Transitional justice’s nature has continued to evolve and, consequently, its scope has significantly widened, raising various unsettled issues. As this review essay observes, transitional justice itself has become conceptually “transitional”, undergoing profound transitions and doing so within an also increasingly and profoundly changing context. Also, as this essay contends, the orientation of those transitions lies at the core of competing visions for transitional justice as a whole. In this vein, as this essay further argues, two major trends seem to be emerging and giving shape to transitional justice’s ongoing transitions: firstly, a trend towards focusing on the (infra)structural dimension of transitional justice processes and thus aiming to reorient transitional justice towards addressing “(infra)structural” factors of (societal) change; and, secondly, a trend towards increasingly relying on public law, in both international and internal legal orders, as a framework to conceptually articulate and implement (infra)structural processes of change.

Functionalism has been increasingly challenged by legal comparatists questioning its nature and suitability. These epistemologically-focused critiques have effectively dichotomised modern comparative law methods, leaving two undertheorised possibilities, namely, the functionalist model—understood in conventional positivist (and substance-ontic) lexes—and emergent postmodern approaches as typified by Pierre Legrand’s system of ‘negative comparative law’ protocols. This article explores an often-neglected alternative grounded in process-relational philosophy. As shown by re-examining Ernst Rabel’s original model, its central claim is that a synthesis of early functionalist theory and process-relational principles exposes postmodern critiques as imprecise and overstated—arguably misconceiving key notions of ‘difference’ and ‘similarity’, and consequently failing to appreciate how greater awareness of the correct order and relationships between levels of abstraction can enhance the nature and possibilities of comparative legal knowledge.

This introductory article challenges foundational assumptions that structure how international legal theory conceptualizes “the Global.” The prevailing approach remains anchored in a Eurocentric legacy that conflates the earth with a geometrically spherical, chronometrically linear, and cartographically fixed model of space and time. This triad has rendered “the Global” an ostensibly objective terrain—embodied by an iconic World Map of states that is presumably atheoretical and transhistorical. I argue this is a form of “misplaced concreteness,” which constrains international legal thought as it confronts increasingly fluid and non-contiguous patterns of global ordering that have become difficult to visualize via the reigning cartographic imaginary. Further, it ignores how “the Global” was constructed by multiple and intersecting types of power, which together manifested demarcations, borders, territories and states as proclaimed mimetic reflections of planetary reality. As contemporary challenges—ranging from e.g. climate change to cyber governance—create trans-territorial or planetary scales of consequence, time is ripe to unfold international legal theory beyond the legacy of a priori conceptualization. Accordingly, the special issue encourages bottom-up, practice-oriented approaches, inviting international lawyers to explore how global spatiality and temporality are actively (re)produced across diverse legal contexts—from mobility regimes and global value chains to counterterrorism forums and planetary systems. Rather than treating “the Global” as a fixed totality or singular map, this special issue reframes it as a historically engineered concept, shaped by ongoing practices of geo-political, geo-economic and legal world-making.

Can the dead subject later generations to their will? Legal and political philosophers have long worried about this question. But some have recently argued that subjection between generations that do not overlap is impossible. Against these views, we offer an account of this kind of subjection and the conditions under which it may occur—the Mediated Subjection View. On this view, legal subjection between nonoverlapping generations occurs when past generations seek to guide the future’s behavior, and legal officials in the future deem the norms and legal frameworks inherited from the past as reason-giving and action-guiding, and have the effective power to enforce them. Under these circumstances, we argue, future legal officials act as intermediaries of the past, enabling past generations to subject later ones to their laws. We first inspect the normative significance of subjection and introduce and motivate the Mediated Subjection View. We next scrutinize four objections to the possibility of legal subjection between nonoverlapping generations and show how our view can answer them.

This Article advocates for conceptualizing law as a design science, with a comprehensive approach that integrates formal, explanatory, and design dimensions of legal knowledge. By embracing the empirical aspects of legal scholarship, this perspective challenges the traditional image of lawyers as solely reliant on linguistic constructs. Instead, it positions them as social engineers capable of shaping legal norms and interpretations in alignment with societal needs. Through analysis and illustration of its application in diverse factual contexts, the Article underscores the necessity for this evolution in contemporary legal scholarship, particularly as teleological interpretation gains prominence in legal practice.

This Article provides the outline for a conceptual framework focusing on legal infrastructures, comprised of socio-material assemblages and entangled legal normativities that both enable and constrain human societies. Section A introduces the growing transdisciplinary field of infrastructural studies, which employs the notion of infrastructure as a tool for analyzing the constitutive relationship between society and essential material structures. It then draws out the analytical conjunction of law and infrastructure in the role ascribed to law within existing applications of infrastructural studies and the nascent engagement with infrastructural theory within the legal discipline itself. Part II develops a conceptual framework on legal infrastructures, outlining three avenues for how thinking infrastructurally may yield new perspectives on the dynamic relationship between law, social practices, and socio-technical materiality; (a) legal infrastructures as socio-material formations that generate societal effects (b) legal infrastructures as schemes of social practice that recursively entangle to produce new configurations, and (c) legal infrastructures as distributing norms across transnational and regime boundaries.

This Article is dedicated to what is arguably one of the most significant tests to which constitutionalism has been subject to in recent times. It examines the theoretical and practical challenges to constitutionalism arising from the profound technological changes under the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) in our emerging algorithmic society. The unprecedented rapid development of AI technology has not only rendered conventional theories of modern constitutionalism obsolete, but it has also created an epistemic gap in constitutional theory. As a result, there is a clear need for a new, compelling constitutional theory that adequately accounts for the scale of technological change by accurately capturing it, engaging with it, and ultimately, responding to it in a conceptually and normatively convincing way.

Legal experts—lawyers, judges, and academics—typically resist changing their beliefs about what the law is or requires when they encounter disagreement from those committed to different jurisprudential or interpretive theories. William Baude and Ryan Doerfler are among the most prominent proponents of this view, holding it because fundamental differences in methodological commitments severs epistemic peerhood. This dominant approach to disagreement, and Baude and Doerfler’s rationale, are both wrong. The latter is committed to an overly stringent account of epistemic peerhood that dogmatically excludes opponents. The former violates the conjunction of three plausible epistemic principles: Complete Evidence, considering all epistemically permissible evidence; Independence, in which only dispute-independent evidence is epistemically permissible; and Peer Support, which involves epistemically permissible evidence. Instead, I argue for jurisprudential humility—we ought to be more willing to admit we do not know what the law is or requires, and take seriously conflicting views.