The ecological transition needs a shift in the definition of the role of the state from a market-correcting to a market-steering actor. This transformation inevitably reverberates within private law, whose institutions participate in distributing the social and economic burdens of sustainability policies. Focusing on the housing sector as a paradigmatic site of tension between environmental imperatives and social justice, the paper examines how measures aimed at improving the energy performance of buildings and promoting urban greening can generate regressive distributive effects, including rising housing costs, green gentrification, and heightened risks of indebtedness and displacement for vulnerable groups. Against this background, the paper argues that private law must be reconceptualised as a tool capable of mitigating these structural inequities.

In 1915, a Denver murder case became a national story, not because of the identities of the perpetrator or victim but because of a reluctant trial witness: Judge Ben B. Lindsey. A pioneer of Progressive Era juvenile justice, Lindsey was charged with contempt of court for refusing to disclose the details that a twelve-year-old boy shared with him. His refusal led to a six-year-long battle over ideas of confidence and secrecy between a juvenile court judge and a minor. This article analyzes the murder trial and consequent contempt of court case as reflective of a clash over questions of law, justice, and public interest and highlights the role of ordinary people, including children, in debating these ideas. It argues that, as legal actors engaged in a conflict between legal formalism and socialized law, members of the public debated their own perceptions and vernacular understandings of law, justice, and the role of the juvenile court.

This article argues that environmental justice extends beyond planning and decision-making to include enforcement as a critical, yet often overlooked, dimension. It advances the claim that incorporating environmental justice into enforcement law and policy is essential for addressing structural inequalities and promoting accountability in environmental governance. The primary objective of the article is to identify environmental justice guidelines embedded in enforcement frameworks, with the aim of strengthening the role of justice in regulatory practice and enhancing the equity and effectiveness of enforcement outcomes. The analysis focuses on three enforcement tools that reflect a flexible and responsive approach: (i) the United States’ Supplemental Environmental Projects, (ii) the United Kingdom’s Environmental Enforcement Undertakings, and (iii) Chile’s Compliance Programmes. The article draws on three sources of data: case studies, the environmental justice guidelines applicable to them, and the existing state of enforcement. It begins by examining the regulatory design of enforcement systems in the three jurisdictions; it then analyzes each tool to identify how environmental justice dimensions are integrated – or could be integrated – into their design and implementation. Finally, it assesses the practical application of these instruments, arguing that the deliberate incorporation of environmental justice considerations can improve the responsiveness, transparency, and legitimacy of enforcement mechanisms, which ultimately benefits both the environment and affected communities.

This study presents a mixed-methods analysis of the integration of social justice into legal practice in Hong Kong. While social justice within the legal field is a growing area of interest, research on how it can be enhanced through legal education remains relatively limited. This study aims to explore how higher education law courses can be leveraged to better incorporate social justice principles into contemporary legal practice. The research adopts a mixed-methods approach, including a quantitative analysis of questionnaires completed by 99 current law students in Hong Kong and a thematic analysis of interviews conducted with 33 students and legal professionals in the region. Findings suggest the potential benefits of increasing the emphasis on social justice within law programs at Hong Kong universities. The study also raises important questions about the optimal content and methods for delivering social justice education in legal curricula.

This article examines recent developments relating to the use of third-party findings of fact at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). A proliferation of fact-finding mechanisms creates more opportunities for litigants to ask the ICJ to rely on third-party facts. This demands renewed attention to how the ICJ responds to this type of evidence, especially given the rise of public interest litigation that may depend especially heavily on such materials. The analysis focuses on the ICJ’s approach in recent requests for the indication of provisional measures and asks whether the Court’s approach to third-party evidence differs depending on the phase of litigation, using the 2024 judgment in Ukraine v. Russia as a case study. Ultimately, recent decisions suggest that the ICJ’s efforts to distinguish evidence generated through an adversarial, court-like process from findings of fact based on investigation and fieldwork are often blurred in practice. Moreover, while the Court’s liberal approach to third-party evidence at the provisional measures phase may be justifiable, the quest for coherence in how the Court approaches third-party evidence, especially on the merits, remains a work in progress. To that end, the article suggests ways in which the Court could engage more closely with third-party fact-finding reports in the fulfillment of its adjudicatory function.

This article engages in a theoretical exercise, tackling an intentionally provocative question: is there such a thing as too much access to justice? Conventional wisdom suggests that barriers to access to justice ought to be low. Countless reform efforts put in place throughout the world have sought to expand access to justice and strengthen judicial institutions. What happens when access to these institutions is expanded? Who takes advantage of that access? Who is left behind? Weaving together scholarship on the unintended consequences of legal reforms and empirical examples from access to justice experiments in Canada, China, Colombia, India, Russia, South Africa, and the United States, this article shows how lowering material barriers to access to justice can: (1) increase strain on the legal system, (2) raise but fail to live up to expectations about the possibilities claim-making, (3) reinforce existing inequalities, and (4) offer limited and perhaps inadequate solutions.

In Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks with conviction on the need for and importance of community. King depicts American society and modern civilization as a great “world house” that is inhabited, inherited—and imperiled. Behind the metaphor of the world house is a prophetic vision and dream—the realization of what he called the “beloved community.” In this article, the author considers King’s beloved community ideal through a housing lens. Engaging with King’s metaphor, the author frames the beloved community as an apologetic for integrated community. The author views the metaphor of the world house as a significant means to expand understanding of beloved community, elevate housing as a moral-ethical concern, and engender radical structural solutions that can be realized through racial justice in the housing sector.

In this editorial, we draw insights from a special collection of peer-reviewed papers investigating how new data sources and technology can enhance peace. The collection examines local and global practices that strive towards positive peace through the responsible use of frontier technologies. In particular, the articles of the collection illustrate how advanced techniques—including machine learning, network analysis, specialised text classifiers, and large-scale predictive analytics—can deepen our understanding of conflict dynamics by revealing subtle interdependencies and patterns. Others assess innovative approaches reinterpreting peace as a relational phenomenon. Collectively, they assess ethical, technical, and governance challenges while advocating balanced frameworks that ensure accountability alongside innovation. The collection offers a practical roadmap for integrating technical tools into peacebuilding to foster resilient societies and non-violent conflict transformations.

This Article looks critically at the extension of sovereign rights to natural resources into the ocean commons. It focuses specifically on the continental shelf. I first account for the novelty of the continental shelf claims and the legal regime set by United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Then, I look at the structure, scope, and practice of sovereign rights to natural resources and assess the consequences of their application to this legally constructed underwater resource domain attached to the territory of a coastal state. The overall argument of this Article is that in the current form, sovereign rights do not promote justice in the ocean commons. Three distinct problematic consequences from the perspective of justice are analyzed: Distributive inequality, unjust politics of resource sovereignty, and legal and economic reification of marine ecosystems. In the conclusion, I raise the question of the role of sovereignty in the global commons and how to restructure it so that it meets the demands of safeguarding the ocean commons as an environmental planetary domain. The Article argues for the possibility of rethinking sovereignty in terms of Earth Trusteeship of the global commons based on a normative concept of sovereignty as trusteeship of humanity and the environment recently proposed in the philosophy of international law.

It has been more than a decade since the publication of three major reports on access to justice in Canada. These reports, namely Access to Civil and Family Justice: A Roadmap for Change1 by the Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters, Reaching Equal Justice: An Invitation to Envision and Act2 by the Canadian Bar Association, and the final report of the National Self-Represented Litigants Project,3 spurred considerable discussion, research, and action to understand and improve the state of access to justice in Canada. Importantly, all called for some variation on making the justice system “user-centered,”4 “people-centered,”5 or “user-friendly.”6

Sociolegal scholars have long debated the effectiveness of legal mobilization as a strategy for achieving social change. In addition to evaluating outcomes of wins and losses in court, they have identified several indirect effects of legal mobilization on social movements. Mobilizing new rights concepts can increase support for a movement, divide its base, and create new political allies or opponents. A win in court might lead to rights being institutionalized but not enforced, and it can serve to demobilize a movement base. This article contributes to this body of literature by arguing that movement groups can strategically mobilize the law to engage in co-optation from below – learning about an agency in order to build more effective organizing strategies. Using data gathered as a participant ethnographer in a grassroots environmental justice organization, I show how organizers used meetings with state regulators to learn how the agency interprets and enforces environmental laws and adjust their tactics in response. This study also demonstrates the value of conducting in-depth studies of local legal contests even as we seek to understand the role of the law in navigating our most pressing global challenges.

Human rights offer to ground global health law in equity and justice. Human rights norms, advocacy, and strategies have proven successes in challenging private and public inequities and in realizing more equitable domestic and global health governance. However, mobilizing human rights within global health law faces enormous political, economic, technological, and epidemiological challenges, including from the corrosive health impacts of power, politics, and commerce. This article focuses on what human rights could bring to three major global health law challenges — health systems strengthening and universal health coverage, the commercial and economic determinants of health, and pandemic disease threats. We argue that human rights offer potentially powerful norms and strategies for achieving equity and justice in these and other key global health domains. The challenge for those working in human rights and global health law is to work nimbly, creatively, and courageously to strengthen the contribution of these instruments to health justice.

Transformative justice is a vision, a framework, and a theory of change which pushes for radical abolition and reimagining of entire systems. It is a community-led strategy which centers on and seeks to uproot structural determinants of oppression. In this article, I outline how applied linguistics can and should draw on transformative justice principles as a methodology for doing applied linguistics and as an underpinning theory of change for the discipline itself. I explore how transformative justice in applied linguistics involves addressing the colonial roots of the discipline and its complicity in perpetuating raciolinguistic ideologies and co-constituted discourses of linguistic deficiency. I argue for new conceptualizations of impact which prioritize community solidarity. I argue for applied linguists to end collaborations with the police, the military, and the prison industrial complex, showing how these collaborations rely on systems of punitive accountability and modest reforms. I argue that transformative justice is a life-affirming theory of change for the discipline of applied linguistics and for the marginalized communities we work with.

Nowadays public policymakers are offered with opportunities to take data-driven evidence-based decisions by analyzing the very large volumes of policy-related data that are generated through different channels (e.g., e-services, mobile apps, social media). Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) tehcnologies ease and automate the analysis of large policy-related datasets, which helps policymakers to realize a shift toward data-driven decisions. Nevertheless, the deployment and use of AI tools for public policy development is also associated with significant technical, political, and operation challenges. For instance, AI-based policy development solutions must be transparent and explainable to policymakers, while at the same time adhering to the mandates of emerging regulations such as the AI Act of the European Union. This paper introduces some of the main technical, operational, regulatory compliance challenges of AI-based policymaking. Accordingly, it introduces technological solutions for overcoming them, including: (i) a reference architecture for AI-based policy development, (ii) a virtualized cloud-based tool for the specification and implementation of ML-based data-driven policies, (iii) a ML framework that enables the development of transparent and explainable ML models for policymaking, and (iv) a set of guidelines for using the introduced technical solutions to achieve regulatory compliance. The paper ends up illustrating the validation and use of the introduced solutions in real-life public policymaking cases for various local governments.

This article gives an overview of the global water law research and provides a contemporary understanding of water law spanning across public and private law questions of natural resources use, environmental protection, and water-related disasters. The overview is based on a systematic literature review. Using HLA Hart’s distinction, we divide the various strands of water law scholarship into two main perspectives, namely the internal and the external. From the law’s internal perspective, water law research is conducted with an intent to interpret and clarify rights and obligations in existing legal instruments, such as multilateral agreements and national statutes, and case law. Based on the literature review, vibrant themes from this perspective are water use and protection, water cooperation, human right to water, rights of nature, water security, water services, and coherence between legal instruments and institutions. From law’s external perspective, the focus of water law research is to analyse and understand how law as an instrument and societal institution facilitates and steers, but also impedes, the movement of public and private actors toward certain societal goals effectively and legitimately. Here, themes such as water law in collaborative and adaptive governance, ecosystem approach, good governance, and climate change adaptation are central.

We investigate structural features and processes associated with the onset of systemic conflict using an approach which integrates complex systems theory with network modeling and analysis. We present a signed network model of cooperation and conflict dynamics in the context of international relations between states. The model evolves ties between nodes under the influence of a structural balance force and a dyad-specific force. Model simulations exhibit a sharp bifurcation from peace to systemic war as structural balance pressures increase, a bistable regime in which both peace and war stable equilibria exist, and a hysteretic reverse bifurcation from war to peace. We show how the analytical expression we derive for the peace-to-war bifurcation condition implies that polarized network structure increases susceptibility to systemic war. We develop a framework for identifying patterns of relationship perturbations that are most destabilizing and apply it to the network of European great powers before World War I. We also show that the model exhibits critical slowing down, in which perturbations to the peace equilibrium take longer to decay as the system draws closer to the bifurcation. We discuss how our results relate to international relations theories on the causes and catalysts of systemic war.

Research on anti-plastics activism in Indonesia and Malaysia, although increasing somewhat in recent years, is sparse and patchy. Interviews with local activists and a review of the existing literature, however, does suggest this activism is intensifying. Activists are educating people of the health and ecological risks of plastics, and operating nonprofit organizations to recycle and repurpose plastics. They are organizing cleanups and advocating for marginalized waste workers. And they are lobbying governments for stricter regulations, exposing illegal operations, and building transnational advocacy networks. Collectively, these strands of activism appear to have the potential to aggregate eco-actions and decrease plastic pollution. In the coming years, however, given the power of the global plastics industry and the nature of politics within Indonesia and Malaysia, pro-plastics corporations and industry allies are likely going to increasingly contest anti-plastics narratives and strive to undermine efforts to address the root causes of plastic pollution, including rising sales of single-use plastics by transnational corporations, the dumping and burning of unrecyclable plastics from high-income countries, and inadequate waste infrastructure and regulatory enforcement. Further research on how this politics is affecting the power and effectiveness of anti-plastics activism, the article concludes, is going to be essential for improving plastics governance.

The term “blue justice” was coined in 2018 during the 3rd World Small-Scale Fisheries Congress. Since then, academic engagement with the concept has grown rapidly. This article reviews 5 years of blue justice scholarship and synthesizes some of the key perspectives, developments, and gaps. We then connect this literature to wider relevant debates by reviewing two key areas of research – first on blue injustices and second on grassroots resistance to these injustices. Much of the early scholarship on blue justice focused on injustices experienced by small-scale fishers in the context of the blue economy. In contrast, more recent writing and the empirical cases reviewed here suggest that intersecting forms of oppression render certain coastal individuals and groups vulnerable to blue injustices. These developments signal an expansion of the blue justice literature to a broader set of affected groups and underlying causes of injustice. Our review also suggests that while grassroots resistance efforts led by coastal communities have successfully stopped unfair exposure to environmental harms, preserved their livelihoods and ways of life, defended their culture and customary rights, renegotiated power distributions, and proposed alternative futures, these efforts have been underemphasized in the blue justice scholarship, and from marine and coastal literature more broadly. We conclude with some suggestions for understanding and supporting blue justice now and into the future.

We build a computational framework to support the planning of development and the evaluation of budgetary strategies toward the 2030 Agenda. The methodology takes into account some of the complexities of the political economy underpinning the policymaking process: the multidimensionality of development, the interlinkages between these dimensions, and the inefficiencies of policy interventions, as well as institutional factors that promote or discourage these inefficiencies. The framework is scalable and usable even with limited publicly available information: development-indicator data. However, it can be further refined as more data becomes available, for example, on public expenditure. We demonstrate its usage through an application for the Mexican federal government. For this, we infer historical policy priorities, that is, the non-observable allocations of transformative resources that generated past changes in development indicators. We also show how to use the tool to assess the feasibility of development goals, to measure policy coherence, and to identify accelerators. Overall, the framework and its computational tools allow policymakers and other stakeholders to embrace a complexity (and a quantitative) view to tackle the challenges of the Sustainable Development Goals.

In the wake of George Floyd's killing by police in Minneapolis and the global response inspired by Black Lives Matter, it is time for the field of global mental health to reexamine how we have acknowledged and addressed racism in our institutions, our research, and our mental health services. In solidarity with street level responses, this is an important opportunity to understand and collaboratively respond to public demand for systemic change. To respond effectively, it is vital to (1) be aware of the colonial history that influences today's practices, and move forward with anti-colonial and anti-racist actions; (2) identify where and why diversity and representation are lacking in the global mental health workforce, then follow steps to combat these disparities; and (3) work with communities and institutions to end both police violence and structural violence.