Multiple factors aligning in 2025 implicate challenges to vaccines as a primary public health intervention. Anti-vaccine proponents seek to recast immunization policies in promotion of perceived individual liberties. Recalibrating national vaccine approaches, however, runs counter to long-standing public health laws and policies grounded in a core truth: safe and effective vaccines save lives.

Anosognosia, commonly understood as a lack of insight, renders individuals with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder unable to understand that they are living with a disease, often resulting in a refusal to accept treatment. Typically, to impose involuntary commitment in an effort to obtain treatment, an individual must be a danger to others or themselves. Even if involuntary commitment is imposed, however, an individual may remain competent to refuse medication—despite symptoms of anosognosia and an inability to understand that they are ill. This article examines the existing legal theories of competency and informed consent and proposes a statutory definition of competency that encompasses the specific needs of people with anosognosia, while considering the significant interests at stake when taking away an individual’s right to choose or refuse treatment.

Kant’s position in analytical jurisprudence has not been sufficiently explored. This paper aims to remedy this shortcoming. The main issue in this paper is to which extent Kant’s legal theory is an instance of natural law theory or legal positivism. Robert Alexy is one of the few philosophers who addressed this issue. Alexy believes that Kant defends a version of natural law theory that puts moral limits on legal validity. I show that Alexy’s interpretation is unsuccessful. I argue that Kant defends the positivist separability thesis that norms need not meet moral requirements to qualify as legal norms.

Academics and policymakers alike have identified data taxes as a possible response to the emergence of the data economy. This essay aims to distill the two possible goals of a data tax. A data tax could serve as a Pigouvian tax, reducing data collection and the accompanying harms of datafication. Alternately, a data tax could serve as a new tax base, allowing for more effective revenue-raising and redistribution of the economic value being created in the data economy and preventing the concentration of economic power in the hands of digital companies. Which of these two is the primary goal of a data tax not only informs important design choices but also illuminates critical issues surrounding the political economic response to datafication. Therefore, advocates of data taxes must first consider the underlying goal of a data tax before calling for specific reforms.

A core issue for media outlets and politicians since the assassination of Abe Shinzō has been monetary transactions between religious organizations and their current or former members. Anxieties surrounding religion's role in the public sphere have informed legal arguments about consumer issues. A category of fraud called “spiritual sales” has become a particular concern. In this article, I describe how interpretations of consumer law have been instrumental in dealing with spiritual sales and I discuss reasons why problematic consumption practices associated with religions that have attracted intense criticism have led the Japanese government to comprehensively revise regulatory protections as they reassess consumer vulnerabilities.

In May 2015, a draft of China's newOverseas NGO Management Law was leaked to the media. International journalists and NGOs declared that this law was evidence of the Xi Jinping regime's political repression and a “crackdown” on civil society. In this paper, we argue that the goal of the Chinese government is not to destroy the NGO sector and civil society, but instead a tactical move in a long term strategy so that the state can gain as much benefit (and minimize as much risk) from the NGO sector as possible. Moreover, the Chinese NGO sector is not a passive victim of oppression, but a dynamic actor that pushes back to serve its own interests. The second half of this paper examines the experiences of overseas NGOs in Yunnan, which have been operating under similar regulations since 2010. In Yunnan, similar policies did not result in the elimination or even diminishment of overseas NGOs. Instead, foreign NGOs were constrained in some aspects even as they benefited in other ways.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as large language models, image synthesis tools, and audio generation engines, present remarkable possibilities for creative expression and scientific discovery but also pose pressing challenges for privacy governance. By identifying patterns in vast troves of digital data, these systems can generate hyper-realistic yet fabricated content, surface sensitive inferences about individuals and groups, and shape public discourse at an unprecedented scale. These innovations amplify privacy concerns about nonconsensual data extraction, re-identification, inferential profiling, synthetic media manipulation, algorithmic bias, and quantification. This article argues that the current U.S. legal framework, rooted in a narrowly targeted sectoral approach and overreliance on individual notice and consent, is fundamentally mismatched to address the emergent and systemic privacy harms of generative AI. It examines how the unprecedented scale, speed, and sophistication of these systems strain core assumptions of data protection law, highlighting the misalignment between AI’s societal impacts and individualistic, reactive approaches to privacy governance. The article explores distinctive privacy challenges posed by generative AI, surveys gaps in existing U.S. regulations, and outlines key elements of a new paradigm to protect individual and collective privacy rights that (1) shifts from individual to collective conceptions of privacy; (2) moves from reactive to proactive governance; and (3) reorients the goals and values of AI governance. Despite significant obstacles, it identifies potential policy levers, technical safeguards, and conceptual tools to inform a more proactive and equitable approach to governing generative AI.

This column was born out of curiosity and community. Inspired by the many conversations and shared experiences of colleagues and friends at gatherings of the International Association of Law Libraries (IALL) and other law library organizations around the world, it seeks to explore the ever-evolving roles we play in the legal community.

This article investigates how two eminent scholars, the French cultural historian Rémi Brague and the American professor of Government J.Budziszewski misunderstand Aquinas on law. It explores the possible reasons for their misunderstandings. In both cases there is a failure to appreciate the theological context and content of what St Thomas has to say about law. Their lack of appreciation for the theological content explains also their individual specific distortions of the account of law. Brague confuses eternal law and divine law, which Aquinas explicitly distinguishes, and applies an abstract notion of the divine which heapplies not only to medieval Christian texts, but also to Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, and Islamic ideas on law. Budziszewski imposes on St Thomas’s classification of types of law the logical structure of genus and species, despite acknowledging that Aquinas avoids this language. The result is that he fails to appreciate the significance of eternal law. Both scholars misapprehend eternal law, and this is due to their ignoring theology. They exemplify a characteristic mistake of treating St Thomas as a philosopher, and his theology as something added on to the philosophical account.