This chapter explores the roles of different generations of lawyers in Estonia’s post-1991 democratic transformation. Focused on young, progressive lawyers familiar with Western legal culture and established leaders educated under the Soviet regime, the study draws on extensive interviews and document analysis to trace how these actors shaped the nation’s transition from Soviet legal structures to a contemporary democratic framework. The findings highlight the critical importance of individual efforts in redefining legal practices, emphasising the dual impact of innovative youth and experienced mentors in driving significant legal and institutional reforms. The study enhances understanding of the dynamics of legal transitions in post-Soviet states, highlighting the essential blend of innovation and experience necessary for successful legal reform.

This chapter explores the complexity of the relationship between Australia’s rule of law claims and its historical and contemporary treatment of First Nations. It argues that there is a constitutional legitimacy crisis within the modern Australian state, sourced in its original denial of the legal existence of First Nations of the land alongside the denial and weaponisation of the ‘rule of law’ against them. The chapter traces these two strands of rule-of-law history in the broader context of the various rule-of-law debates that persevere in the Australian legal system, and the more immediate contemporary debate as to how to ‘recognise’ First Nations in the Australian Constitution. The objectives underpinning the proposed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice (a representative advisory body) are examined, as well as the reasons for its failure at referendum, which resonate with the claims of equality and rule of law that underpinned the Australian state’s origins, and the origins of its ongoing constitutional crisis.

Following NATO’s military intervention and a very wide-ranging UN peacekeeping mission, Kosovo is today the site of the largest civilian mission of the European Union. In the aftermath of the armed conflict of 1998–9 which was fought along ethnic lines and led to mass atrocities and to the destruction of more than half of the available housing stock, the UN set up a quasi-judicial, administrative mechanism to “resolve” property issues, which was called the Kosovo Property Agency (KPA). Staffed predominantly by Kosovo Albanian national legal professionals and a few international jurists, the KPA was entrusted to deal with war-related property claims submitted overwhelmingly by Kosovo Serbs. Relatively powerless and underfunded, the KPA is a paradigmatic example of a contemporary transitional justice mechanism that is understood as a short-term, bridging, technical-legal project rather than a national process of righting past wrongs. Under the increasing neoliberal managerialism of rule of law as a tool of good governance, the KPA was organized as a mass claims procedure. To “streamline” the process and allow for the “quick” and “efficient” resolution of claims, it used data-processing technologies, and decisions were issued in batches of claims of similar legal scenarios. This chapter conceptualizes the work of the KPA as “law-washing” within the post-cold war juristocratic phase of international intervention and international law more generally. The chapter understands juristocracy in a broad sense, as a diffuse and transhistorical moment in which law is used in often fetishistic, instrumental ways to tackle a range of social and political issues previously not conceived as legal issues. Engaging with law’s “dialectics of reckoning” means analytically making sense of moments (that we may choose to call “juristocratic”) of simultaneous hope in law’s potential to propel the currents of social justice and cynicism and disenchantment about law’s incapacity to “solve” issues beyond law (if at all).

Generative AI offers a new lever for re-enchanting public administration, with the potential to contribute to a turning point in the project to ‘reinvent government’ through technology. Its deployment and use in public administration raise the question of its regulation. Adopting an empirical perspective, this chapter analyses how the United States of America and the European Union have regulated the deployment and use of this technology within their administrations. This transatlantic perspective is justified by the fact that these two entities have been very quick to regulate the issue of the deployment and use of this technology within their administrations. They are also considered to be emblematic actors in the regulation of AI. Finally, they share a common basis in terms of public law, namely their adherence to the rule of law. In this context, the chapter highlights four regulatory approaches to regulating the development and use of generative AI in public administration: command and control, the risk-based approach, the experimental approach, and the management-based approach. It also highlights the main legal issues raised by the use of such technology in public administration and the key administrative principles and values that need to be safeguarded.

My introduction considers the rhetorical mechanics of Roman legal writing, and isolates three distinct discursive modes in which legal writing represents the world: the normative, the descriptive, and the constructive. I then discuss the ideological valence of law in the Roman imagination, with reference to Cicero’s description of the ideal magistrate as a “talking law.” I finally provide a plan of the work.

International law is a system of rules, institutions and practices that govern the relations of States with one another. It is designed to distribute resources and solve problems that States identify as relevant for creating order in the world. In a world without a centralised government States use international law and its institutions to generate solutions for emerging and complex issues and problems, such as climate change and terrorism. The effectiveness of international law is often called into question when it fails to stop certain kinds of activities that appear abhorrent to most people from around the world. However, it also manages to resolve and address issues and challenges that would otherwise get ignored without international cooperation. A lot of international law is designed to meaningfully contribute to establishing order. States also use it to legitimise disruptions to global relations.

I conclude the book by discussing how later historians used Roman law to imagine legal orders that were more appealing than their own conditions. I use two examples: Bracton, whose treatise on English law used Roman concepts to aggrandize jurists like himself within the legal system of the thirteenth century, and Fritz Schulz, a refugee from Nazi Germany whose writings imagined a Roman rule of law as an implicit counterpoint to the totalitarianism he had fled. I finally argue that this rhetorical feature of Roman law is not unique to the Roman context, but instead reflects a broader aspirational tendency in legal writing and historiography.

This chapter completes the act of setting the stage for the rest of the book by stressing the significance of the relationship between legitimacy and law, at the national level as well as at the international level. Legitimacy and law do not have a simple and straightforward relationship—far from it. Highlighting four features of this relationship helps shed light on the complexity of their relationship and serves as a preview of some of the issues that will be addressed throughout the book. These four features are the paradoxical character of the relationship between legitimacy and law; the unavoidable, yet at times, problematic role of values in the legitimacy–law nexus; the need for legitimacy and law to not be entirely captive of the power on which they depend; and the nature of these features for legitimacy and law at the international level.

A strategic, organized, and coordinated attack on the basic tenets of higher education in the United States was launched in late 2020 when the Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping was issued by Donald Trump, prohibiting most diversity training in federal agencies. Republican-controlled states quickly enshrined laws to limit how public schools, colleges, universities, and even individual faculty members can discuss racism, sexism, and gender identity in educational institutions. Characterized as a “culture war,” this conservative backlash to antidiscrimination inroads actually constitutes a massive resistance movement, the likes of which perhaps has not been seen in the United States since the civil rights era. Black writers and intellectuals have a long history of confronting the massive resistance of whiteness. Black nonfiction writings, in particular, offer revealing critiques and warnings about the impacts of whiteness in the modern world.

In the common law tradition, legal decisions are supposed to be grounded in both statute and precedent, with legal training guiding practitioners on the most important and relevant touchstones. But actors in the legal system are also human, with the failings and foibles seen throughout society. This may lead them to take methodological shortcuts, even to relying on unknown internet users for determinations of a legal source’s relevance. In this chapter, we investigate the influence on legal judgments of a pervasive, but unauthoritative source of legal knowledge: Wikipedia. Using the first randomized field experiment ever undertaken in this area – the gold standard for identifying causal effects – we show that Wikipedia shapes judicial behavior. Wikipedia articles on decided cases, written by law students, guide both the decisions that judges cite as precedents and the textual content of their written opinions. Collectively, our study provides clear empirical evidence of a new form of influence on judges’ application of the law – easily accessible, user-generated online content.

This chapter explores how civil society mobilization in Latin America can undercut a core component of liberal democracy: the experience of universal citizenship rights backed by rule of law. It examines civil society activism around two issue areas: opposition to inclusion on the lines of gender identity and sexuality, and support for militarized approaches to policing. Right-wing civil society groups repurpose rights ideas that are typically associated with the left to contract the citizenship rights of marginalized groups that they depict as existential threats to society, including poor and racialized adolescents, people experiencing homelessness, and sexual minorities. In the process, right-wing groups construct discourses about which kinds of individuals have the rights of citizenship, and which kinds of individuals imperil the rights of truly deserving citizens. The discursive foundations laid by civil society provide rich terrain for illiberal politicians to build on and mobilize political support.

A pragmatic approach to international human rights law involves discussing its premises, principles like human dignity, liberty, equality, and solidarity, and structural principles such as democracy, pluralism, and the rule of law. The chapter also examines the conditions, matters, and actors involved in the discussion. It explores how these principles are applied in practice and the challenges faced in their implementation. The chapter emphasizes the importance of a pragmatic approach that considers the practical realities of applying human rights principles in different contexts. It also discusses the role of various actors, including states, international organizations, and civil society, in promoting and protecting human rights.

The rule of law is a normative political ideal. This chapter presents two approaches to understanding it. The first is the legal essentialist approach, which derives an account of the rule of law from an account of the essence of legality and legal systems. The second is the limited government approach, which derives an account from a normative theory proposing a role for law in opposing and negating the arbitrary power of persons over others. The chapter contends that the latter approach is more persuasive than the former. However, and despite recent refinements, the approach has a legacy of libertarian thinking and has not acknowledged what the author of this chapter refers to as a regulatory conception of the rule of law which has a prominent social dimension. The social dimension entails a duty founded upon the rule of law ideal to legally regulate private arbitrary powers whose exercise allows some to impose coercion as well as non-consensual exploitation on others. The regulatory conception and its social dimension help us understand the appropriate relationship between the rule of law and human rights, the welfare state, and democracy.

The chapter recharacterises the founding instrument of international organisations as constitutions. They function as a legal basis for the organisation, they contain provisions about the mission of the organisation, about the organs/bodies and their competences, and regulate the relationship between the organisation and those who are legally subjected to it. It traces two waves of theories which have espoused different conceptions of constitution: The first wave revolved around the “small c-constitution” in the more neutral sense. The second wave postulated constitutions “with a capital C” that enshrine the constitutionalist trinity: rule of law, human rights, and democracy. In the current constellation of a global shift of power and ideology, a third theory for constitutions of international organisations, more responsive to the global social question and to the demands of the global south, is emerging. This third theory deserves to be pulled out into the light and should be fleshed out further. It should, on the one hand, not fall back on the small-c constitution and, on the other hand, take on board new principles, notably social transnational solidarity and contestatory democracy. This intellectual contribution can provide a basis for responses to the current pushbacks against international organisations.

The separation of powers is not a theory of mechanical checks and balances or counterforce. Any sufficiently complex organization will have competing interests or sub-units; most do not have a separation of powers. This chapter identifies the conceptual and normative core of the separation of powers as a particular kind of institutionalization of the rule of law. It is an attempt to guarantee a separation of general rules from applications to particular persons by keeping them apart not only in time but also in personnel and institutional space. The chapter further argues that the idea of the separation of powers as articulated by Montesquieu joined that understanding of the rule of law to bodies and estates of the mixed constitution, relying in particular on independent and high-status nobles to defend the law against the political demands of the executive monarch equipped with coercive force. The democratization of the separation of powers in the American founding stripped away that social independence, and left the separation of powers weaker than has generally been noticed. The chapter concludes with considerations of the modern executive branch, and suggests that separation of powers reasoning might need to be applied internally to it.

Hobbes posed for modernity what we can think of as the puzzle – even the paradox – of sovereignty. The sovereign of a particular polity is the person or body who wields ultimate authority to make law. It follows, he claimed, that the sovereign is legally unlimited. But for Hobbes, any sovereign is legally constituted in that it must comply with what I call the ‘validity mark’ of sovereignty: Legal change must happen in accordance with the criteria of validity. In addition, there is the ‘fundamental legality mark’: To count as an act of sovereign will, a law must be consistent with the laws of nature, in more contemporary terms with the fundamental legal commitments of the legal order. Hobbes’s idea of sovereignty is thus a legal idea, which contrasts with the figure that haunts politics today, the ‘political idea of sovereignty’. I argue that in order to properly oppose the troubling figure of the political sovereign, one needs to have in place not only both marks of sovereignty, but also a political theory of their value. There is a politics to the legal idea of sovereignty.