The autonomous position of legal professionals is no longer self-evident. Professionals are under increased pressure to reform. This phenomenon is not only true for legal professionals. A broader trend – which is recognised for the medical profession, academic profession and alike – is that paraprofessionals are gaining a more prominent position. In this paper, we focus on the developments in the Dutch public justice system. We conduct a case-study on the role of paraprofessionals in courts and in the public prosecution service – two understudied legal institutions in this regard. By drawing on empirical data unfolding the working routine of the judiciary and the prosecution service, we find two paradigms that define the thinking about professionalism: a traditional ‘pure professional’ paradigm and a new, more hybrid paradigm that includes (policy-based) managerial thinking. The latter appears to be enhanced by a New Public Management (NPM) approach within these institutions. Although we observe resistance among (para)professionals towards professional changes and ambiguity in the relationships between professionals and paraprofessionals, we also observe that managerialism has changed the work processes and the division of labour between professionals and paraprofessionals.

In a context of hyper-diversity and social polarisation, it has been suggested that public parks constitute crucial arenas in which to safeguard deliberative democracy and foster social relations that bind loosely connected strangers. Drawing on empirical research, we offer a more circumspect and nuanced understanding of the – nonetheless vital – role that parks can play in fostering civic norms that support the capacity for living with difference. As ‘spaces apart’, parks have distinctive atmospheres that afford opportunities for convivial encounters in which ‘indifference to difference’ underpins ‘openness to otherness’. As places in which difference is rendered routine and unremarkable, the potency of parks for social cohesion derives from fleeting and unanticipated interactions and the weak ties they promote, rather than strong bonds of community that tend to solidify lines of cultural differentiation. Both by design and unintentionally, regulation and law can serve to foster or constrain the conditions that sustain conviviality.

One way of understanding the exile of the Chagos Islanders and their inability to return to their ancestral land is through a reading of the case from a perspective of post-colonial legal scholarship. Chagossians have strong legal rights to land and remedies of compensation and return through a purposive application of the international legal definition of Indigenous, Magna Carta right to abode and international human rights law that could address their dispossession. Yet, the inability of those rights to be meaningfully applied has been constrained because of the post-colonial way they are legally interpreted, creating a legal vacuum in which basic fairness and substantive equality have been routinely compromised. Drawing attention to the continued legal denial of return in the context of decolonisation, ongoing colonialism and the rule of law makes sense of the legal record and explains the expulsion of the islanders despite the moral merits of return.

Long at the margins of international law, property is now among the key challenges facing international law- and decision-makers. A ‘shrinking’ planet and a polycentric international law regime provide the backdrop for contestation between different property concepts and claims. While presenting important commonalities in legal concepts and normative content, international investment law and international human rights law protect different and possibly competing rights, reflect different balances of commercial and non-commercial considerations, and embody different standards of legal protection. As the frontiers of natural resource extraction expand, natural resource investments can bring different property concepts and claims directly into tension. In this context, the articulation between investment law and human rights law influences the ways in which international law mediates competition for the world's natural resources, redefining the balance between public and private interests and reshaping spaces for the lawful exercise of state sovereignty.

Calls for the adoption of a universal capacity approach to replace dedicated mental health law are motivated by the idea that the measures designed to protect patient autonomy in legislation such as the Mental Capacity Act 2005 should apply to everyone, including people with a psychiatric diagnosis. In this article it is argued that a diachronic perspective on questions of mental capacity is necessary if capacity law is to play this broader role, but that employing this perspective in assessments of capacity undermines central patient autonomy preserving features of the legislation, which presents a moral dilemma.

Capacity legislation aims to protect individual autonomy and avoid undue paternalism as far as possible, partly through ensuring patients are not deemed to lack capacity because they make an unwise decision. To this end, the law employs a procedural test of capacity that excludes substantive judgments about patients' decisions. However, clinical intuitions about patients' capacity to make decisions about their treatment often conflict with a strict reading of the legal criteria for assessing capacity, particularly in psychiatry. In this article I argue that this tension arises because the procedural conception of capacity is inadequate and does not reflect the clinical or legal realities of assessing capacity. I propose that conceptualising capacity as having ‘recognisable reasons’ for a treatment decision provides a practical way of legitimately incorporating both procedural and substantive elements of decision-making into assessments of capacity.