In 2016, Colombia’s Constitutional Court recognized the Atrato River as the first water body in Latin America to have its own rights. This article interrogates the historical roots of the judicial decision declaring the river a rights holder. Drawing on my long-term engagement with social organizations as an activist, lawyer, and then researcher, I illuminate the influence of Black people from the Atrato River in the transformation of law in at least three areas: ethnic territorial rights, transitional justice, and river rights. To do so, I combine interdisciplinary theoretical critique with socio-legal research using community-based and autoethnographic approaches to trace the community methods and historical practices of political contestation deployed along the rivers. Thus, I conceptualize how an organic and distinctive style of claiming and creating rights has been constructed in the basin. Moreover, by listening to the voices of the riverine representatives, I argue that the river is a nonhuman existence that has participated in the processes of rights-making in conjunction with local communities and a broader mosaic of allied actors. However, I also outline how legal systems still function to overlook crucial socio-legal claims of marginalized and resistant communities.

The aim of this contribution is to critically introduce and assess the Frankfurt School’s theory of late capitalism as it emerged in the 1970s, when a combined crisis of inflation and stagnation began to unravel the Keynesian orthodoxies of state-organised capitalism. In the process, Frankfurt theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Claus Offe developed powerful critiques of commodification and juridification. The origins of their theory of late capitalism are first traced to the interwar debates on the Weimar Constitution – Germany’s first experiment in both constitutional and economic democracy. The rest of the Article takes a closer look at the Frankfurt School’s changing posture towards economic democracy in the 1970s. Accordingly, I first reiterate how the theory of late capitalism converged with that of the other major crisis theory of the time – the neo-conservative theory of ‘ungovernability’. In diagnosing the ‘governability crisis’ as a crisis of democracy, the Frankfurt School’s increasing pessimism about democracy’s economic reach becomes apparent. Secondly, by looking at the way the Frankfurt School perceived the emergence of the ‘neoliberal’ alternative in the early 1980s, I also argue that the theory of late capitalism had, and did, little to resist the de-democratisation of the economy through the rise of economic constitutionalism in the 1980s. As the welfare state was caught between the two logics of commodification and juridification, economic democracy was its unwitting victim.

In the 1970s, both Denmark and Norway passed abortion legislation that is still the basis for the regulation of abortion in these countries. The legislation was fairly liberal with abortion on demand until 12 weeks of gestation and a permission system for later abortions. This article provides a brief history of the developments leading up to these political compromises and an analysis of the reasons why they have proved remarkably stable. It ends by looking at some factors that may now destabilize 50 years of stable compromise about abortion.

For over a decade, Salvadorean grassroots movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) pursued legal innovations with the aim of protecting their water sources from potentially polluting industrial activities such as mining. They initially drafted bans on mining that would preclude the extractive-based development path embraced by neighbouring countries. Eventually, they scaled up their approach and devised a draft proposal for a transboundary waters treaty that addressed the challenges that the ecological materiality of international watercourses poses to national de jure sovereignty. In so doing, the transboundary watershed has become a useful heuristic, a spatial trope to which Salvadoreans have turned to substantiate their claims to sovereignty over the Lempa River waters that El Salvador shares with pro-mining Guatemala and Honduras – claims imbued with an ethics of care rooted in wartime politics and Catholic morality.

Since 1990, market mechanisms have occurred in the predominantly hierarchical National Health Service (NHS). The Health and Social Care Act 2012 led to concerns that market principles had been irrevocably embedded in the NHS and that the regulators would acquire unwarranted power compared with politicians (known as ‘juridification’). To assess this concern, we analysed regulatory activity in the period from 2015 to 2018. We explored how economic regulation of the NHS had changed in light of the policy turn back to hierarchy in 2014 and the changes in the legislative framework under Public Contracts Regulations 2015. We found the continuing dominance of hierarchical modes of control was reflected in the relative dominance and behaviour of the sector economic regulator. But there had also been a limited degree of juridification involving the courts. Generally, the regulatory decisions were consistent with the 2014 policy shift away from market principles and with the enduring role of hierarchy in the NHS, but the existing legislative regime did allow the incursion of pro market regulatory decision making, and instances of such decisions were identified.