What does it mean to think about trust as a legal scholar? From one perspective, there comes the broad question of why people trust or mistrust the law as it pertains to their lives and communities. Although there is no shortage of analytical angles from which to examine this question, to configure trust in relation to the lives of people and their communities is to broadly think about trust as a broad social phenomenon. That is because law is all-pervasive in structuring the social relations that shape the lives of individuals and their communities. On this basis, the multi-faceted traditions of ‘law and society’ and ‘socio-legal studies’ must become relevant for selecting the appropriate methods for exploring trust and trusting in relation to the law.

Social reproduction offers a critical lens through which to analyse how labour law creates and constructs labour/ers. Socially reproductive work, traditionally ignored in waged labour markets, has been omitted from legal categories that protect workers. Yet these same legal categories that create and construct labour/ers are themselves socially reproduced. In Sicilian agricultural work, social reproduction happens in the extra care that is needed in labour carried out by migrantised workers, as well as the silence that is reproduced by markets that overlook the exploitation buttressing a local economy. The lens of social reproduction connects the work behind the scenes that depends on the complicity, whether wilful or ignorant, of consumers who do not ‘care’ that the labour producing Sicilian Denominazione di Origine Protetta (Protected Designation of Origin, DOP) and Indicazione Geografica Protetta (Protected Geographical Denomination, IGP) products is legally irregular. Contributing to discussions of labour law’s limits, this article addresses how labour exploitation is socially reproduced through the invisibilisation of labour involved in cultivating and harvesting Sicilian DOP olives and IGP tomatoes.

The question of how digital health is regulated has become increasingly important within debates on technology, inequality and global health. While digital health is frequently celebrated for its capacity to expand access, build resilient systems and advance equity, scholars have raised critical concerns about its role in reproducing asymmetries of power. The potential for reproducing rather than curbing inequality is particularly relevant for the Global South. This Special Issue of the International Journal of Law in Context interrogates the ways in which digital health infrastructures, regulatory frameworks and transnational data flows are constitutive of coloniality and neoliberal capitalism. Bringing together socio-legal, feminist and decolonial perspectives, the contributions examine regulation as a terrain in which vulnerabilities, exclusions and structural inequalities are reinforced. Against the celebratory rhetoric of innovation, this collection situates regulation as a key site for understanding the entanglement of digital health with broader histories of coloniality and capitalism.

The promise of digitalisation in achieving Universal Health Coverage in postcolonial contexts is undermined by the realities of insufficiently resourced public healthcare systems. In response, private health insurance is often seen as essential to healthcare delivery. The provision of this private health insurance is increasingly mediated through digital infrastructures, with providers leaning into the promise of data-driven behavioural economics to provide better and more efficient services. While an increasing number of studies focus on digital health, in this paper, we particularly focus on the less-explored question of how datafication – under the veil of shared value, and enabled by forms of legal access – reproduces inequalities. Using the case study of Discovery, a financial services company in South Africa providing health insurance, we analyse how a social value and data-driven behavioural economic model of health insurance commodifies health and wellness. We argue that legal infrastructures are central to this commodification. Through a socio-legal critique of digital health, our article makes an original contribution to broader debates on enduring postcolonial social inequalities by illustrating how infrastructural injustice manifest through datafication.

This article draws on Roger Cotterrell’s framework for the sociological interpretation of the concept of trust to expound on, via examples from an empirical project in South Africa, methods for the empirical study of an informal environmental economy. Three distinct challenges encountered during fieldwork on the informal waste economy in South Africa are used to make a case for more robust empirical research methods – positionality, observation and the production of a documentary film, a non-traditional output. Each challenge concerns the relationship of trust between researcher and research respondent. The article concludes that these challenges can be addressed and managed via the appropriate socio-legal methodological framework. The article’s findings will have relevance for those embarking on an empirical study of the informal environmental economy, and for those interested in socio-legal methodology more generally.

Environmental protection is widely considered a core function of the state. Yet more than 210 million people currently live under the control of armed non-state actors (ANSAs), many of whom exercise state-like authority over vast, environmentally important territories. Despite growing legal and political science scholarship on ANSAs, their role in environmental protection remains largely unexplored. International law, shaped by conflict-centric frameworks, often fails to account for ANSAs’ non-military dimensions – especially those related to environmental service provision. Similarly, theories of rebel governance have yet to meaningfully incorporate environmental service provision as a governance facet. The article addresses this gap by examining the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) in Colombia, drawing on documentary analysis and interviews with former combatants. It shifts the limited ecological perspective on war, arguing that the FARC-EP’s environmental practices amounted to a form of rebel environmental governance – structured, intentional and legally plural. Through this case study, the article challenges dominant narratives that view ANSAs solely as environmental spoilers or incidental protectors and instead advocates for a more comprehensive understanding of their impact as environmental service providers and lawmakers. In doing so, the paper reframes ANSAs as socio-legal actors whose environmental practices merit scholarly attention – particularly in ongoing debates around accountability and transitional justice in conflict-affected regions.

As cities in the Global South gain visibility in global forums – engaging in climate negotiations, forming alliances and aligning with development goals – their legal and economic status remains structurally ambivalent. This article challenges the idea that these cities are becoming full international legal actors. Instead, we argue that they possess a ‘borderline international legal personality’: conditionally included in global regimes through mechanisms that reinforce long-standing asymmetries. Central to this dynamic is the notion of ‘creditworthiness’, now a key metric of development. Tools like sub-sovereign credit ratings pressure cities to prioritise investor confidence over local needs. These interventions promise international agency but often deepen financial dependency. We call for a re-reading of urban internationalism, attentive to the in-between status of Global South cities – caught between aspiration and discipline. Any emancipatory urban agenda must confront the financialisation of local governance and centre debt justice, autonomy and institutional reform.

Digital health services in Kenya comprise mobile health applications (mHealth apps), electronic health records, telehealth and telemedicine, which form part of an expanding digital health assemblage. These are shaped by transnational development agendas and donor-driven public health interventions. This paper discusses the for-profit turn in the digitalisation of health care – what I term the ‘appisation’ of health – as a site of intensified commodification where users are reconfigured as digitised health consumers. While other scholars have argued that digitalisation functions as extractive in deepening market penetration into spheres of life we rely on, I extend these arguments by claiming that, far from enhancing access, these technologies exploit vulnerabilities through opaque governance mechanisms and algorithmic decision-making, while transferring responsibility for health from the state to the individual, thus creating new dependencies on market-mediated platforms. Using discursive interface analysis of two health apps in Kenya, I examine how consumer health apps embed vulnerabilities while consumer law remains structurally limited in confronting the collective harms they generate.

This article brings Cotterrell’s legal concept of community based on trust-based interactions in social life to expand the critical horizons of economic sociology of law (ESL) in its analytical, normative and empirical aspects for law and development in Africa. Dominant law and economics approaches sometimes see informal economic activity as an aberration and/or an obstacle in development. This article proposes an alternative way of looking at informality in development in Africa through the lens of ESL. As part of wider social life, economic life is about social interactions in production, exchange, distribution and consumption while legal life is about social relations in and under the law. Furthermore, ‘legal and economic life shape and are shaped by each other, as well as by the wider social, and more-than-human, world’. This calls for a framework that reconceptualises law in ways that are inclusive of the many state, social, economic and other normative orders such as informal economic activity in African societies that are continually interacting as part of wider social life.

Against a backdrop of rapidly expanding health artificial intelligence (AI) development, this paper examines how the European Union’s (EU) stringent digital regulations may incentivise the outsourcing of personal health data collection to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), fuelling a new form of AI ethics dumping. Drawing on parallels with the historical offshoring of clinical trials, we argue that current EU instruments, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) and Medical Devices Regulation, impose robust internal safeguards but do not prevent the use of health data collected unethically beyond EU borders. This regulatory gap enables data colonialism, whereby commercial actors exploit weaker legal environments abroad without equitable benefit-sharing. Building on earlier EU responses to ethics dumping in clinical trials, we propose legal and policy pathways to prevent similar harms in the context of AI.

Constitutional democracies face significant threats. Such threats are countered by various theories of militant democracy and non-militant democratic self-defence, using a wide range of repressive, educational and social policy tools. The article introduces an alternative perspective on democratic self-defence policies, emphasising integration as a key component in maintaining the resilience of the constitutional community and draws on Rudolf Smend’s integration theory. It explores how constitutional design through its structures, powers, procedures, rituals and symbols shapes community cohesion and strengthens the constitutional order by deliberately using emotions.

Building on Roger Cotterrell’s call to theorise the law of trusts in relation to trust as an all-pervasive sociopolitical phenomenon, we explore the interplay between these two concepts of trust in relation to the rise of neoliberalism. Here, we centre how the ability of offshore trusts to evade tax/regulatory obligations compromises the ability of sovereign states to build institutions that nurture trust. Historicising this dynamic, we turn to how the rise of a post-imperial world of sovereign states in the context of decolonisation and the Cold War prompted elite interest in transnational legal innovations – especially trusts – that could avoid state-led redistribution efforts. Empowered by various crises, such innovations became central to neoliberal globalisation and its erosion of trust in the sovereign state. Focus on these material dynamics provides a new lens for conceptualising the failure of human rights and anti-corruption projects whose state-centric outlook detracts attention from broader transnational forces.

This article brings critical human rights scholarship into the intersex sphere to unearth the potential limitations of the growing deployment of human rights to improve the health care experiences of intersex people. It traces the changing tactics of intersex activist groups and identifies three tendencies – reformism, coerciveness and juridification – that may be brought by the intersex movement and international agencies embracing human rights as the vernacular. This article argues that the dominance of the human rights approach, while allowing the intersex struggle to gain legitimacy, visibility and recognition, risks fuelling a depoliticised framework of remedicalisation and increased penality. It deflects attention from the endeavour of interrogating the social and cultural foundations rendering intersex variances a deviant form of embodiment.

This article argues that modern trust law has undergone a radical global transformation while remaining largely absent from democratic debate, a condition the article terms trust law’s ‘permissive invisibility’. The article traces how trust law’s origins in equity entrenched a judge-centric, normatively charged but socially insulated doctrinal culture, which proved increasingly permissive as trusts were repurposed for regulatory arbitrage in an era of transnational financial capitalism. The article then shows how legislative reform was critically enabled by trust law’s particularly low public salience but inverted, high salience among the owners and operators of concentrated capital. The recursive force of this judicial and legislative permissiveness has now normalised antisocial innovations such as perpetual and massively discretionary trusts. The article concludes by calling for empirically grounded, critical socio-legal study in the tradition articulated by Roger Cotterrell as a necessary precondition for any democratically credible trust law reform agenda.

The introduction and use of digital contact tracing apps as part of pandemic management have notably raised many legal and ethical challenges, ranging from determinations of public interest in using gathered data to privacy protections for app users and broader considerations of national socio-economic priorities. As the use of these digital contact tracing apps is supported by laws, legal preparedness is essential in determining appropriate legal authority that considers necessary trade-offs such as temporary privacy infringements, proportional data gathering and collective public health benefits. This paper examines the extent of legal preparedness in addressing competing interests between public health and individuals in the use of digital contact tracing apps. It does so through two main lenses: (1) an analysis of Singapore’s legal framework pertaining to data protection, privacy and contact tracing apps and (2) an analysis of the domestic social and political influences that explain why Singapore’s approach to digital contact tracing was viable, and assess its potential or limits for broader applicability.

This paper revisits debates about the right to communicate from the late 1960s to early 2000s, examining how different actors engaged with this concept in reaction to imminent technological changes and their implications for society. It explores how these actors advocated for or contested this concept at different international forums such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to advance different agendas for the international order. In telling the story of the right to communicate, this paper adopts a historical-materialist approach, examining discursive struggles as reflective of and conditioned by material and social relations and their contradictions, and reflects on the question of the promise and perils of human rights for social change, considering not only the malleability of rights language but the material conditions of which human rights concepts are reflective and constitutive.

The digital age, while promising tools to advance health care, has simultaneously ushered in new forms of power asymmetry, with extractive data practices risking the perpetuation of historical injustices and structural inequities. Achieving epistemic justice in health data governance initiatives demands a fundamental shift in how knowledge is produced, legitimised and applied. It requires a concerted effort to delink from colonial epistemic hierarchies and to embrace the rich plurality of ways of knowing, ensuring that health data genuinely serves the well-being and prioritises the self-determination of those from all walks of life. This article critically examines Transform Health’s equity- and human rights-based ‘Health Data Governance Principles’ through a decolonial lens, interrogating their potential to foster equity in the rapidly expanding field of digital health. Grounded in a decolonial imperative, the article challenges dominant epistemologies that underpin current global health frameworks. The conceptual foundations and practical applications of the Health Data Governance Principles are then explored in light of the findings of an empirical study undertaken by the author which examined the Principles themselves, organisational perceptions thereof, and efforts towards their operationalisation. In particular, it interrogates whether these principles align with and address the needs and values of historically marginalised communities. Central to this analysis is the introduction of a decolonial nexus that brings into relation the decolonial concepts of ‘health data justice’, ‘epistemological delinking’ and the ‘vernacularisation of human rights’. This approach is intended to not only to expose epistemic injustice within prevailing health data governance models but also to centre emancipatory praxis in reclaiming knowledge, rights and representation in digital health agendas.

This article proposes to centre economic inequality when introducing trusts to law students. The subject is reputedly tedious and gruelling. This can only be compounded, as economic inequality intensifies, by the experiential distance between underprivileged students and the world of trusts. Yet their career prospects, and potential contributions to reducing inequality, can benefit from understanding trusts. The need to engage students in learning the subject, therefore, warrants attention. This article offers a four-step method aimed at promoting engagement by introducing the subject within the context of the familiar social problem of drastic economic inequality. It constructs this method by drawing from Roger Cotterrell’s critical and socio-legal consciousness about trusts.

This article reviews Roger Cotterrell’s landmark paper, ‘Trusting in Law: Legal and Moral Concepts of Trust’. That paper identified a shift from a moral conception of trusteeship based on the notion of a settlor reposing personal trust in a trustee, to an amoral systems-based conception of trusteeship, in which personal entrustment is largely absent. This article examines contractualised trusts, containing widely drawn exemption clauses, which commonly underpin commercial arrangements. It identifies two developments which have the potential to limit the amorality of the contractualised trust. The first is a reaffirmation of the existence of a non-excludable core of fiduciary obligations. The other is an enhanced understanding of the trustee’s accountability, owed to the court as well as to the beneficiaries, for the due administration of the trust. The developments demonstrate that equity has the resources to overcome contractual overreach in trusts law.

This article develops an evaluative framework for community-rooted justice systems through comparative analysis of South Africa’s Community Advice Offices (CAOs) and Bolivia’s constitutionally recognised Indigenous jurisdictions. Departing from courtroom-centric approaches that have dominated access-to-justice scholarship, the study employs socio-legal methodology synthesising ethnographic research, constitutional texts and institutional analyses. The examination reveals that both systems derive legitimacy from relational embeddedness rather than formal legal authority, resolve disputes holistically within social networks and navigate ongoing tensions between community autonomy and state regulation. From these practices, five evaluative dimensions emerge inductively: accessibility, responsiveness, legitimacy, empowerment and sustainability. The framework offers conceptual tools for assessing alternative justice mechanisms on their own terms, contributing to a shift from descriptive legal pluralism toward evaluative pluralism attentive to how communities themselves produce and experience justice.