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This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law’s enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontroversial, natural, and universal conditions of being ‘human’ cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law’s understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence.

Philip Pettit has made central to modern republican theory a distinctive account of freedom—republican freedom. On this account, I am not free solely because I can make choices without interference. I am truly free, only if that non-interference does not itself depend on another’s forbearance (what Pettit calls ‘formal’ freedom). Pettit believes that the principal justification for the traditional focus of the criminal law is that it constitutes a bulwark against domination. I will, in part, be considering the merits of this claim. Is the importance of the orthodox realm of the criminal law solely or mainly explained by the wish to protect people from domination? In short, the answer is that it is not. Across the board, the criminal law rightly protects us equally from threats to what Pettit calls ‘effective,’ as opposed to formal, republican freedom. I will develop my critique of Pettit’s account of criminal law, in part to raise questions about the role of ‘domination’ in political theory, and about whether it poses a significant challenge to liberal accounts of criminal law.

It is good to take stock from time to time and to see how things stand in jurisprudence. So, what is the relationship of doctrine and theory with jurisprudence? Is private law theory apolitical while public law contains politics for the very many constitutional ends in the Global South? In India, legal theorist Chhatrapati Singh very originally asked if legal systems and normative systems were the same? Chhatrapati’s enquiry was however a species of the classical approach to the law that promotes the law’s purity. On the contrary, the postcolonial approaches account for the historical life as well as the political proclivities of the law. The private law theory often seen as impersonal and non-imperial comes under scrutiny in the postcolonial approaches. Duncan Kennedy and Roberto Unger notably problematized contract theory, while Upendra Baxi argued for mass tort as public law—contract and tort are both private law—to offer, if you will, a jurisprudence of the South. A southern jurisprudence essentially rejects an impersonal reading of the private law.

It is widely acknowledged that human rights law (hereafter, HRL) and international criminal law (hereafter, ICL) share core normative features. Yet, the literature has not yet reconstructed this underlying basis in a systematic way. In this contribution, I lay down the basis of such an account. I first identify a similar tension between a “moral” and a “political” approach to the normative foundations of those norms and to the legitimate role of international courts (hereafter, ICs) and tribunals adjudicating those norms. With a view to bring the debate forward, I then turn to the practices of HRL and international criminal law (hereafter, ICL) to examine which of those approaches best illuminates some salient aspects of the adjudication of ICs. Finally, I argue that the political approach best explains the practice. While each preserves a distinct role, HRL and ICL both establish the basic conditions for the primary subject of international law (HRL and ICL, for the purpose of this article), namely the state, to legitimately govern its own subjects constructed as free and equal moral agents.

Th is paper summarizes the methodology of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project, and related analytical issues. Th e WGI has covered over two hundred countries and territories, measuring six dimensions of governance starting in 1996: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. The aggregate indicators are based on several hundred individual underlying variables, taken from a wide variety of existing data sources. Th e data reflect the views on governance of survey respondents and public, private, and NGO sector experts worldwide. We also explicitly report margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. We find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country and over-time comparisons. Th e aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying source data.

Against increasing rule of law backsliding within the EU, the European Commission has presented the rule of law as a well-established and well-defined principle whose core meaning is furthermore shared as a common value among all Member States. In refute, the national governments of the two EU countries, which are both subject to special EU procedures on account of the systemic threat to the rule of law their repeated actions have caused, have claimed that the rule of law is neither defined in EU law, nor could it be defined in EU law. This article’s primary aim is to assess these conflicting assertions. It does so by first offering an overview of the EU legal framework on the basis of which it is shown that the rule of law, as asserted by the Commission, is a well-established constitutional principle of EU law. It furthermore shows that it is well-defined, not least because of the Court of Justice’s extensive case law, the European Commission’s definitional codification of it and most recently, the adoption of the Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation 2020/2092 which provides the first comprehensive allen compassing internal-oriented definition of the rule of law adopted by the EU co-legislators. This article furthermore contends that the EU’s understanding of the rule of law reflects what may be presented as a broad consensus in the European legal space on its core meaning and components; its legal use as a primary principle of judicial interpretation and a source from which standards of judicial review may be derived; and how the rule of law relates to other fundamental values. Finally, this article concludes by examining the reality of a potentially emerging East-West dissensus as regards the rule of law. In light of evidence of strong and widespread support for the rule of law in every single EU Member State in the face of top-down attempts to systemically undermine it, it is however submitted that there is no meaningful East-West divide but an authoritarian-liberal divide at elite level.

To reinstate what amounts to a “Soviet-style justice system”, Polish authorities have repeatedly and deliberately violated the Polish Constitution and EU law. Rather than comprehensively detailing these repeated violations, this article focuses on the EU dimension of Poland’s rule of law breakdown. Using the activation of the Rule of Law Framework by the European Commission on 13 January 2016 as a starting point, this article offers a critical five-year assessment of EU’s (in)action starting with an overview of the extent to which virtually all of the multiple problematical issues identified early on by the Commission have yet to be addressed by Polish authorities by January 2021. Regarding the Commission and the Council’s (in)action, this article argues that the Commission has systematically acted in a too little too late fashion while the Council has systematically failed to meaningfully act, with the inaction of these two EU institutions amounting, at times, to dereliction of duties. By contrast, the Court of Justice has forcefully defended judicial independence whenever an infringement case was lodged with it by the Commission. The Court of Justice’s record in preliminary ruling cases is more mixed due, in part, to the Court’s apprehension to undermine the principle of mutual trust. The article ends with a list of key lessons and recommendations which reflect the EU’s few successes and many failures highlighted in this article. It is submitted inter alia that more statements, dialogue and reports are not going to help contain, let alone solve Poland’s rule of law crisis. It is indeed no longer a crisis the EU is facing but a total breakdown in the rule of law in Poland which, in turn, represents a threat to the interconnected legal order that underpins the EU.

The issue of hate speech has received significant attention from legal scholars and philosophers alike. But the vast majority of this attention has been focused on presenting and critically evaluating arguments for and against hate speech bans as opposed to the prior task of conceptually analysing the term 'hate speech' itself. This two-part article aims to put right that imbalance. It goes beyond legal texts and judgements and beyond the legal concept hate speech in an attempt to understand the general concept hate speech. And it does so using a range of wellknown methods of conceptual analysis that are distinctive of analytic philosophy. One of its main aims is to explode the myth that emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred are part of the essential nature of hate speech. It also argues that hate speech is best conceived as a family resemblances concept. One important implication is that when looking at the full range of ways of combating hate speech, including but not limited to the use of criminal law, there is every reason to embrace an understanding of hate speech as a heterogeneous collection of expressive phenomena. Another is that it would be unsound to reject hate speech laws on the premise that they are effectively in the business of criminalising emotions, feelings, or attitudes of hate or hatred.

In recent years the creeping deterioration of democratic rule worldwide has become a major preoccupation across a wide range of research fields and disciplines—especially public law and political science—as scholars struggle to understand the nature of evolving threats to a broad range of democratic systems. Many terms are now used to refer to the incremental degradation of democratic rule worldwide, or ‘democratic decay’. Abusive constitutionalism. Autocratic legalism. Populist constitutionalism. Bad faith constitutionalism. De-constitutionalism. Constitutional retrogression. Constitutional capture. Constitutional rot. Constitutional decay. Democratic deconsolidation. Democratic backsliding. Authoritarianisation. Authoritarian backsliding. Rule of law backsliding. Democratic erosion. Democratic recession. The list goes on. This article argues that conceiving of this scattered cross-disciplinary literature as a research field and providing an account of recent conceptual development can help to map a rapidly developing landscape, maximise the analytical utility of key concepts, identify resonances and duplication among concepts and across discrete literatures, and can help to ensure that this emerging quasi-field develops in a more coherent and rigorous manner.