This article investigates changes in the right to social assistance – a means-tested cash support programme, regulated by the Social Services Act – for irregularised migrants over a period of four decades, 1982–2022. The article makes the case that austerity policies have hollowed out the right to support, with significant repercussions for those with irregularised residency status. In doing so, it draws on a range of empirical data to shed light on the dynamics of legal change over time and across various settings, identifying both continuities and critical turning points. The latter include shifts in national or local migration policies, and novel intersections between migration law and social law, epitomised by court judgments that have redrawn the lines of inclusion and exclusion in the sphere of rights holders. The article also highlights continuous issues concerning inconsistencies in the legal sources made used of by courts, neglect of children’s interests and needs, and an application of requirements for participation in work-related activities that disadvantage migrants and citizens alike. Ultimately, the article offers insights into how social rights can be preserved in the context of increasingly restrictive migration and social policies.

Financial redress for victims of occupational diseases can be offered through no-fault compensation schemes. No-fault compensation schemes have an explicit mission in promoting perceived fairness and justice. The objective is to offer a quick, fair and just procedure and outcome, while preventing civil court procedures and restoring trust. However, the question is whether applicants of these no-fault schemes indeed experience perceived fairness and justice. This paper discusses the result of an in-depth interview study with fifty-eight victims involved in no-fault schemes for occupational diseases in the Netherlands. We focus on the role of perceived procedural justice, outcome concerns and trust in the (former) employer.

The crisis that now grips the ‘living earth’ establishes an intersection of climate and finance which entails questions of time: what does temporality mean in the context of both climate emergency and the processes of financialisation? In this paper, I intervene in these debates by reflecting on the reconstruction of time as a concrete legal object in the space of international investor-state arbitration. Over the past decade, international arbitration settlements, often using the accounting technique of discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis, have increasingly relied on a conception of investor-oriented time that offers an expansive future, a time of long-term unbroken integrity. I trace the complex but often uneven shifts in arbitration practices through which the future is reconfigured not as a proximate and conditional object but as a category, encoded in DCF, which is endlessly expansive. The time of the unbroken asset, I argue, is in urgent disjuncture with the time of transition.

Even after seven decades since it came into force, examinations of the Indian Constitution remain partial and incomplete. It is not widely known that the original ratified copy of the Constitution also makes a visual argument through the opening pages of every part. These elaborately crafted artworks, which are entirely negated in Indian scholarship, are structured in the form of a teleological and linear narrative, encompassing a claim of an unbroken link to an immemorial civilisation. Based on archival research and a hermeneutic that combines imaginal analysis, literary theory, historical scholarship and constitutional jurisprudence, this article will demonstrate that these constitutive images are the aesthetic foundation that imaginally binds the constitutional subject and the collective citizenry, and this article will show how its negation is closely tied to a foundational ambivalence that endures in constitutional law.

The gated community is a unique site of social reproduction which has proliferated across India. Elite families are reproduced at the individual, household level but also at the communal level in service-rich private enclaves. These households rely heavily on specialised reproductive labourers who are deprived of worker status because they work in the private domain. Homeowners’ associations or resident welfare associations (RWAs) meanwhile regulate reproductive labour through surveillance and wage fixing and by regulating entry and exit. Despite their public function, RWAs claim no responsibility for worker welfare due to privity of contract and the exclusion of ‘domestic service’ from labour laws. We examine India’s new labour codes, establishment laws and constitutional law to pin responsibility on RWAs as public bodies for ensuring the fundamental rights and welfare of these workers.

Mapping of human rights abuses and international crimes is an increasingly common tool to evidence, preserve and visualise information. This paper asks, what does rights-informed mapping in the context of mass graves look like? What are the rights concerned and allied goals, and how might these practicably apply during a pilot study? The study offers an analysis of the goals and benefits espoused to accrue to mapping and documentation efforts, as well as an explication of rights arising when engaging with mass graves. Our findings underscore the imperative of understanding the full ramifications of the applicable context, in our case the life-cycle of mass graves. This will bring to the fore the rights engaged with the subject as well as the challenges with data points, collation and reporting as experienced in a pilot (Ukraine) where realities on the ground are not static but remain in flux.

This paper examines the core twin concepts of secularism and pluralism and their location within the Indian constitutional discourse, through a discussion of the hijab ban in the South Indian state of Karnataka. I suggest that attempts at Hindu majoritarian subversion of these core principles face challenges due to the structure of the Indian Constitution, and due to the constitutional agency and mutinies set in motion by women through their legal challenge of state action. I discuss the hijab ban in India and the two judgments on the ban as an example of this attempted subversion but also of its failure, suggesting that these judgments fall short in their reading of this interrelationship between secularism and pluralism. In doing so, I introduce a threefold analytical categorisation, pluralist constitutionalism, constitutional appropriation and constitutional derailment, to help us outline the tensions inherent in constitutional politics in the present.

In N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, core laws are written on stone. But the tablets are incomplete, open to interpretation and their authorship uncertain. Nonetheless, Stone Law forms the basis of the governance system. Ultimately, the narrative reveals that the Stone Laws are recent in origin and an instrument of subjugation whose claims to common sense belie its harms. This article considers immutability in law and the ways in which particular laws become as if written in stone. Constitutional law and jus cogens are two examples of immutable worldbuilding laws represented as inevitable, absolute, unyielding and perpetual. Debates in law and humanities on genre, performance, interpretation and the concerns of a particular era are often reflected and refracted through both the laws and the literature of an era. In particular, the practice of worldbuilding is used to demonstrate the wariness necessary when laws are represented as immutable.

An (ongoing) interrogation of colonial wrongdoing is important for debates on decolonisation, restorative justice, racial and gender equality and global political and socio-economic equality. This article presents a theoretical study of colonialism’s legal-political injustices and aims to (re)turn the discussion on colonialism to the field’s most powerful insight, i.e. that of of epistemic violence and injustice. This article also suggests that the reach of this historical injustice went much further than the politics of autonomy, usurpation of territorial rights, political disenfranchisement and resource appropriation. To address the question of colonialism’s distinctiveness as a political mission, which has been discussed in recent debates within analytic philosophy, it argues that colonialism’s epistemic injustice, which denied the very existence and the traditions of the colonised, is the foundational and distinctive feature of colonialism as a political system and which drives its continued impact to this day.

This paper offers a socio-legal historical analysis of the process of formulation and evolution of Chinese marine insurance law by transplanting foreign laws, with a view to grasping from the material of legal history and social reality the deeper significance of the imported law’s relation to tradition, ideology and environmental context. The key argument is that this perspective reveals how transplanted law emerges as an authorless product shaped by social forces and processes. It is created by the operation of institutional arrangements of law-making, which provide the platform for the interplay of diverse traditions and interests generated by the social environment of the importing jurisdiction. This research integrates several lines of discussion of legal transplantation that lack connection, highlights the impact of the transplanting process and contributes to current theoretical debates by proposing potential interdisciplinary research for future studies of legal transplantation.

The social and political contexts in many countries are affected by dangerous trends and forces of populism. Populist hostility is most observable in connection with issues of immigration, where it functions as a pretext for scrapping legal protections in increasingly hostile immigration laws. What is particularly insidious about these developments is the claim, articulated by some theorists, that the popular resentment and backlash against immigrants and refugees are justified. That populists are hostile towards immigrants and human rights laws, the claim seems to go, is the fault of the legal norms and institutions that allow in the immigrants and protect them. This article challenges those approaches and argues that legal constraints on popular biases towards immigrants are necessary and need to be defended against popular moralism. It is also argued that although community values are important, they should not be considered as trumps against the rights of immigrants and refugees.

Money pushes sports to extremes. As the rewards for success grow, so does the pressure, with sportspeople pushing themselves ever harder. In equestrian sports, this can mean pushing the horse as well, too often to the point of abuse. This article discusses the beautiful side of equestrianism as well as its darker side, which is a bitter reality for many competition horses. It sets out a comparison of legal standards for equine animal welfare (at the level of international law, EU law and national laws) as well as those coming from sports laws. It also examines dependencies between animal protection rules under EU law and animal protection rules under the laws of individual EU Member States concerning equestrian sports. It aims to answer the questions of whether equestrian sports constitute a general exemption to their being considered animal abuse and on what grounds this exemption might be changed in the future.

In response to the short-term political cycles that govern law-making, there is growing international attention to the obligations owed to future generations. Within the diverse approaches there is often a single, temporally defined inequality; that is, between now and a depleted future. While inequality is imagined between generations, these generations are often constructed as homogenous. This elides not just contemporary inequalities, but that these injustices are caused by historically rooted inequalities that current planetary threats are likely to deepen. In response, we centre health inequalities which illustrate the complex temporalities and structural causes of inequalities. We argue for a focus on eco-social and embodied generations to better understand – and respond to – inequalities past, present and future. We apply this focus to the Capabilities Approach as an example of the work needed to better articulate what is owed to present and future generations to secure justice and inform future-oriented law-making.

In this article, I reconceptualise the League of Nations as an Imperial Assemblage that embeds and is embedded by coloniality. Relying on the return to the League’s historisisation by Third World Approaches to International Law, I argue that we can understand the League as a governance body that works across scales of international, transnational and local actors, processes and structures to reiterate coloniality within the mandated territories. I utilise Deleuzian notions of assemblage alongside the concept of ‘coloniality’ within the literature of decolonial theory within International Relations and Sociology to show how the work of the League’s various actors, processes and structures across different scales made, actualised and evolved the laws on Forced Labour and Slavery from 1925 to 1932 in the inter-war era with a particular focus on Mandate Territories B and C.