Henry Foe's dilemma

In 1722, Daniel Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year – a supposed account of the ‘great plague’ of 1665. It is commonly thought to be one of his most incisive pieces of ‘realist’ fiction. And, in our moment, one of his most prescient. The purpose of this paper is to revisit Defoe's Journal in order to stimulate reflection on our present experience of living through the ‘plague year’ of 2020. There is much, as we shall see, about governance during a plague that is resonant – but much also about ‘hearts melted into tears’, about suffering, how it is felt and how it is perceived. The purpose of the Journal, according to Defoe at least, was to inform ‘those who come after’, so that they might be better prepared, so that they would not make the same mistakes. We will see.

The jurisprudence of elimination: starvation and force-feeding of Palestinians in Israel's highest court

This paper assesses the functioning of law and legal institutions in Palestine/Israel through the lens of settler colonialism by analysing two thematically interconnected decisions issued by the Supreme Court of Israel, the first involving the starvation of besieged Palestinian civilians and the second involving the force-feeding of Palestinian prisoners. Following a discussion regarding the role of law in settler colonialism, it proceeds to argue that the Court enabled, legitimised and legalised state-sanctioned violence that targeted the native Palestinian population by and through a jurisprudence of elimination in order to facilitate the attainment of Israeli settler-colonial objectives. By so doing, the paper provides further evidence in support of the appropriateness of settler colonialism as a theoretical framework for the case of Israel, including in legal matters.

Liquid regulation: the (men's) business of women's water music?

Complexity and uncertainty often animate the desire for regulatory approaches seeking to fix, limit and constrain. But what if, instead of doubling down on ‘solid’ regulation, we also make room for ‘liquid’ regulatory approaches? We interrogate this question through deep empirical analysis of the developing regulatory framework around a form of Melanesian cultural property known as water music. We argue that, although both solid and liquid regulatory forms exist in all normative orders, we have recently seen an increasing emphasis on solid forms of regulation (legislation, registers, etc.) with respect to cultural property. As an effort to consider alternative approaches, we identify a range of liquid regulatory strategies drawing from our case-study. We show how attention to temporality, relationality and situatedness can impact upon the degree of liquidity of individual regulatory approaches, and how they can cumulatively impact the solidity or liquidity of the overall regulatory system. Finally, we identify the different ways in which gendered power and forms of accountability emerge in contexts of solid or liquid regulatory strategies.

Legitimising a ‘zombie idea’: childhood vaccines and autism – the complex tale of two judgments on vaccine injury in Italy

The impact of ‘bad’ science on judicial decision-making is a thorny aspect of the relationship between science and law. This study employs doctrinal and empirical analysis to explore two Italian judgments that asserted a causal link between childhood vaccines and autism. Using a combination of actor–network theory and legal pragmatism, we uncovered a network of actors and institutions internal and external to the legal system enabling these impactful decisions that went on to contribute to a crisis in vaccination coverage in Italy. These include trial strategies, resources, communication practices between arms of government, awareness and responsiveness of institutional actors, and institutional mechanisms governing the integration of scientific expertise into the legal process. By forensically analysing how a ‘zombie idea’ received a patent of legitimacy in the Italian context, this study provides useful lessons for legal systems grappling with complex and contested public health matters.

Protecting working welfare recipients through human rights experimentalism

In this paper, we adopt an experimentalist approach to determining the content of international human rights for assessing national mandatory work programmes for recipients of social assistance (MWPs). This approach implies going back and forth between law and experience in order to determine the better way to secure human rights in an ever-changing environment. After having identified six criteria for evaluating MWPs in the soft case-law of international bodies, we confront this emerging international human rights framework with an empirical study on MWP practices in the Netherlands. This confrontation reveals that specific aspects of the capability for voice of working welfare recipients are absent in the human rights framework and that the framework is not gender-neutral. Including these aspects, we construct an experimentalist human-rights-based instrument that is suitable for evaluating national MWPs.

Hidden depths: diversity, difference and the High Court of Australia

There is a growing international emphasis on the importance of diversity in the judiciary and the impact of the individual in decision-making. However, it can be a challenge to gain insight into the individuals who sit on the bench. For instance, there is limited official information about the individuals who sit on the High Court of Australia. One of the rare glimpses provided by the justices themselves is their judicial swearing-in speech. Drawing on a case-study of the swearing-in speeches of High Court justices sitting between 2008 and 2016, this paper illustrates how these speeches can illuminate key demographic information about the judiciary, as well as facets of the individual rarely explored in studies of judicial diversity: personality and values. This study demonstrates how swearing-in speeches can assist with filling information gaps about judicial diversity, and so extend debates about judicial selection.