Immanuel Kant’s account of justice is no enemy of potent political activism. Claims that seem to condemn any but the most bloodless and measured protest are better read as cautions against actions that forsake justice for violence, fraud, or whim, that spurn rather than elevate moral assessment and critique, that undermine public trust in the rule of law, and that advance individual lust for power or personal gain at the expense of justice. Most fundamentally, Kantian political activism is committed to vigorous social and political justice reforms respectful of the civic agency of persons and duly sensitive to worldly conditions.

This article presents two interconnected arguments. First, a method other than the doctrinal method is needed to study EU constitutional law. Using the ruling in Commission v Hungary as the central example, the article demonstrates that EU constitutional law is not just legal but also political in nature. Following Martin Loughlin, the article therefore argues that the method of EU constitutional law is ‘the method of prudence’. Second, adopting this perspective shows that the academic and judicial discourse concerning Article 2 TEU has been off the mark. CJEU case law, in particular, is characterised by a demise of constitutional prudence.

The 2024–2026 reform of the EU return procedure constitutes the most far–reaching transformation of the European return acquis since the adoption of the key instrument governing returns—Directive 2008/115/EC. This Article critically assesses the impact of the reform on the EU return acquis and more generally on the migration regulatory framework. First, it introduces the concept of “exceptionalized pluralism” to describe the defining structural feature of the reform: the multiplication of derogatory return tracks—at external and internal EU borders and extraterritorially—that systematically displace the procedural safeguards constitutionalized by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), progressively relegating the common return procedure from norm to residual exception. Second, it argues that this architecture raises constitutional concerns on four interconnected fronts: the codification of numerous accelerated border transfer procedures institutionalizing harmonization as the coordination of coercion rather than the harmonization of rights; the European Return Order reproducing the structural accountability gaps of the Dublin system; the systematic expansion of pre-removal detention recalibrating the constitutional relationship between the right to liberty and executive power beyond what Article 6 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU (CFR) and the CJEU permit; and the formalization of return externalization through “return hubs” raising rule of law and accountability issues. In conclusion, the Article argues that the legitimacy of the emerging European return system will depend not on its operational speed or uniformity, but on whether enforcement harmonization is matched by concrete implementation of Charter-based safeguards. Moreover, it warns that, absent such implementation, “exceptionalized pluralism” will continue to operate as a self-reinforcing regulatory logic, expanding its derogatory tracks and leaving courts to fulfill, under conditions of mounting institutional pressure, a constitutional function that the legislative design has failed to assume.

There is a broad agreement that political and economic institutions matter for long-term development. Yet relatively little is known as to how to adopt good-quality institutions and reform weak institutions, for which one needs to know how they change. This paper provides a systematic econometric investigation of long-run patterns of institutional change, using panel time series methods allowing for different forms of country-specific heterogeneity and cross-section dependence. We focus on variables capturing the quality of four key political and economic institutions over 200 years and 161 countries from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) database: electoral democracy and executive constraints, for political institutions; and the rule of law and property rights, for economic institutions. We test whether institutions change or persist, whether political and economic institutions tend to co-evolve, and whether changes in political institutions cause changes in economic institutions in the long run. We find that political and economic institutions are non-stationary, suggesting that institutional change is more the norm than the exception. We also find that they tend to co-evolve, although this is less evident for property rights, and that long-run causality runs mainly from political to economic institutions. We illustrate the cross-country evidence with discussions on Indonesia and Chile.

The EU chose “anti-corruption” to target a particular mode of citizenship acquisition: citizenship by investment. The fact that no other mode of acquiring citizenship has been actively stigmatised through “corruption” rhetoric, including discretionary naturalisations based on economic contributions, suggests that corruption was by no means the European Commission’s main concern. The high importance of citizenship could indeed carry corruption risks associated with it. This, however, cannot be the sole ground for closing particular avenues for naturalisation. Improving the enforcement of the rule of law and the effective implementation of anti-corruption mechanisms are more suitable approaches. Fighting “corruption” served as a rhetorical device deployed by the Commission to stop the supposedly corrupting effects of investment naturalisations on the ethno-nationalist Eurowhiteness model, which this institution, together with the Court of Justice, has chosen for Europeans in direct departure from the law in force. “Anti-corruption,” thus, helped achieve institutional ends unrelated to either fighting corruption or reinforcing the rule of law and other values in the EU.

This article examines China’s legal framework for protecting healthcare information in the artificial intelligence (AI) era from a rule of law perspective. Critically analysing the Basic Healthcare and Health Promotion Law (2020) alongside the Personal Information Protection Law (2021), we identify systemic vulnerabilities enabling institutional overreach: ambiguous consent thresholds, absent use-case governance, and deficient auditing mechanisms. Case studies, including coronavirus disease 2019 data leaks, demonstrate how legislative gaps perpetuate power asymmetries, violating Lon Fuller’s principles of clarity and congruence. We argue that China’s “socialist rule of law” paradigm prioritises state control at the expense of individual safeguards, contravening global norms like General Data Protection Regulation accountability standards. The article proposes statutory reforms: embedding objection rights, codifying purpose-limited data processing, and establishing independent audits. Only through such measures can China reconcile AI-driven healthcare innovation with the rule of law’s core tenets: transparency, accountability, and restraint on arbitrary power.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems already govern – they rank speech, allocate attention, filter applicants and triage claims. Technical improvements in safety and alignment do not determine whether publics will accept that governance. Legitimacy, on the sociological view used here, turns on recognition: whether power appears rule-bound, justified and situated in institutions that speak for those it governs. Social media demonstrates the problem: distribution improved even as publics questioned who sets the rules, producing recurrent conflicts grounded in missing authorization. As AI embeds upstream of more domains, the risk is repeating that crisis at larger scale – systems that perform yet lack legitimacy, inviting resistance and regulatory backlash. This Article makes legitimacy an explicit regulatory aim for AI. It identifies three persistent deficits: opacity blocks audience-understandable reasons; private actors wield public-facing authority without recognized authorization; and administrative automation strains participation, reason-giving and review. Legal tools can structure recognition. Thin legality supplies visible forms – publicity, stability, consistency – that signal non-arbitrariness. Thick legality adds public authorship, audience-facing reasons and contestation. This Article distills this into three principles: Integration seats AI rule-setting in recognized venues; Familiarity presents rules in locally credible forms; and Contestation guarantees a credible second look. Together, these convert performance into justification and justification into authority publics recognize as rightful.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has revived the European Union’s enlargement policy, placing it at the forefront of the EU’s priorities. This process is being viewed as the next phase of EU enlargement, encompassing the Western Balkans, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. This article examines the new framework for EU accession negotiations adopted in 2022, which regrouped the chapters of the acquis (presently 35 negotiating chapters) into six clusters. The article presents a case study on the Western Balkans, highlighting both their achievements and shortcomings in strengthening the rule of law and how the new framework is being applied to them. It analyses whether the EU has expanded the rule of law conditionality across the negotiating chapters in the new clusters format as a pre-emptive measure regarding EU candidate states’ ability to uphold the rule of law and their commitments to fundamental rights before joining the Union. Furthermore, it assesses whether the reform of the EU accession negotiations framework has been influenced by the experience of rule of law erosion and backsliding in Poland and Hungary, as well as assessing the reasons for including some EU candidate states from the Western Balkans in the annual Rule of Law Report mechanism while conditioning EU funds on their respect for the rule of law.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in public administration, yet its opacity raises concerns about arbitrary exercises of state power. This article argues that alongside regulatory frameworks, the Rule of Law supplies an independent basis for limiting state deployment of AI. Drawing on widely accepted ideas associated with the Rule of Law – predictability (decisions must guide conduct ex ante) and procedural clarity (rationales must be knowable and contestable ex post) – the article shows how these standards constrain government use of AI. It examines why black box systems frustrate legal guidance and contestability, and why explanations are often the minimally sufficient remedy. A welfare-benefits hypothetical illustrates the stakes of opacity versus explainability. The article concludes that Rule of Law limits offer a distinct and operationalizable basis for determining when state deployment of AI contravenes fundamental commitments, demonstrating that not all government uses of AI should be permitted.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo ended the longstanding practice under which courts deferred to reasonable agency interpretations of unclear statutory language. Yet the Loper Bright Court erred in holding that such deference violated a federal statute. Deference to agencies is justified by their expertise and political accountability. Moreover, contrary to the majority’s suggestion, deference does not violate the law-declaration principle. Indeed, deference to other actors is inherent in the judicial function; courts routinely defer to other actors because ‘saying what the law is’ means identifying the authoritative utterances of those other actors. Although the non-deferential regime of Loper Bright might be seen as useful in the present moment—when federal agencies are asserting unprecedented powers—such a view misunderstands what is happening. The current U.S. administration is not adopting questionable but arguably reasonable interpretations of federal law. Across many domains, the current administration is simply acting lawlessly.

When will individuals support government noncompliance with the written law? A bedrock principle of the rule of law is that politicians who fail to comply with written law will face political consequences. Drawing on survey experiments fielded in two consolidated democracies, we introduce the noncompliance penalty, the loss of public support for a government action that contravenes the law. The results show that citizens do penalize governmental noncompliance with the law. However, we find that this penalty decreases if government noncompliance advances the policy interests of favored protest groups, and mixed evidence that this penalty increases with professed support for the rule of law. Perhaps surprisingly, our results suggest that citizens with the strongest commitment to the rule of law can become the most accepting of noncompliance if it advances their policy goals. These findings have important implications for understanding whether the public will punish politicians who disregard the formal letter of the law.