In May 2024, the European Union adopted the Directive on violence against women and domestic violence, marking the first EU-wide binding legislation to address various forms of sexualized and gendered harm. This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the Directive’s provisions on image-based sexual abuse (“IBSA”), encompassing the non-consensual taking, creating, and sharing of intimate materials, as well as threats to distribute them. While acknowledging the aim to harmonize legislation at the Union level, the Article identifies a range of limitations and the failure to fully reflect the diverse experiences of victims. Additionally, the Article evaluates the complementary roles in combating IBSA of the Digital Services Act and the AI Act which impose obligations on online platforms, search engines, and AI developers. Overall, the current EU framework represents a promising but partial approach. If the EU is to comprehensively address IBSA and safeguard victims’ rights, implementation beyond the minimum will be required together with proactive, effective regulation.

This Article argues that to protect public debate, which is vital for democratic societies, it is crucial for courts in EU Member States to apply the freedom of expression standards established by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) when adjudicating cases, particularly in the context of Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs). The Article examines whether the obligation to protect the freedom of expression extends to the non-enforcement of judgments that could have a chilling effect on public debate, and explores the legal implications within the framework of the EU’s mutual recognition regime. By analyzing the Real Madrid v. Le Monde case, the Article highlights the importance of safeguarding free speech and public debate, praising the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for providing clear guidance on when non-enforcement is necessary to prevent the suppression of the public debate. The Article concludes by emphasizing the evolving role of the ECJ in balancing mutual trust among Member States with the protection of fundamental rights, especially in light of the EU’s ongoing integration and its potential accession to the ECtHR.

In this work, I address the “demarcation problem” in law, which invites us to look for the essential properties distinguishing law from nonlaw. First, I introduce the main terms of the discussion, which has seen the traditional view that law is a distinctive practice with its own distinguishing properties pitted against the critical view that law cannot be associated with any such properties. I then turn to what I take to be the core of truth that the critics of the demarcation project have brought to our attention, showing that they have offered a compelling argument even against the most sophisticated treatments of the distinctive traits of law contained in the work of influential mainstream legal theorists. Finally, I argue that, despite the best critical efforts, the demarcation question stands. For, while the critical stance does have a point in challenging the search for necessary and sufficient properties of law, it does not follow that there is no justification at all for the demarcation project, once this project is understood as a circumscribed and context-bound quest for the properties that are fundamental to the core cases of law in a specific tradition.

The accepted approach of competition law to non-horizontal mergers, largely based on the Chicago School of Antitrust Law and Economics paradigms, is criticized on both sides of the Atlantic as too lenient, disregarding developments of economic theory, and no longer adequate in the reality of the digital economy. Current economic research confirms the legitimacy of fears about the effects of non-horizontal concentrations that were raised before the Chicago School put them into doubt. The disbelief in the accuracy of the former US non-horizontal mergers policy resulted in the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice adopting new Vertical Merger Guidelines. The changes introduced were considered insufficient, which led to the unilateral repeal of the guidelines by the FTC and the start of work on new guidelines introducing a stricter approach. The new U.S. 2023 Merger Guidelines introduced far-reaching changes taking into account the modern views of economists and empirical research on vertical mergers. Comparatively, the EU Commission’s Non–Horizontal Merger Guidelines still do not fully correspond to what empirical research and contemporary economic theories say about the possible effects of vertical mergers. Thus, the revision of the EU guidelines seems necessary.

The question of when and how a European consensus or trend contributes to shaping rights guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights and its Protocols is controversial. The European Court of Human Rights quite often performs an analysis of the laws and practices of the Council of Europe’s Member States or of relevant international material. However, the cases where rights have actually been shaped by a European consensus or trend are quite rare. In the last twenty-five years, some 27 out of 424 judgments on the merits of the Grand Chamber of the Court established a consensus or trend having a “shaping impact” on these rights. Further, only one advisory opinion based on Protocol No. 16 contained comparative law material having such an influence. This Article assesses the intensity of the impact of a consensus or a trend analysis on a judgment’s or an advisory opinion’s ratio decidendi, shows what shaping a right actually means, and suggests that cases that are more prone to a potentially persuasive consensus or trend analysis will typically deal with matters of political or general policy, sensitive moral or ethical issues, or changes in the case law.

Borders are ubiquitous. As invisible lines, they contribute to a functioning world order and guarantee security for the people. In the form of walls and fences, they divide society and establish strongholds of prosperity that are not accessible to everyone. A similar effect can be observed in connection with the concept of citizenship, which binds people fatefully to a particular territory and thus significantly determines an individual’s life chances. This article shows how borders and their protection as well as the concept of citizenship challenge fundamental ideas of justice and traces discourses that seek to evolve the current border and citizenship regimes into a more universal and just form of human coexistence.

The wide and deep participation into legislation is a crucial means for the CCP to govern the Chinese Party-state. This Article examines how the CCP as a legislating Party acts in the state legislation as well as in its own internal legislation and what influences the Party’s legislating behaviors bring to the socialist rule of law. By a positivist and typological survey, the Article divides the intra-party regulations into three kinds, namely the pure intra-party regulations, the state-parallel intra-party regulations as well as the supra-state intra-party regulations. On this basis, the Article further analyzes how different types of the intra-party regulations influence the state legislation and, ultimately, the socialist rule of law. Finally, this Article points out that the overexpansion of the intra-party regulations leads to the partisanization of the state legislation and the legalization of the Party legislation which renders the existing separation of the Party and the state feebler and the socialist rule of law could afford more pressures in a foreseeable future.

Much has been written on the constitutional overhaul in Israel, and the attendant constitutional crisis in the first nine months of 2023. Since October 7, however, with the breakout of the Israel-Gaza war, the overhaul was seemingly shelved. This Article seeks to connect both events, by comparing the legal-political response to the overhaul with the legal-political response to the war. It asks why, given the intensity of the protest movement generated by the overhaul, there was a dearth of protest activity after the war, even though both events implicated similar values, namely the rule of law and individual rights, championed by the protest movement. I argue that a central reason for the disparity cannot only be explained by the dynamics of war but also due to the tensions and complexities inherent in Israel’s self-professed constitutional identity as a Jewish and democratic state. In particular, I argue that anti-overhaul protests appealed to liberal universalist values to garner bipartisan support, with the effect of bypassing substantive issues such as the occupation of the Palestinian Territories and discrimination faced by Israeli Palestinians. This explains the lack of Arab participation in the protests, as many perceived them to be an internal Jewish Affair. Thus, when post-war repressive measures mostly affected Israeli Palestinians, the protest movement failed to rally in their support. Although anti-overhaul protests could have brought about greater liberal consolidation in Israel, the relative lack of post-war mobilization casts lingering doubts on the possibility of long-term consolidation of liberal values in Israel. Attempts to depoliticize the protests, while perhaps successful in warding off the overhaul, and though impressive on their own, have likely failed in instilling deeper, more resilient, liberal values in Israel.

This Article is dedicated to what is arguably one of the most significant tests to which constitutionalism has been subject to in recent times. It examines the theoretical and practical challenges to constitutionalism arising from the profound technological changes under the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) in our emerging algorithmic society. The unprecedented rapid development of AI technology has not only rendered conventional theories of modern constitutionalism obsolete, but it has also created an epistemic gap in constitutional theory. As a result, there is a clear need for a new, compelling constitutional theory that adequately accounts for the scale of technological change by accurately capturing it, engaging with it, and ultimately, responding to it in a conceptually and normatively convincing way.

The “migration” of Future Generations from a moral to a judicial context represents a captivating development in contemporary legal discourse. Recent years have seen a surge in courts across various nations addressing the intersection of future generations and climate litigation. This nexus, far from being coincidental or sporadic, epitomizes a deeper societal and legal dilemma that necessitates a nuanced articulation for effective resolution. The main objective of this Article is to provide preliminary insights for contextualizing this legal evolution. Initially, the Article delineates the journey towards social legitimacy of climate science. Subsequently, it examines the impact of this social legitimation on judicial rulings, particularly observing an emerging trend in climate litigation to expand the temporal scope of legal relevance. The Article culminates in an exploration of the possible interplay between the legal significance of future generations and the extension of the law’s temporal horizon. This conjectural postulation is substantiated through select historical precedents.

Climate change stands as the paramount challenge confronting humanity in the contemporary era. Attempting to address the problem, the main sectors responsible for it have been subject to domestic or international policies and laws aimed at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, except one: livestock. Given that animal-sourced food production contributes a large portion of GHG emissions, this Article aims to analyze the impacts that the exclusion of the livestock sector, in efforts to tackle climate change, would have on compliance with international treaties on the subject, especially the Paris Agreement. One conclusion reveals that state parties, by ignoring the sector, will violate several articles of the Agreement, which will likely lead to the failure of its main purpose of holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C.

This Article explores the implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven innovation across sectors, highlighting the resulting legal uncertainties. Despite the transformative influence of AI in healthcare, retail, finance and more, regulatory responses to these developments are often contradictory, contributing to the opacity of the legal underpinnings of AI business. Our Article notes the common trend of commercializing AI tools amidst legal uncertainty, using innovative contractual solutions to secure claims. Over time, these innovations trigger overlooked legal conflicts, sometimes leading to outright bans on AI products due to negative impacts on some fundamental rights and democratic Governance. The core argument of our Article is that an over-reliance on co-regulatory strategies, such as those proposed by the European AI Act, exacerbates legal instability in emerging technological markets. This panorama creates an ’extended legal present’ when alternative legal expectations coexist, thus causing economic and political uncertainty that may elicit legal instability in the future. The concept of ’competing legal futures’ is introduced to illustrate how economic actors must bet on a legal future in the absence of guarantees that this future will materialize. To help analyze this complex narrative, we propose a theoretical framework for understanding legal, technological, and economic dynamics, highlighting anomalies in market exchanges within the co-regulatory model. Despite the focus on European developments, the practical and theoretical implications extend beyond the EU, making the Article relevant to a broader understanding of the legal-economic challenges posed by AI and digital innovation. We conclude by arguing for a course correction, proposing institutional diversification for resilient governance of legal innovation under uncertainty.

Digital platforms and social media have expanded the ways in which individuals can exercise their right to freedom of expression and obtain and diffuse information. At the same time, they have become a principal means for haters to express and spread their hate in ways that would have been unthinkable some years ago. Responsive to the challenge, the EU has progressively developed a broad range of instruments and tools to counter online hate speech. This chapter discusses the key characteristics of the EU arrangements made to fight digital hate speech, shedding light on what is a multi-faceted and daunting regulatory task.

Rapid, unpredictable ecological changes and the resulting instability that are characteristic of the Anthropocene call for a re-examination of the role of law in governing interactions between humans and ecosystems and facilitating adaptation to ecological change. The scope and scale of environmental change we are experiencing seem to call for a regulatory approach, namely forms of law that are designed to pursue well-defined material objectives, often through instruction rules designed to guide behavior to line up with those objectives. Such forms of law have a crucial role to play. However, the negligence principle at the heart of civil liability law is also capable of absorbing and circulating information about environmental risk and means of addressing it, and of translating that information from empirical to normative terms. The grounding of negligence in domestic civil liability law could be a serious obstacle to its effectiveness given the global, Earth system-wide nature of environmental degradation. However, the negligence principle increasingly operates through networks that traverse jurisdictional boundaries, as well as the boundaries between social systems. I propose such a network approach to analyze interactions between the negligence principle and corporate due diligence obligations embedded in domestic legislation and international texts such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). One important result would be the imposition of expanded epistemic obligations on firms, which would in turn require their serious engagement with domestic, international, and transnational environmental and sustainability norms.

The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) introduces a new regulatory approach to address the societal harms of online platforms: Systemic risk assessments. While a core component of the DSA, the regulation only outlines the standards and processes governing systemic risk assessments in broad strokes. It remains unclear what these systemic risk assesments will entail in practice. This Article develops a proposal of how systemic risk assessments should be implemented. It situates systemic risk assessments as a critical step toward platform accountability as they address societal harms, while existing approaches, such as remedy mechanisms, only protect user rights. Engaging with intangible harms and regulating speech and public discourse, risk assessments also entail significant challenges. Conventional reference points for content moderation regulation, such as terms and conditions, contractual freedom, fundamental rights and expertise, do not provide practical and legitimate bases to concretize risk assessment obligations. Public actors, such as the European Commission, should refrain from defining substantive standards, too, as they are directly bound by freedom of expression guarantees. Instead, the Article argues, the Commission should foster a procedural framework, a “virtuous loop,” which empowers civil society and allows it to specify and refine the standards governing systemic risks over time. Developing this framework, the Article explains how systemic risk assessment can fix “multistakeholderism,” and “multistakeholderism,” in turn, can help make systemic risk assessments work.