The regulation of emerging technologies often involves prolonged legislative processes that demand significant attention and resources. Setting a future-proof framework is therefore imperative: not only to accommodate innovation, but to hedge against the uncertainties that render detailed legislation obsolete. The drafting of legal frameworks to regulate emerging technologies increasingly engages a variety of future-proofing techniques.

Surveillance laws are more susceptible to the need for future-proofing. The nature of intelligence agencies and their operational need to remain secretive provide powerful incentives to prevent their governing legal framework from undergoing frequent legislative revision. Accordingly, surveillance laws are often drafted in a manner catering to these constraints.

This article maps and assesses the principal future-proofing strategies available to legislators. It then examines Israeli surveillance law as a test case. The article analyses the Israel Security Agency (ISA) Law, which, inter alia, governs the online surveillance activities of Israel’s domestic security agency, the ISA. The article examines the language of the ISA Law currently in force. It explores a past expansion of its purposive domain through the deployment of ISA surveillance for COVID-19 contact-tracing, and the subsequent judicial narrowing of the statutory provision enabling this deployment. The article then discusses in detail the future of ISA surveillance powers and their future-proofing mechanisms pursuant to the recently published ISA Amendment Memorandum.

This article considers two arguments raised by the Government of Israel to explain why it does not regard the West Bank as occupied territory and may therefore establish Israeli settlements there. The first is that this territory was not the sovereign territory of another state when occupied by Israel in June 1967; the second is that the trust created by the League of Nations Mandate over Palestine still applies in those parts of Mandatory Palestine that did not become the sovereign territory of another state in 1948. After a short introduction, the article argues that in the modern era, in which peoples have the right to self-determination, the law of belligerent occupation may apply in territory that was not the territory of a state before it was occupied. Relying on a large body of historical research, the article then shows that the mandate system was a compromise between the colonial aspirations of Britain and France and the principle of self-determination propagated by US President Woodrow Wilson. The Mandate did not give rights to Jews or the Jewish people. It merely obligated Britain to facilitate its commitment under the Balfour Declaration to create the conditions that ‘will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home’ in Palestine. This obligation, and its parallel right, ended with the termination of the Mandate and the establishment of the State of Israel, which was the ultimate realisation of a national home for the Jewish people in the land of Israel. Even if one were to accept the argument that the trust established by the Mandate continues to apply in the West Bank, in an era in which colonial ideas have been rejected, the conclusion is not that Jewish citizens of Israel have a right to settle there, but that the right of the Palestinian inhabitants of that area to self-determination should be respected.

The purpose of this study is to discuss possible solutions to stated problems and to reflect on the prospects for the resumption of military justice in Ukraine. The research formulates solutions for overcoming the negative consequences for the judiciary of the armed aggression by Russia against Ukraine. With regard to the limited institutional and human resources of international tribunals such as the International Criminal Court, the main burden of the investigation and trial of cases arising from military legal relations will be placed on the Ukrainian judicial system. International tribunals play a more global role, which is imposing responsibility on the organisers of armed aggression against Ukraine and placing sanctions on the military and political leaders of the aggressor country. For the judiciary of Ukraine, the best way to resolve this significant problem is to restore the system of military courts, which were voluntarily liquidated in 2010. The restoration of military courts will make it possible to unload pressure from the system of courts of general jurisdiction, to ensure prompt resolution of hundreds of thousands of cases of compensation for damage caused to citizens and businesses as a result of the hostilities, as well as the just trial of criminal proceedings for military and war crimes.

Since the 1970s the EU has expressed its continuous commitment to contributing to the resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict. This commitment, which is increasingly linked to its obligation to advance the rule of international law, is manifested in its support for the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel (the two-state solution). The article contributes to the literature on the EU’s efforts in conflict resolution in the context of the Conflict, and it does so in the scholarly contexts of international law, EU law, international relations, and European integration. Firstly, it identifies a dissonance between, on the one hand, the EU’s strong interest in the resolution of the Conflict and its firm commitment to such resolution and its long-standing engagement in promoting such resolution; and, on the other hand, its actual, ineffective contribution to achieving that goal. Secondly, it analyses the two principal instruments adopted by the EU towards Israel: (i) the linkage between the upgrading of EU–Israel relations and advancement towards the resolution of the Conflict (the linkage instrument), and (ii) the policy of granting trade and trade-related benefits to entities and products situated within the recognised borders of the State of Israel, while withholding the benefits of EU–Israeli cooperation from entities and products in the Occupied Territories (the differentiation instrument). The article represents the first attempt to analyse these instruments together, and to do so within the overarching theoretical framework of the EU’s actorness and effectiveness in its external relations. It concludes that the ineffectiveness of these instruments renders the EU’s involvement itself ineffective, thereby preventing the EU from contributing meaningfully to the resolution of the Conflict. The analysis of the article focuses on EU efforts over the last 30 years, and its conclusions are examined against the developments in the Middle East since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023.

This article analyses the legal classification framework applicable in cross-border non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) through the lens of international humanitarian law (IHL). It defines cross-border NIACs as armed conflicts involving a state or a multinational force, engaging non-state armed groups on the territory of another state, with or without that state’s consent; as well as hostilities between non-state armed groups across state borders. Where a state acts without the territorial state’s consent, overlapping legal classifications may arise, necessitating use of the ‘double classification’ method. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and customary IHL are identified as the core legal sources that apply to this variation of NIAC, while the potential extraterritorial application of Additional Protocol II 1977 (AP II) is considered in the light of the analogy with international human rights law. The article contends that when a state exercises effective control over persons in cross-border NIACs, obligations under AP II may extend extraterritorially to its armed forces.

This article explores the potential effect of converting a constitutional narrative into a tax narrative that might help to address a constitutional controversy. The article examines, as a case study, the deep and long-standing issue of inequality in mandatory conscription. All efforts made over the decades to resolve the conflict or reduce its scope have failed. The article sets up a novel framework by conceptualising mandatory service as a ‘tax in-kind’, proposing a mandatory army tax credit (MATC) as a significant tool to alleviate the inequality. The proposed regime bridges the tension between Israel’s ‘people’s army’ ethos and the growing inequality. The proposed tax regime leverages the framing effect to preserve the ‘people’s army’ ethos while addressing inequities. Our insights apply to any country with mandatory military service facing issues of inequality: should conscription controversies be addressed solely through constitutional narrative, or through tax narrative as well? In addition, the approach of the article challenges traditional tax perspectives and public policy by incorporating non-monetary obligations into the tax discourse.

Professor John-Stewart Gordon addresses in his new book – The Robot Rights Manifesto (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) – the individual rights owing to AI systems. In a nutshell, Gordon claims that the more that advanced AI systems come to resemble human beings – both in their physical appearance (in the form of humanoid robots or virtual persons) and in their sapience (capacity to reason and apply moral considerations) and sentience (capacity to experience suffering, pain and pleasure) – the weaker the case becomes for differentiating between humans and AI systems with respect to access to rights. In particular, he argues that human-like robots are morally significant and should already be entitled to some rudimentary rights protection. Despite some doubts, Gordon’s book ultimately succeeds in its primary mission: to demonstrate that robot rights deserve moral consideration. It also succeeds in demonstrating how a bill of robot rights (and obligations) built upon such consideration could look. This is no small achievement.

This article examines the transformative impact of large language models (LLMs) on online content moderation, revealing a critical gap between platforms’ rule-based policies and their AI-driven enforcement mechanisms. Using Facebook’s hate speech moderation policies and practices as a case study, we identify a paradox: while content policies are increasingly rule-oriented, AI-driven enforcement seems to operate in a standard-like manner. This disconnect creates transparency, consistency and accountability challenges relating to the delineation of online freedom of expression that are not addressed in the literature, and require attention and mitigation. In this specific context, we introduce the concept of ‘rules by the millions’ to describe how AI systems actually operate through generating vast networks of micro-rules that evade traditional regulatory oversight. This phenomenon disrupts the conventional rules-versus-standards framework used in legal theory, raising urgent questions about the adequacy of current AI governance mechanisms. Indeed, the rapid adoption of LLMs in content moderation has outpaced the human capacity to monitor them, creating a pressing need for adaptive frameworks capable of managing the evolving capacities of AI.