinga’s view that global defeaters are possible and, once gained, are impossible to escape by reasoning. They thereby must be extinguished by other means: epistemically propitious actions, luck, or grace. I then distinguish between three types of global defeater—pure-undercutters, undercutters-because-rebutters, and undercutters-while-rebutters—and systematically consider how one can deflect such defeaters. Lastly, since I draw insights from the literature (...) on perhaps the most widely discussed global debunking argument in the literature, Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, I end up responding to many potential problems for it. This includes the so-called conditionalization problem, as well as those raised by Bergmann (2002), Law (2012), Deem (2018), Hendricks and Anderson (2020), and Wielenberg (in Craig and Wielenberg (2021)). (shrink)

The process of economic globalization has over the years accelerated the pace of labour policy convergence. In the Indian context, labour law since 1991 has witnessed a paradigm shift while embracing a policy of global integration. The ambit of labour relations is now being related with private practice or the informal settings, leading to multiple concerns over labour justice and security. In compliance with global standards, the continuous emphasis upon labour flexibility characterised by flexible labour employment, performance based (...) remuneration, increasing portion of casual labour, has raised several concerns. This paper is an attempt to highlight the attempted and achieved labour law policy convergence in India, coupled with a few suggestions for balance in global national comittments towards labour welfare. (shrink)

The UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS) has played a central role in the development of standards for the sustainable exploration of the Moon. The standards, in particular, are being shaped through consultations with the major space actors namely, states, international organizations, and commercial enterprises. The Moon Village Association, for instance, was created to foster the implementation of a vision of peaceful international cooperation of governmental and non-governmental actors in the exploration of the Moon. In 2021, (...) the MVA, in its Report on the Global Expert Group on Sustainable Lunar Activities, proposed the creation of a neutral multi-stakeholder platform and framework to ensure the conduct of sustainable lunar missions in the future. According to the MVA, there is a need to consider approaches that promote future lunar sustainability or recommend practices for upcoming lunar activities. In light of the above-mentioned report and MVA’s Report on Best Practices for Sustainable Lunar Activities (2020), this article sheds light on some of the major contributions toward the development of standards for sustainable exploration of the Moon, including the recognition of its legal personhood. (shrink)

Given that the law is helpful, essential and non-separable with our lives, we surely would like to know the people that make laws and who practice in the legal profession. This query is the recent theme we have pursued in this and other related projects. The investigation has revealed a knowledge economy (savoir-faire) that has entwined law and the actions of law people, which growingly became edged to explain their behavior and moral and professional conduct. The expectation has been that (...) graduate law classes are for foreign lawyers who would return to their home country to work as international lawyers or as professors. That has long been deemed as a given; but the precise reality has not been previously unraveled. With this backdrop, the current paper purports to survey the status and performance of graduate law degree holders in US law school, to rank global law schools, and explore the implications and findings concerning the processes and outcomes of their missions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Drawing upon John Rawls's framework inThe Law of Peoples,this paper argues that MNEs have a responsibility to promote well-ordered social and political institutions in host countries that lack them. This responsibility is grounded in a negative duty not to cause harm. In addition to addressing the objection that promoting well-ordered institutions represents unjustified interference by MNEs, the paper provides guidance for managers of MNEs operating in host countries that lack just institutions. The paper argues for understanding corporate responsibility in relation (...) to the specific institutional environment in which MNEs operate. (shrink)

According to Wringe 2006 we have good reasons for accepting the existence of Global Collective Obligations - in other words, collective obligations which fall on the world’s population as a whole. One such reason is that the existence of such obligations provides a plausible solution a problem which is sometimes thought to arise if we think that individuals have a right to have their basic needs satisfied. However, obligations of this sort would be of little interest – either theoretical (...) or practical – if they did not give rise, either directly or indirectly, to any kinds of reasons for individuals to behave in certain ways. -/- In this paper, I shall argue that in many situations, forward-looking global obligations give rise to an obligation on individuals to work towards bringing into existence and support an institutional system which will enable their obligations to be met. My argument for this conclusion involves two steps. In the first step, I address a general question about how collective obligations can give rise to individual obligations without being reducible to them, and which obligations they give rise to. Here I give a Kant-inspired argument, based on the principles that ‘ought implies can’ and that the content of the moral law is given by reflecting on how agents should legislate in a kingdom of ends, which is designed to show that collective obligations can give rise to individual obligations. In the second step I apply this principle to the case of global forward-looking obligations. (shrink)

Comparative religion scholar Thomas Berry’s influential concept of “Earth jurisprudence” has been helpfully elaborated in three principal books. My first section identifies four of their common themes, deriving therefrom an implicit narrative: (1) the basis of ecology is autopoiesis, which (2) originally generated human communities and Indigenous vernacular laws, which were (3) later reasserted by forest defenders who fought to create the Magna Carta’s “Charter of the Forest,” which is (4) now championed globally by the Indian physicist and eco-activist Vandana (...) Shiva’s Earth Democracy movement. My next three sections identify mutually exclusive elements of the three books, deriving the following alternative narrative: self-conscious new dancing rituals (Cullinan) could empower an historically informed reconstruction of private property (Burdon) via commons-based vernacular law (Weston and Bollier). And my conclusion offers one template for such a strategy, namely a new environmental variation on my dancing-poetic conception of legal justice, christened “emerald star-law.”. (shrink)

This article outlines a new approach to the law of political economy as a form of transformative law, a new approach that combines a focus on the function of law with a concept of law encapsulating the triangular dialectics between the form-giving prestation of law, the material substance the law is oriented against, and the transcendence of legal forms—that is, the rendering of compatibility between forms. Transformative law thereby serves as an alternative to both law and economics and recently emerging (...) culturalist and neo-Marxist approaches. The timing of this publication is not coincidental. The era of neoliberalism—that is, of structural liberalism, which started in the 1970s and experienced its breakthrough in the 1980s and 1990s after the collapse of structural Marxism—is ending. This makes the question of what will succeed the neoliberal episteme pertinent. (shrink)

This article examines and rejects the view that nonhuman animals cannot be recipients of justice, and argues that the main reasons in favor of universal human rights and global justice also apply in the case of the international protection of the interests of nonhuman animals. In any plausible theory of wellbeing, sentience matters; mere species membership or the place where an animal is born does not. This does not merely entail that regulations of the use of animals aimed at (...) reducing their suffering should be implemented. It actually supports the end of such use, as well as other positive steps to provide help and to promote what is good not only for domesticated animals, but also for those living in the wild. Another reason to bring the protection of animals' interests into the international arena is that it is at this level that numerous animal exploitation industries enjoy the protection of different agreements and institutions. It does not follow from this that changing international law should be animal advocates' first priority, but it does follow that they should conduct their work internationally and not limit it to their own countries. (shrink)

The Global Forum on Bioethics in Research (GFBR) served as a global platform for debate on ethical issues in international health research between 1999 and 2008, bringing together research ethics experts, researchers, policy makers and community members from developing and developed countries. In total, nine GFBR meetings were held on six continents. Work is currently underway to revive the GFBR. This paper describes the purpose and history of the GFBR and presents key elements for its reinstatement, future functioning (...) and sustainability. Potential participants and sponsors are encouraged to contribute actively to the future of this unique international research ethics event. (shrink)

Corruption is a ubiquitous problem. As Gillian Brock notes early on, it exists to one degree or another in all societies, no matter their stage of development, and is regularly identified by the public as one of the top problems in the world (2–3). Despite its importance and frequency, it hasn’t been a central topic for philoso- phers working on normative moral and political theory. This isn’t to say that it has been ignored, but it has mostly been seen as (...) a specialty topic in areas such as business ethics, criminal law theory focusing on white-collar crime, or certain sub- areas in democratic theory. However, as Brock points out, corruption has particular importance for questions of global justice, given that “corruption plays an enor- mous role in sustaining global injustice and hinders efforts aimed at remedying global deprivations” (17). This comes not only from the sort of large-scale corrup- tion by government officials that starves developing countries of funds needed to provide necessary services but also from more day-to-day corruption in the provi- sion of water, leaving many people without access to clean drinking water; in con- struction, where people must make do with substandard and unsafe buildings; in the provision of education and medical services; and so on. Despite the massive size of the global justice literature, Brock’s book is one of the first—perhaps the first— to focus specifically on corruption in relation to global justice. It would be an im- portant work for this reason alone, but it also has many other virtues which should make it the touchstone of the topic going forward. (shrink)

This book develops the law of political economy as a new field of scholarly enquiry. Bringing together an exceptional group of scholars, it provides a novel conceptual framework for studying the role of law and legal instruments in political economy contexts, with a focus on historical transformations and central challenges in both European and global contexts. Its chapters reconstruct how the law of political economy plays out in diverse but central fields, ranging from competition and consumer protection law to (...) labour and environmental law, giving a comprehensive overview of the central challenges of the law of political economy. It also provides a sophisticated and multifaceted framework for further enquires while outlining the contours of new law of political economy. (shrink)

Harmony as a basic value is neglected in internationally influential philosophical discussions about rights, power, and other facets of public policy; it is not prominent in articles that appear in widely read journals or in books published by presses with a global reach. Of particular interest, political philosophers and policy makers remain ignorant of the similarities and differences between various harmony-oriented approaches to institutional choice from around the world. In this chapter, I begin to rectify these deficiencies by critically (...) discussing the way harmony has figured into political philosophies from three major traditions in the Global South, namely, African ubuntu, East Asian Confucianism, and South American buen vivir. I point out that, although harmony is at the core of all three political philosophies, it is conceived in different ways, entailing incompatible prescriptions about things such as who should make laws and which sorts of beings have rights against the state. Such contrasting views call for rigorous cross-cultural dialogue amongst theorists of harmony, beyond mounting challenges to more individualist approaches that have been salient in modern Western political thought. (shrink)

Faced with political opponents, proponents of climate justice should consider how politically feasible different principles of climate justice are. I focus in this chapter on the political feasibility of an “ability to pay principle” as a proposal for dividing the burdens of past emissions and emissions from the global poor. I argue that a formulation of an ability to pay principle with a voluntarist scope, restricted only to agreed upon collective goals, is significantly more politically feasible than one with (...) a preventative scope, which focuses on preventing a very bad outcome. A voluntarist ability to pay principle can much more clearly be justified to both constrained policy makers and reactionary citizens as a solution to a collective action problem among states that have already bound themselves to collectively solving the problem. A voluntarist principle also has a stronger precedent as a principle of international law. Thus, those philosophers concerned with the political feasibility of an ability-to-pay principle should carefully consider using a voluntarist rather than a preventative formulation. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, I outline what I mean by “political feasibility” and distinguish it from other conceptions of feasibility. Second, I explore the different rationales for a preventative ability to pay principle. Third, I introduce my voluntarist formulation of the ability to pay principle. I then reply to objections to that formulation, arguing that the drawbacks of a voluntarist formulation are not as dire as they might appear. (shrink)

Oftentimes we consider how the law and public policy were interwoven one another for any fine appeal to the constituents and global public. Nonetheless, we are fairly never definite to suggest any hard picture of their relationship. It rather involves an issue of meditative process of philosophy, humanity and social justice as well as a wider of public contention from the purview of temporal and spatial evolution. The paper, in the face with this difficult conundrum, attempts to highlight some (...) of basics despite a surfeit of work products in this field. The paper begins with the instant queries or explanation from the peer scholar practitioners, which would be some of communication with the author. Then the author elicits some of principled relationship between the two concepts. (shrink)

On 4 December 2006, during discussions on the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill, Andrew Dismore, Member of Parliament and then Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, said, ‘Organisations can kill people … but it is the actions and omissions of people in organisations that cumulatively cause death’. However, the corporate entity is a vehicle for the communal actions of those who guide the business activities. Attempting to seek out persons or people that are solely responsible for deaths (...) and violations of human rights caused by companies is fruitless. The entity is a vehicle for those actions, it possesses its own, often deep, pockets of finance and resources, and it has a public image. It is more useful to punish the corporate entity, in instances where the corporate behaviour has led to death and human rights abuses, as it is in seeking out individual defendants. Soft law options have not brought about a sufficient reduction in instances of deaths caused by corporate behaviour across jurisdictional borders. This article will argue that the time has now come to establish an international hard law on corporate killing, and for states to ensure that there is a viable path towards a redress for victims and their families along with adopting a duty to assist the victim or their family to pursue redress to ensure a fair balance of power against transnational companies. (shrink)

The 2024 Global Religious Recognition Report is a compilation of the most recent available data on recognition and registration impacting conditions of religious freedom throughout the world. Each page of the 259-page report is dedicated to each sovereign state and dependent or disputed territory, including an overview of the constitutional structure, secularity and recognition and registration policies and practices. Detailed explanations of registration policy have been gathered from the Office of International Religious Freedom's International Religious Freedom Report in addition (...) to other credible sources. The RoRB classification for each country and territory has been updated in accordance with the criteria set out in the Spectrum of Religious Recognition (SRR) which was included towards the front of this year's report. This year's report includes an abridged version of Dr Monica Gyimah's article (the full article can be found in Journal of Astronist Studies Volume 1 Issue 1) that highlights recognition and registration issues specifically impacting indigenous religious communities. (shrink)

The principle of Information Conservation or Determinism is a governing assumption of physical theory. Determinism has counterfactual consequences. It entails that if the present were different, then the future would be different. But determinism is temporally symmetric: it entails that if the present were different, the past would also have to be different. This runs contrary to our commonsense intuition that what has happened in the future depends on the past in a way the past does not depend on the (...) future. To understand how this can be so we observe that while the truth of some counterfactuals is guaranteed by the laws of logic or the laws of nature, some are not. It is among the latter contingent, counterfactuals that we find temporal asymmetry. It is this asymmetry that gives causation a temporal direction. The temporal asymmetry of these counterfactuals is explained by the fact that the dynamical laws of nature are logically irreversible functions from partial states of the world onto other partial states. (Logical reversibility is not to be confused, though it too often is, with time-reversal invariance). Though these irreversible laws are locally indeterministic, they can sum to give a globally deterministic description of the world. This combination of global determinism and local indeterminism gives rise to contingent counterfactual dependence and gives that dependence a direction. That direction is independent of the direction of entropy. The direction of contingent counterfactual dependence is time's arrow. (shrink)

In this paper, I suggest that for some proposed solutions to global justice problems, incompatibility with the necessary features of international law is a reason to reject them. I illustrate this by discussing the problem raised by the case of unjust combatants, that is, combatants lacking a just cause for war. I argue that the principle of inequality of combatants, which suggests that we ought to prohibit those without a just cause for war from fighting, is not only a (...) bad international legal principle, but also a bad principle of global justice. (shrink)

We subsist under the law where we claim our rights and are obliged to do something enforced. What is a law? The question would be perplexing in history, and one of crucial themes with many lawyers or legal philosophers. As we know, two most important perspectives had earned a universal and historical forge in academics, to say, the natural law and legal positivism. The concept of natural law deals in its primacy for the humanity and natural order which often can (...) be traded as something inviolable or inalienable. The concept has strands in several aspects; (i) its anchor with the civil democratic revolution around 17 and 18 centuries (ii) its supremacy with the new constitutional states (iii) less quality as a realist law from ambiguities and lack of clear definition. The concept of public policy may be related with the social justice, ethics and administration. It generally pursues a justice and desired state of public or community where the tension and conflict always exist between the ruling class and citizens. Historically, the public policy could be mightier to address the society than law where the benevolent Kings or Sovereigns liked to address both their needs and social justice. They may abrogate, more in endowment and divinity, the laws or social customs. The tension between the public power and private interests could be one reason as well as offers a good dualism in understanding the rule of law concept and advent of modern democracy. In this dimension, the King would no longer be divine nor entitled to exercise a plenary power of state rule. Instead, the popular sovereignty in the US democracy or parliamentary type in the UK were to be established to resolve a feudal conflict within the class and society. Lighted to be in vein of influence could arise the two contexts which are a contractarian view and plutocracy desire of the founding fathers. They underlay the mood and philosophical ethos of US revolution. Hence, three concepts as a pillar in private law were sanctified in the very foundation of US constitutional state, sanctity of property right, freedom of contract and due limits for the civil liability. The governmental power should be limited to protect the life and limb of citizens which addressed the Hobbes’ evil, “war against all the rest.” The due process concept was expressed as a fundamental principle of constitution where the human rights are inviolable and inalienable. The separation of powers principle could serve the freedom and wealth of new civil class in the continent, and bicameralism was devised for the check and balance within the federal congress. They see the role of judicial branch is important to preserve their civil interest. Then we can derive some assumptions between the law and public policy. First, a law plays to protect the private interest while the public policy pursues the social justice and mediates the competing interests, “private v. private” and “public v. private.” The civil courts may address a first nature of conflict and the law of takings or regulatory laws may deal with the second aspect. Second, the public or administrative law can shape a legal plane of bureaucracies or public administration, and may guarantee the rule of law ideals. It plays as an enabling authority and, on the other, monitors an arbitrariness and unfairness in the bureaucratic government. In this context, the unresponsive and unfathomable bureaucracy in the Kafka’s could be remedied. Third, for the welfare state in the late 19th and 20th century, a law can well be seen as one of authoritative expression of public policy to redress the evils of capitalist states. Some public laws, such as the Sherman Act classically and Lanham Act recently, may act to regulate the monopoly or oligopoly while other laws were enacted to restore justice between the labor and employers. Through the chapters, the fundamentals of law and public policy will be considered to address their proper status. (shrink)

[This download includes the table of contents and chapter 1.] -/- When we praise, blame, punish, or reward people for their actions, we are holding them responsible for what they have done. Common sense tells us that what makes human beings responsible has to do with their minds and, in particular, the relationship between their minds and their actions. Yet the empirical connection is not necessarily obvious. The “guilty mind” is a core concept of criminal law, but if a defendant (...) on trial for murder were found to have serious brain damage, which brain parts or processes would have to be damaged for him to be considered not responsible, or less responsible, for the crime? The authors argue that evidence from neuroscience and the other cognitive sciences can illuminate the nature of responsibility and agency. They go on to offer a novel and comprehensive neuroscientific theory of human responsibility. (shrink)

In recent work, Adlam (2022b), Chen & Goldstein (2022), and Meacham (2023) have defended accounts of laws that take laws to be primitive global constraints. A major advantage of these accounts is that they’re able to accommodate the many different kinds of laws that appear in physical theories. In this paper I’ll present these three accounts, highlight their distinguishing features, and note some key differences that might lead one to favor one of these accounts over the others. I’ll conclude (...) by briefly discussing a version of a “constraint” account that I think is especially attractive. (shrink)

Abstract. In this article is presented a model of the change of the probability of the global catastrophic risks in the world with exponentially evolving technologies. Increasingly cheaper technologies become accessible to a larger number of agents. Also, the technologies become more capable to cause a global catastrophe. Examples of such dangerous technologies are artificial viruses constructed by the means of synthetic biology, non-aligned AI and, to less extent, nanotech and nuclear proliferation. The model shows at least double (...) exponential growth of the probability of the global catastrophe which means that the accumulated probability of the catastrophe will grow from negligible to overwhelming at the period of a few doubling times of the technological capabilities. For biotech and AI, such doubling time roughly corresponds to the doubling period of Moore’s law and its analogues in other technologies and is around 2 years. Thus the global catastrophe in the exponential technologies world will most likely happen during a “dangerous decade”. Such a dangerous decade could start as early as in the 2020s. We also found that the double exponential growth in the model makes the model less sensitive to its initial conditions, like the number of dangerous agents or initial probabilities constants. The model also shows that smaller catastrophes could happen earlier than larger ones, and such a smaller catastrophe may be able to stop the technological growth before larger ones become possible, thus global risks will be self-limiting. However, if the growth of the number of dangerous agents will be very quick, the multiple smaller catastrophes could happen simultaneously and will be equal to a global catastrophe. (shrink)

From the traditionalist position on international law, a new form of compact agreement, which cannot be classified as an international treaty in terms of academic framework, had long fueled much of contention in politics, international law, and constitutional law. A growing practice of compact agreement had been natural as corresponding with the global compression of international community and rising aspiration of peace regime on the international relations. The scholars of international law believe that, regardless of whether the President of (...) the United States is an internationalist or an isolationist, the enactment of international law in the 21st century will be based on more pragmatic rather than formal criteria. It is still true whether or not he is willing to accept or escape the international obligations so that we can more realistically share the powers conferred by the Constitution. On the other hand, a constitutional controversy on somewhat mushy yet sophisticated issues on the compact agreements began with the Laurence Tribe's acrimonious criticism in 1990. He argues that a procedure between Congress and the executive branch for the Clinton administration's accession to the North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA) is unconstitutional. His criticism pointed out that the NAFTA is unconstitutional since it is contrary to the text and structure of the Constitution. On the other hand, scholars of political science believe that, while a politics is termed as the distribution of values, the new form of compact agreement serves connecting the domestic and international politics as a living organism and must be affirmed from the standpoint of parliamentary politics. The political scientists argue on the necessity and inevitability of a new form of international agreement as pursuant to the nature of political process on informal procedures and parliamentary practices. In respect of the theoretical controversy, the paper is devoted to survey what the new form of compact agreement is, what types we can identify and explore the theoretical contest among the disciplines. As the dealings of paper attempt to touch on the core of scholarly assertions as fundamental and philosophical, the endeavor could inculcate the mind of international lawyers within and outside the government by providing a better framework to understand the specific real-world issues. The perception and rationale for the new form of international agreement should differ varying with their academic disciplines from which their thought stems from. The paper ends with implications within the grand scale of jurisprudence. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is therefore to critically analyse Kelsen's position on the relationship between law and coercion. Here I will show that the connection between law and coercion in Kelsen's legal theory goes deeper than the first definition of ‘law as a coercive order’ suggests: the connection has to do not only with the specific content of legal norms, but also with the existence of the legal order itself. In Section II, I will show that for Kelsen coercion (...) is an essential element of law as the criterion that allows to distinguish law qua normative and social order from other kinds of social and normative orders (such as religion and morality), i.e., coercion of a certain kind. In Sec-tion III I will further develop the argument and show that coercion is also the criterion that allows to distinguish legal norms from other norms (like moral norms), i.e., coercion as a specific object of norms which are hypothetical formulations with sanction as consequence. In Section IV I will show that, in Kelsen’s framework, coercion is also to be regarded as an essential element for the effectiveness of a legal order, thus for its very existence. I will further argue that in this view the most important effect of coercion is not the direct one – the effective application of sanctions or the effective exercise of force – but the indirect one – the psychological pressure that the mere existence of organised violence and sanctions exerts on the individual. Finally, in Section V I will offer a brief concluding remark. (shrink)

In this thesis we have examined the complex interaction between intellectual property rights, life sciences and global justice. Science and the innovations developed in its wake have an enormous effect on our daily lives, providing countless opportunities but also raising numerous problems of justice. The complexity of a problem however does not liberate society as a whole from moral responsibilities. Our intellectual property regimes clash at various points with human rights law and commonly held notions of justice.

Many philosophers have criticized John Rawls’s Law of Peoples. However, often these criticisms take it for granted that the moral conclusions drawn in A Theory of Justice are superior to those in the former book. In my view, however, Rawls comes to many of his 'conclusions' without too many actual inferences. More precisely, my argument here is that if one takes Rawls’s premises and the assumptions made about the original position(s) seriously and does in fact think them through to their (...) logical conclusions, both 'A Theory of Justice' and 'The Law of Peoples' have abysmally counterintuitive and immoral implications. To wit, if the members in the original position think, as Rawls suggests,that their society is closed and they will have no interaction with outsiders, and if, furthermore, they are self-interested and concerned with the basic structure of their own society, than there is absolutely no reason for them to use the terms “persons” or “least advantaged” in the formulation of the two principles. Rather, they will use the terms “citizens of our society” and “least advantaged of our society” instead. But thus revised, the principles of justice imply that the genocide or the enslavement of outsiders is unobjectionable. I will consider attempts to block this conclusion and demonstrate that they all fail. The Law of Peoples, moreover, faces similar problems. (shrink)

During the current financial crisis, the need for an alternative to a laissez-faire ethics of capitalism (the Milton Friedman view) becomes clear. I argue that we need an order ethics which employs economics as a key theoretical resource and which focuses on institutions for implementing moral norms. -/- I will point to some aspects of order ethics which highlight the importance of rules, e.g. global rules for the financial markets. In this regard, order ethics (“Ordnungsethik”) is the complement of (...) the German conception of “Ordnungspolitik” which also stresses the importance of a regulatory framework. This framework is needed not to tame the market, but to make it more profitable in the long run. -/- The conception of order ethics relies heavily on contractarianism, especially on James Buchanan’s work. Unlike many other conceptions of ethics, it does not start with an aim to achieve, but rather with an account of what the social world – in which ethical norms have to be implemented – is like. Our social world is different from the pre-modern one. Pre-modern societies played zero-sum games in which people could only gain significantly at the expense of others. And the types of ethics that we are still used to today have been developed within these pre-modern societies. -/- Modern societies, by contrast, can be characterised – by economists and other social theorists alike – as societies with continuous growth. This growth has only been made possible by the modern competitive market economy which enables everyone to pursue his own interests within a carefully devised institutional system. In this system, positive sum games are played, which makes it in principle possible to improve the position of every individual at the same time. Most kinds of ethics, however, resulting from the conditions of pre-modern societies, ignore the possibility of win-win-situations and instead require us to be moderate, to share, to sacrifice, as this would have been functional in zero-sum games. These conceptions distinguish – in more or less strict ways – between self-interest and altruistic motivation. Self-interest, more often than not, is ultimately seen as something evil. -/- Such an ethics cannot be functional in modern societies. Ethical concepts lag behind. Within zero-sum games, it was necessary to call for temperance, for moderate profits, or for a condemnation of lending money at interest. Within positive-sum games, however, the morally desired result of a social process cannot be brought about by changes in motivation, by switching from ‘egoistic’ to ‘altruistic’ motivation. The second theoretical element introduced by order ethics is the distinction between actions and rules, which was already mentioned. Traditional ethics concerns actions: It calls directly for changes in behaviour. This is a consequence of pre-modern conditions as reconstructed before: People in the pre-modern world were only able to control their actions, not so much however the conditions of their actions. In particular, rules like laws, constitutions, social structures, the market order, and also ethical norms have remained stable for centuries. In modern societies, this situation has changed entirely. The rules governing our actions have increasingly come under our control. -/- In this situation, ethics has to focus on rules. Morality must be incorporated in incentive-compatible rules. Direct calls for changes in behaviour without changes in the rules lead only to an erosion of compliance with moral norms. Individuals that continue to behave ‘morally’ will be singled out, because the incentives have not been changed. Moral norms which are to be justified cannot require people to abstain from pursuing their own advantage. People abstain from taking ‘immoral’ advantages only if adherence to ethical norms yields greater benefits over the planned sequence of actions than defection in the single case. Thus ‘abstaining’ is not abstaining in the long run, it is rather an investment in expectations of long-term benefits. By adhering to ethical norms, I become a reliable partner for interactions. The norms do indeed constrain my actions, but they simultaneously expand my options in interactions. And people consent to rules only if these rules hold greater advantages for them, at least in the long run. -/- In general, ethics cannot require people to abandon their individual calculation of advantages. However, it may suggest improving one’s calculation, by calculating in the long run rather than in the short run, and by taking into account the interests of our fellows, as we depend on their acceptance for reaching an optimal level of well-being, especially in a globalized world full of interdependence. -/- The problem of implementation can now be placed at the beginning of a conception of order ethics, justified with reference to the conditions of modern societies I have sketched. Under the conditions of pre-modern societies, an ethics of temperance had evolved that posed simultaneously the problems of implementation and justification. The implementation of well-justified norms or standards could then be regarded as unproblematic, because the social structures allowed for a direct face-to-face enforcement of norms. Pre-modern societies not only favored an ethics of temperance, they also had the instrument of face-to-face-sanctions within their smaller and non-anonymous communities. This instrument is no longer functional in modern anonymous societies, and so we have to face up to the problem of implementation right at the start of our ethical conception. Simultaneously, an order ethics relies on the implementation of sanctions for enforcing incentive-compatible rules. In modern societies, rules and institutions, to a large extent, must fulfil the tasks that were, in pre-modern times, fulfilled by moral norms, which in turn were sanctioned by face-to-face sanctions. Norm implementation in modern societies thus works by setting adequate incentives in order to prevent the erosion of moral norms, which would happen if ‘moral’ actors were systematically threatened with exploitation by other, less ‘moral’ actors. -/- This conception of order ethics is then elaborated further in the area of business ethics. -/- . (shrink)

Rawls saw need for non-ideal theory also within society but never developed that project. In this chapter, Card suggests that the non-ideal part of Rawls’ Law of Peoples can be a resource for thinking about responding to evils when the subject is not state-centered. It is plausible that defense against great evils other than those of aggressive states should be governed by analogues of scruples that Rawlsian well-ordered societies observe in defending themselves against outlaw states. This essay explores those hypotheses (...) in relation to women’s self-defense and mutual defense against evils of misogyny, the term feminists apply to the most deeply hostile environments of and attitudes toward women and girls and to the cruelest wrongs to them/us, regardless whether perpetrators harbor feelings of hatred. It extrapolates and adapts to this case values, concepts, and methods from Rawls’s life’s work, especially his writing on war. (shrink)

Conditions for recognition of religion or belief (RoRB) continued to deteriorate around the world from June 2021 to June 2022. Authoritarian regimes bent on controlling religious activity maintained a foothold in Africa, Asia and parts of Central and South America. The liberties enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights are at serious threat by the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine. While in Afghanistan, the Taliban's reclamation of power after twenty years of being kept at bay likely signals a new (...) generation of Afghan boys and girls who will not see their fundamental human rights upheld by the very institutions that are supposed to protect them.​ -/- The Religious Recognition Project considers the topic of how countries register religious groups and activities is one of the foremost issues in the modern world when it comes to respecting and protecting freedom of religion or belief (FoRB). The majority of countries and territories (58% or 137 out of 235 studied) either continue to make government registration mandatory for religious groups or provide no registration procedures at all. -/- An even greater majority of countries have established onerous registration procedures, the consequences of which, whether by intention or not, include the disenfranchisement of belief communities, the deregistration or denial of registered status for minority or "untraditional" religious groups, and the state's maintenance of control over the religious and philosophical lives of citizens. In essence, issues of registration remain a harbinger of worse violations of FoRB to come so if a focus is placed on dismantling these misused recognition and registration systems, it is possible that we could see a brighter future for FoRB conditions in countries worst effected by this issue. (shrink)

News about the first baby born after a mitochondrial replacement technique (MRT; specifically maternal spindle transfer) broke on September 27, 2016 and, in a matter of hours, went global. Of special interest was the fact that the mitochondrial replacement procedure happened in Mexico. One of the scientists behind this world first was quoted as having said that he and his team went to Mexico to carry out the procedure because, in Mexico, there are no rules. In this paper, we (...) explore Mexico's rule of law in relation to mitochondrial replacement techniques and show that, in fact, certain instances of MRTs are prohibited at the federal level and others are prohibited at the state level. According to our interpretation of the law, the scientists behind this first successful MRT procedure broke federal regulations regarding assisted fertilization research. (shrink)

What comes after neoliberalism? This is in many ways the question of our time. Or maybe neoliberalism doesn’t really exist at all? And if it does, what is the relevance for lawyers, legal scholarship and legal practice?

FinTech -- along with the blockchain, other distributed ledger, smart contract, and tokenization usually assumed to accompany it -- could change the way governments procure goods and services. Procurement authorities and procurement law can play a vital role in the development of FinTech. They can help build the FinTech platforms and ecosystems that help them engage in public procurement. They should not try to procure such FinTech outright. At the national level, regulators should not just leave FinTech rulemaking up to (...) financial regulators. Contracting authorities should not just develop or use their own selected FinTech applications willy-nilly. They should contribute to overall changes in procurement law - which extend far beyond simple supervisory or regulatory technologies (RegTech/SupTech). Governments should get serious about the Agreement on Government Procurement and similar treaties - by creating a new authority to help develop the law needed to put FinTech-enabled procurement platforms in place. China’s own world-leading FinTech and cross-border public procurements do not always contribute to a global level playing field. Any FinTech applications facilitating public procurement should thus encourage compliance with the procurement law legal principles the international community has developed over decades. (shrink)

This review essay on John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples focuses on two of its more contentious claims. The first is that international economic justice is secured by a principle of assistance and that a principle of distributive justice will in fact have “unacceptable” results. The other is that certain non-liberal societies, or peoples, fall within the limits of international toleration. The essay evaluates and critiques these claims from a liberal cosmopolitan perspective.

Abstract: The article aims to sharpen the neo-republican contribution to international political thought by challenging Pettit’s view that only representative states may raise a valid claim to non-domination in their external relations. The argument proceeds in two steps: First I show that, conceptually speaking, the domination of states, whether representative or not, implies dominating the collective people at least in its fundamental, constitutive power. Secondly, the domination of states – and thus of their peoples – cannot be justified normatively in (...) the name of promoting individual non-domination because such a compensatory rationale misconceives the notion of domination in terms of a discrete exercise of power instead of as an ongoing power relation. This speaks in favour of a more inclusive law of peoples than Pettit (just as his liberal counterpart Rawls) envisages: In order to accommodate the claim of collective peoples to non-domination it has to recognize every state as a member of the international order. (shrink)

The publication of Guido Calabresi’s book “The Future of Law and Economics” has drawn a substantial amount of attention among law and economics scholars. We thought that the best way to devote special attention to this book was to devote a Special issue to it. This article situates Calabresi’s book among other reflections on the future of the discipline, introduces and explains the reasons behind this Special issue and discuss the organization and content of it. -/- We emphasize how Calabresi’s (...) historical-conceptual standpoint allows him to isolate the stakes of different future developments around the question of how could further appreciation of legal institutions that defy the standard economic assumptions help the field develop theoretically. Overall, the contributors all shared Calabresi’s attempt to restore the balance between Law and Economics and the need to better account for the “whole unanalysed experience of human race”, often neglected by the Economic Analysis of Law approach. Most disagreements are about the ‘how’. In any case, the search for the Law and Economics ‘not (yet) taken’ or for other “Law and … ” approaches is always open to the Future. (shrink)

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this (...) publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. (shrink)

Pandemics have been suggested as global risks many times, but it has been shown that the probability of human extinction due to one pandemic is small, as it will not be able to affect and kill all people, but likely only half, even in the worst cases. Assuming that the probability of the worst pandemic to kill a person is 0.5, and assuming linear interaction between different pandemics, 30 strong pandemics running simultaneously will kill everyone. Such situations cannot happen (...) naturally, but because biotechnology is developing analogously to Moore’s law, it may become possible in the near future (10-50 years from now), because of biohackers, CRISPR, bioprinters, AI-assisted DNA-programing, and weapons of “knowledge-enabled mass destruction” published on the Internet. It could also happened in case of large-scale biological war, or if a rogue country released its entire biological arsenal simultaneously. We also will address other scenarios and risk increasing factors as well as mitigation and adaptation strategies. (shrink)

The theoretical underpinnings of public international law have taken the sovereign status of the nation-state for granted since the beginning of the modern era. After centuries of evolution in legal and political thought, the state's definition as a bounded territorial unit has been strictly codified. The legal development of the nation-state was an ideological project informed by extra-legal considerations. Additionally, the ever-narrowing scope of the juridical idea of sovereignty functioned as a boundary mechanism instrumental in colonising Africa and other regions. (...) While international law claims universal liberalism today, the current system based on sovereign nation-states represents not social inclusion but fierce and dangerous exclusion. -/- The central thesis of this book is that the development of legal sovereignty was, rather than part of the modernist progress narrative, a historically contingent evolutionary regression. While other social systems such as economics and science became globalised, politics and law counterintuitively became more territorialised. It is argued that the nation-state today is not only anachronistic but is dangerously ill-equipped for facing international problems such as the climate crisis or global pandemics. Finally, it also leaves African states and many other formerly-colonised territories at a particular disadvantage by regulating their political practices into a predefined mould. (shrink)