This chapter looks at the link between environmental disputes, movements, and defenders and the use of the law to target environmental defenders. It explains and clarifies how environmental conflict and ‘defenders’ are conceived and employed throughout the book. The chapter introduces the conceptual framework – hegemonic environmental lawfare (HEL) – used throughout the book to examine attacks against environmental defenders through legal means. Furthermore, the chapter elaborates on the strategic dimensions of HEL: geographies, weaponry, externalities, and resistance. It argues that HEL in Southeast Asia should be placed in a wider structural context by scrutinising the functions of law and legal institutions in capitalist development in the region. It is argued that HEL is a response and reaction to the question of legitimacy in relation to the political and economic status quo.

The book concludes by emphasising that HEL emerges as a reaction and response of the power holders to address challenges in their pursuit of economic growth and capital accumulation posed by environmental defenders without risking their legitimacy. In addition, it will also point out how the literature on environmental law is implicated by the findings discussed in the book. Finally, the book’s conclusion closes by providing insights for future research agenda on HEL.

Epilogue reflects on the recent public discussions in Poland about ways to dismantle the legacy of rightwing authoritarian populist legalist rule and to “restore” democracy and the rule of law. These discussions raise critical questions about political strategy that has wide resonance beyond the national borders of Poland. In particular, they bring into focus the relationship between law, authoritarianism, democracy, and transitional justice, at the alleged ends of rightwing authoritarian rule from an international and historical perspective. In light of these discussions and the insights accumulated in this study, the epilogue suggests an alternative way of conceiving the means and ends relationship and formulating the question of social transformation and justice beyond the imaginary of “restoration” of democracy and the teleological vision of transition.

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.