Acquisition of territory by force, once permitted, is strictly forbidden today. However, this normative shift has not led to a reconceptualization of annexation, which is still understood as the extension of sovereignty through formal state acts. Maintaining the requirement of formal state acts, we argue, undermines the norm and is further analytically flawed and generates a rule-of-law problem: it fails to capture instances of undeclared annexation, and incentivises states to avoid formal proclamations of annexation to evade legal consequences. This article therefore proposes a new theory of annexation. Drawing on theories of bureaucracy and administration, we suggest three qualifications for annexation: the normative organising framework with which the state manages the territory reflects a perception of the territory as part of its own; the organisational structure of control assimilates the management of the territory into the bureaucratic machinery of the state; and the symbolic performance of power erases symbolic differences between the territory and the annexing state. This reconceptualisation of annexation may support the goal of the contemporary international legal order to suppress aggressive use of force and ensure the self-determination of peoples.

, edited by Matthias Siems and Po Jen Yap, continues recent calls to expand the field of comparative law. By including authors drawn from all parts of the world, it presents 'new perspectives' on the field. This wide geographic remit proves successful as a way of moving beyond traditional 'families' and doctrinal topics. The contributors raise new themes for comparison, many related to public law and processes of change. But this, in turn, raises questions about the purposes of expanding the field. The volume largely concerns the laws and legal issues of modern states, and the authors do not venture far into history. Nor do they consider the alternatives offered by religious and traditional legal systems or forms of non-state ordering. I suggest that these subjects could productively expand the field even further, raising more theoretical questions about what law is and does.

This article takes a close look at the state of comparative constitutional studies as constitutional scholarship is taking a comparative turn. It first surveys the field and identifies four varieties - doctrinal, law-and-society, documentary, and cultural - of constitutional comparison and then critically investigates the state of comparative constitutional studies. Through this two-stage engagement, this article aims to make two main analytical points. First, at the core of each of the four varieties of comparative constitutional studies lies an interpretive exercise oriented by its distinctive purpose. Second, the social sciences' growing influence on constitutional comparison has entailed a myth of scientism in the field, which may inadvertently impoverish comparative constitutional studies as a whole. It concludes with a cautionary note on the comparative turn in studying constitutional ordering. With its prevalent focus on formal institutions and norms in constitutional orders, the comparative turn may unwittingly limit studies of the multifaceted constitutional phenomenon.

This article starts with a question that looks like it has been taken from an introductory legal reasoning class, namely, is coffee a non-alcoholic beverage? It will be seen that from a trade mark perspective there is reason to conclude that coffee is definitely a non-alcoholic beverage in Australia, is definitely not a non-alcoholic beverage under the European trade mark regime and may or may not be such a beverage in the UK. This divergence is itself worthy of attention, given efforts to facilitate cross-border registration using common terminology. More importantly, however, this article argues that the reason why trade mark law struggles with questions of this type is because it has never taken a clear view of the person at whom the trade marks register is aimed-in particular, it has never been clear as to the level of expertise and knowledge of the internal workings of the trade mark system that is to be attributed to the notional reader of the register. This oversight has important implications for matters that someone new to the field might imagine would have been resolved long ago.

Regulation in healthcare has often been accused of protecting the professions and neglecting patients. 'Public protection appeals', used to challenge fitness to practise decisions considered to be 'insufficient' for the 'protection of the public', have created a welcome space for judicial scrutiny. Focusing on doctors, the present study of public protection appeals examines the contours of that scrutiny. It frames these appeals as a recalibration of the metaphorical 'regulatory bargain', finding that many of the resulting judgments signal a departure from traditional postures of 'deference' in professional regulation jurisprudence and a steady judicial assertion of jurisdiction over the core issue of 'seriousness' in doctor misconduct. Further exploration of that heightened scrutiny identifies several strands of new doctrine which fortify the regulatory regime in a variety of directions. This exploration also, however, isolates and critiques the emergence of a ' gloss'-a seam of cases which tilt decision making towards censure and risk disrupting regulatory strategies which have cultivated a commitment to rehabilitative approaches in the disciplinary process.

Legal pluralism is a useful framework for analysing church-state relationships. Often overlooked, legal diversity also exists religions. This article examines the interactions between the two. It discusses how church-state arrangements influence the internal legal pluralism of religious systems: how religious actors' depictions of church-state arrangements impact their self-perception of internal legal diversity. Understanding these often-overlooked nuanced and complex influences has descriptive and normative significance. This argument is demonstrated by analysing a case study: the modern transformations of a hyper-pluralistic doctrine in Jewish law, named 'Kim-Li'. Modern legal centralism rendered rabbinical reluctance towards its application. The article reveals the correlation between rabbinical interpretations of the doctrine and particular assumptions and aspirations regarding church-state structures. By employing legal pluralism/law and religion classifications, the article suggests that reactions to the 'shadow of the state' are more diverse and nuanced than the current literature foresees, and concludes by suggesting its rectification.

Even if a hiring process is merit-based and non-discriminatory, it may still fail to ensure substantive fairness if some applicants lacked a fair opportunity to develop their qualifications to compete. A familiar potential remedy for the problem is 'affirmative action', in the sense of preferential treatment for job candidates who lacked a fair opportunity to develop their job qualifications. I defend two analogous contentions about criminal justice. Even if criminal sentencing is formally fair-ie free of discrimination and bias-it may still be substantively unfair because some disadvantaged offenders have lacked a fair opportunity to develop their capacities and structure their choice environments to fortify themselves against resorting to crime. And the criminal justice system might implement a form of 'affirmative action in criminal justice' by mitigating the punishment of offenders who are culpable for crimes but lacked a fair opportunity to avoid becoming so.

Does private law punish? Should it? I question whether private law punishes in a form other than through a court order of punitive damages, by exploring a less obvious form of punishment to which less attention has been paid-'punitive disentitlement'-wherein a person is disentitled from a legal right, defence, or other legal advantage they would and should otherwise be entitled to, because of their misconduct. Potential instances are identified and analysed in a broad survey of private law doctrine, including the laws of property, contract, unjust enrichment and torts. The strongest reason for punitive disentitlement is its immunity to a powerful normative objection to punitive damages. Punitive disentitlement is not free from difficulties, however. It inherits some of the difficulties associated with punitive damages; it also runs into a separate set of objections. We should therefore be more alert to, and cautious about, its continued use.

As the metaverse blurs the lines between physical and virtual realms, enhanced by haptic devices providing sensory feedback, it is poised to become integral to daily life. However, this new digital frontier is also a site for sexual violence. Women users increasingly report non-consensual touching, image-based sexual abuses and novel forms of gendered harm, often trivialised and inadequately addressed by current laws. Accordingly, this article proposes the new concept and terminology of 'meta-rape' to better capture the intense and embodied nature of these forms of sexual violence. We also provide a new categorisation of experiences of sexual harassment and abuse in the metaverse, together with a comprehensive analysis of the role and application of criminal law in tackling meta-rape. We suggest, contrary to conventional approaches, that current criminal laws could apply to some forms of meta-rape. We also propose strengthening and future-proofing criminal law, with laws proscribing intimate intrusions. By reframing our understanding of meta-rape, we aim to address the prevalence and impact of these gendered and sexualised harms, providing robust avenues for victim redress and promoting safety and autonomy in emerging virtual spaces.

Insiders can profit from material non-public information pertaining to their own firm by trading in the shares of their own company (traditional insider trading) or in the shares of other companies whose stock prices may also be affected by such information (shadow trading). We show that traditional insider trading and shadow trading have the same consequences for financial markets and corporate governance, but only the former is pursued aggressively by regulators in the European Union, the UK and the United States. Drawing on a variety of evidence, including a survey of 200 retail investors, we suggest that, rather than protecting unsuspecting outside investors, such an arrangement enables insiders to profit at their expense. The ban on the more salient practice of traditional insider dealing regulation lulls outside investors into a false sense of security, thus effectively operating as a placebo, whilst insiders can still profit by engaging in shadow trading. We further argue that, ironically, this arrangement may nonetheless be efficient.

The development of the principle of non-delegation in administrative law was a response to the perceived needs of a 'modern machinery of government', which emerged in post-war 1940s Britain. While it ostensibly sought to ensure that decision-makers appropriately retain their decision-making discretion, and through that political accountability, it has developed into a permissive doctrine that facilitates significant delegation of decision-making within public administration. As algorithmic decision-making (ADM) is increasingly used in public decision-making, it is necessary to question whether it remains fit for the modern machinery of government of the 2020s and beyond. This article considers the limitations of the doctrine in the context of public ADM, considers the shift in doctrinal approach that would be needed to accommodate this emerging machinery and concludes that the doctrine faces serious challenges in accommodating ADM in public decision-making.

This article concerns the role of the UK Supreme Court in the devolution settlement. It starts by describing the approach adopted by the Supreme Court in relation to devolution cases, characterised by a style of reasoning strictly tied to the literal meaning of the statutory text, and an expansive understanding of the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. The article argues that the purpose of devolution is the accommodation of national pluralism: devolution institutionalises the unique plurinational nature of the UK, accommodating the claims to self-government advanced by the UK's minority nations. This has important implications for the Supreme Court: in deciding devolution cases, the Supreme Court can contribute positively or negatively to the achievement of this purpose. I maintain that the Court ought to reason and interpret the devolution statutes in a manner which promotes the accommodation of national pluralism, moving away from the current approach. The argument is illustrated with an analysis of the judgment, in comparison with the Canadian .

Whether in the form of conceptual analysis or as grounding reduction, armchair theorising has been the main method of theory construction in general jurisprudence in the English-speaking world. Given important deficiencies in this way of proceeding, empiricist jurisprudence, particularly in the form of reductive naturalism, has emerged as an alternative to armchair theorising and has gained some support within the discipline. In this article, I argue that both of these methodological positions ultimately provide us with partial and thus inadequate explanations of the social phenomenon of law. In their failure, however, each position does get something right. I then further argue that to make good of these positions' strengths and simultaneously correct their shortcomings, we need to be able to navigate between the self-understanding of participants of the social practice of law and the viewpoints of social scientists and critical observers.

Digitalising public programmes creates new accountability challenges, many of which are under-theorised. Using Universal Credit to illustrate its points, this article argues that the distributed infrastructures upon which digital government programmes rely create extended chains of decision-making actors. Each link along the chain is responsible for decision-making components, such as data entry and interpretation. This phenomenon has three significant effects. First, it distributes administrative responsibilities widely. Second, it 'publicises' actors previously considered 'private', by integrating companies and landlords into public decision-making processes. Third, it bureaucratically disempowers, because it makes it difficult for all actors to recognise and address errors. In some cases, it prevents them from knowing they are involved in decision-making processes at all. Drawing on public administration, socio-legal studies and public law scholarship, we reconceptualise 'administrative burden', 'bureaucratic disentitlement' and 'privatisation' to show how this distribution of responsibilities within novel 'decision chains' raises critical questions for public law.

Ernest Weinrib's recent book, , considers the implications of his Kantian corrective justice account of private law for other aspects of the legal order (including distributive justice, constitutional rights and the rule of law). The book addresses an important ambiguity left open in Weinrib's past work: whether corrective justice places any limits on the substance of what can count as private law (what Kant calls 'constitutive' requirements). At first, Weinrib appears to deny this, implying that corrective justice is merely 'regulative'-that it helps judges interpret private law in a way that is more coherent and just, without excluding any particular legal content. But a closer reading reveals that he accepts such limits: private law that violates the innate right of persons is non-authoritative. This reading changes our understanding of Weinrib's work, and requires us to consider whether Weinrib can still claim to have a positivist account of law.

This article draws out two injustices to which retrospective criminal legislation may give rise: undermining accessibility of law and challenging equality before the law. It is argued that the censuring function of criminal law exacerbates both wrongs. This sets the stage for an analysis of delaying prisoners' release. It is suggested that retrospective reform in this context threatens the same values as those threatened by retrospective criminalisation. Yet, the safeguards against retrospective reform of release provisions are weak due to two important strands of case law, one concerning which penalty was 'applicable at the time' of the offence and another which draws a distinction between penalties and their execution. Both strands of case law are in need of fundamental reconsideration if article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights is to realise its purposes of upholding rule-of-law values and providing practicable safeguards.

Debates about whether to remove, rename or 'retain and explain' monuments, buildings and street names play an important part in contemporary disputes about the construction and meaning of history. They also contribute to a significant cultural and socio-legal reassessment of Britain's colonial and slave-trading past. We explore how two local governmental legal processes dealt with renaming controversies. More specifically, we examine the extent to which they facilitated consultation and what impact this had on local debates. In doing so, we ask how legal processes around renaming can be prefigured to generate more transformative understandings of controversial histories without further polarising the 'culture war'. This exploration shines a critical light on the role of law in debates about Britain's past and offers valuable lessons for future legal development.

The protest trial has distinctive features and should be governed by what we term the 'integrity principle': it should respect the moral consistency of the defendant; justifications, not excuses, should be privileged; and the 'remorse principle' should not apply. As such, the trial should enable effective communication where the defendant is held to account in meaningful terms. We apply this argument to three high-profile protest trials: the Frack Free Three; the Stansted 15; and the Colston 4. Using observation data, we argue the first two trials and subsequent appellant court rulings failed to respect the integrity principle. The third case provides a contrast: the defendants maintained moral consistency, and gave an authentic and contextualised account. This was, however, at some cost of political divestment. Nevertheless, the Colston 4 trial is exceptional in a process that typically pays little operational respect to the integrity principle.

The procedural account of prison legitimacy proposes that inmates' compliance with correctional institutions depends more on whether they feel that prison guards treat them fairly during their daily interactions than on whether the guards' decisions are ultimately favourable to them. In , Anthony Bottoms and Alison Liebling provide a compelling overview of their work in this area, highlighting the importance of respectful relationships for building feelings of trust in penal institutions and advancing a humanitarian account of legitimacy that is sensitive to the moral and relational dimensions of order maintenance. Despite their important contribution, Bottoms and Liebling's procedural approach advances a precarious notion of legitimacy that depends too heavily on the fair treatment of inmates by prison guards and too little on methods of inmate participation that might help the institution align its values with those of prisoners, creating a more stable, and truly normative, commitment towards compliance.

A purchaser unwittingly buys stolen goods. The owner from whom they were stolen demands their return. The purchaser refuses. How should the law resolve their dispute? This article argues that the law's primary objective in resolving disputes between owners and good faith purchasers should not be to achieve 'justice' between the parties but to disincentivise theft. With some categories of goods, it is difficult to see how the legal attribution of liability can achieve this end. However, where goods are amenable to registration, the rules of good faith purchase can discourage theft by conditioning an owner's success over a good faith purchaser on the fact of prior registration. In the absence of a register, there seems little to choose between the parties. However, because the favoured party will frequently be a monopolist, the danger of holdouts warrants employing innovations from auction theory, the effect of which is to force the parties to reveal otherwise private information about their subjective valuations of the disputed goods.

A growing critique regards judicial review as inhibiting infrastructure delivery on the basis of what I term 'litigant power', which may come to represent the dominant political critique of judicial review under the Labour administration. This differs from classic concerns of judicial power, focusing on how legal challenges by project opponents-notwithstanding their doctrinal outcome-can produce delay and embed a chilling overcaution among industry and policy makers. Having articulated the litigant power critique alongside judicial power, the article explores judicial review's impacts on infrastructure delivery through a case study of the legal challenges to England's High-Speed 2 railway project. I argue this litigation presents little evidence of judicial overreach, but in some ways supports litigant power concerns. Nevertheless, I suggest the litigant power critique risks oversimplification, especially in view of the radical reform often proposed, and it also downplays chilling effects associated with the constitution's centralisation of government decision-making power.