This chapter explores symmetry’s implications for the law of democracy. Symmetry has obvious relevance in this area, given the centrality of election-related disputes to maintaining courts’ political neutrality. At a minimum, symmetric interpretation should encourage the Supreme Court to ensure greater consistency in its emergency orders blocking legal changes before an election. In addition, symmetry may help justify the Court’s controversial decisions leaving both partisan gerrymanders and choices about overall districting procedures to the political process. In combination, if not in isolation, these rulings are symmetric because they avoid constitutionalizing one position or the other on politically charged questions about appropriate criteria for districting. Finally, symmetry should support closer scrutiny of voting rules and procedures with skewed partisan effects, provided that challengers can convincingly establish a meaningful impairment of political competition.

This chapter addresses symmetry’s implications for gun rights and unenumerated fundamental liberties. Although recognizing an individual right to bear arms is inevitably asymmetric given current divides over gun regulation, the Supreme Court might moderate its decisions’ asymmetry in two ways: by allowing some meaningful room for firearms regulation, and by ensuring that the Second Amendment sometimes interferes with laws that are conventionally favored more by conservatives than by progressives. With respect to unenumerated rights, symmetry should support embracing some method for identifying such rights that avoids any predictable skew toward rights favored by one or the other major partisan or ideological camp. The Court’s current method of looking to “history and tradition” to define unenumerated rights could satisfy this standard, provided the Court applies it in a manner that allows recognition of new rights based on enactment of new laws over time in jurisdictions across the United States. In addition, the existing constitutional protection for parental rights, meaning parents’ authority to control key aspects of their children’s upbringing, appears not only defensible under the Court’s “history and tradition” approach but also symmetric given major current divides over certain parenting choices.

More than three decades of the ‘constructivist turn’ in IR has led to clear insights about what the field gained and lost as ‘norms’ moved from the margins to the mainstream. What happened to the pathbreaking theoretical and empirical claims of the late 1980s and early 1990s? The critical edge dropped out, and the field fractured into silos, while an Atlantic divide deepened. Norms got reduced to an analytical factor to be tested. Can renewed attention to critical and holistic aspect of norms, help the world to craft better responses to climate change or pandemics? Not until the field confronts embedded hierarchies built on racism. I explore this overarching claim about racial hierarchy through the historically rooted themes of rights, migration, and nationality. I stress that IR mistakenly builds on the assumption of domestic jurisdiction as a fundamental feature of the inter-state system, rather than as a constitutive norm specific to the early twentieth century. With a conceptual stroke, the discipline eliminates imperialism, in theory and practice. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I do not privilege 1945, or 1648; our genealogical travels concentrate on the 1920s. Even a cursory glance at the diplomatic record reveals persistently fierce contestation over race.

This chapter surveys forms of status by which legal systems assign rights, obligations and capacities to various categories of person. Though such discussions have tended to restrict themselves to statuses recognized in Roman law (the hierarchical birth-based statuses that Maine contrasted with the contractualism of later Western systems), cross-cultural comparison requires a wider lens. Hence, the chapter covers status within the polity, official or military status, unfree or servile status, putatively ‘natural’ statuses, status in the family and status as member of a voluntary or professional association. Special attention is given to the mechanisms involved in change of status, and to status as a factor in legal penalties. It is proposed that, in systems of religious law (which often operate parallel to civil law in a legal-pluralist context and across borders), status within the ‘ecclesial’ polity is comparable to civil status (citizen, resident alien, etc.) within a territorially defined polity.

Chapter 2 analyses some foundational ideas relied upon in the book. This conceptual base comprises an analysis of nature, the environment, development, and sustainable development. These concepts are discussed as a progressive movement of a complex ideation: where nature is conceptualised as the starting point, later becomes the environment, then advances to become development, and is finally transformed into sustainable development. I employ Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) in my analysis of neo-imperial ideologies and allied Eurocentric philosophies and how these are embedded in the contemporary language of sustainable development. At each stage of the analysis, I highlight the significance of human agency as the defining character of the transformations that occur within this conceptual fluidity. It accounts for the persistence of the subtext of Eurocentrism and demonstrates how the interplay of law, politics, ethics, and history as sustainable development is established upon different elements of both law and non-law theories. The analysis in this chapter is refracted through ’Afrosensitivity’, which I describe as a reaction to Africa as a conceptual tool in sustainable development discourse, and as a conscious, alternative route for imprinting African legal cosmologies on this global phenomenon called sustainable development.

Informal carers of people with dementia work with the person with dementia and with professionals to form a secure triangle of care. They make a huge contribution to the health and well-being of individuals and to the economics of care. They have rights recognised in legislation.

Unfortunately, they are often dismayed by the care received by individuals with dementia when admission to a general hospital becomes necessary. This can be avoided and much better outcomes achieved for all concerned if professionals work with informal carers throughout the process of considering admission, effecting admission, and living through admission to discharge or death. Informal carers do not constitute a homogenous group: they have a range of characteristics, strengths, and needs.

Some are old; many have pathology of their own and multiple responsibilities. They need to be listened to and to be respected.

This Handbook brings together a global team of private law experts and computer scientists to examine the interface between private law and AI, which includes issues such as whether existing private law can address the challenges of AI and whether and how private law needs to be reformed to reduce the risks of AI while retaining its benefits.

Whether AI should be given legal personhood should not be framed in binary terms. Instead, this issue should be analysed in terms of a sliding-scale spectrum. On one axis, there is the quantity and quality of the bundle of rights and obligations that legal personhood entails. The other axis is the level of the relevant characteristics that courts may include in conferring legal personhood.

Property has a vexed status in Rousseau’s Social Contract. On one hand, Rousseau seems committed to the conventionalist view that property is a creation of law and state. Yet Rousseau also recognizes prepolitical dimensions of property, such as a right of first occupancy and a natural entitlement to land through “labor and cultivation.” This chapter contends that Rousseau’s seemingly divergent views on property become less paradoxical once one distinguishes between the rights of others and the more self-regarding aspects of morality. Focusing on the dense section of the Social Contract titled “Of Real Property,” it argues that while Rousseau acknowledges moral obligations governing the use of things, he ultimately holds that persons only have full-fledged property rights within the state. It suggests, moreover, that Rousseau’s attention to both the political and prepolitical dimensions of property continues to resonate in contemporary debate.