The rise of remote work and work-from-home, accelerated by the COVID pandemic, is reshaping and disrupting the social dimension of work—that is, the incidence of cooperation, sociability, and solidarity (as well as conflict) among co-workers. Most discussion of the trend toward remote work centers naturally on its impact on firms (especially in terms of productivity) or workers (especially in terms of work-life balance). This essay focuses instead on how remote work and work-from-home might affect the social underpinnings of political life outside the workplace. The quotidian experience of working together—traditionally, face-to-face, and often across salient lines of social division—generates weak and strong interpersonal bonds that can strengthen the foundations of a democratic society. The cumulative societal benefits of co-worker interactions are at risk if remote work thins out and weakens workplace ties. That is especially likely because those societal benefits are “public goods” and spillover benefits of workplace interactions. Those social benefits may thus be neglected by analysts and observers. This essay develops that thesis and then reflects briefly on whether and how the conventional institutional arsenal of labor and employment law might be deployed to increase the production of such public goods.

How does law travel in Inter-Asia? This chapter focuses on traveling law as an empirical event and does so to reflect on prevailing theories in comparative law that explain how law moves from one jurisdiction to another. The dominant paradigm in comparative law for traveling law is legal transplants, a concept that has generated a sprawling literature. The point of this chapter is not to say that Inter-Asia is aberrational regarding legal transplants; instead, the perspective is to use the Inter-Asian Law material, and specifically the fraught movements of Chinese law in Inter-Asia, to critically reflect on comparative law conventions. Whereas Inter-Asia is embedded within global trade and migration routes, it has also been populated by outsiders – pirates or jihadis – whose participation within those circuits creates contrast and distance, elements that are prerequisites to critical reflection. Chinese law may also be such an outsider that permits reflecting on taken-for-granted paths.

This chapter examines four common immediate causes of wrongful convictions as confirmed by recent data from registries. They are mistaken eyewitness identification, incentivized and lying witnesses, false confessions and faulty forensics. Commonly used remedies designed to prevent these immediate causes are examined from a legal process perspective, which stresses the different remedies that can be implemented by courts, legislatures and through executive measures. The latter includes reforms that police and forensic science providers can take themselves to decrease the risk of causing wrongful convictions. The most effective strategies often involve all three branches of government. At the same time, many jurisdictions are reluctant to adopt optimal reform measures because of concerns about preventing the use of evidence that is frequently used to achieve convictions. For example, the use of jailhouse informants has not been banned despite their frequent role in wrongful convictions. This insight suggests that reforms to prevent wrongful conviction cannot ignore their perceived or likely impact on conviction rates.

Chapter 3 further refines the criteria for when failure-based arguments might be justified. Drawing insights from the early UN Human Rights Commission’s focus on addressing specific rights violations, along with literature on structural reform litigation and emergencies in public law, the chapter underscores the importance of proportionality. This involves weighing the necessity, functionality, and potential costs of interventions. The chapter concludes with a contemporary example — the Horizon scandal and the UK Parliament’s legislative response overturning wrongful convictions of subpostmasters—illustrating how this reasoning works in practice.

This chapter argues that Article 14(6) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) does not require proof of innocence. At the same time, it only requires compensation for some wrongful convictions and may require updating especially for false guilty pleas. International criminal courts have a potential to be hybrids of adversarial and inquisitorial systems that provide optimal protection against wrongful convictions. Unfortunately, this has often not been the case, raising the risk of false guilty pleas. Nevertheless, the International Criminal Court has made improvements compared to previous courts. Except in Australia, the right to appeal under Article 14(5) of the ICCPR is underdeveloped. South Africa’s approach to appeals is especially restrictive. Proposals to recognize a new international right to claim and prove innocence are critically examined. Article 9(5) provides a broad but often underenforced right to compensation for unlawful detention. Compensation should not, in accordance with international law remedial principles, be limited to monetary compensation. Compensation is not sufficient because it only subjects the human rights violated by miscarriages of justice to liability rules and does not ensure their non-repetition.

This chapter examines the main challenges posed by remote working from the perspective of occupational health and safety protection. Methodologically, the chapter utilizes a multi-level perspective and also focuses on how the temporal and spatial breadth of remote work affect health and safety at work and its regulations. The chapter analyzes the problem of applying the current concepts of effective working time and rest time to the new activity times that arise in remote work. The study also examines the problems that arise regarding controlling and recording working time in remote work, as well as the legal limits of the new forms of control used by companies. The need to articulate specific forms of digital disconnection and to introduce online working time as a psychosocial risk factor is addressed. The chapter also examines the implications of remote work for the management of occupational risk prevention. In addition to how occupational risk prevention planning is carried out, special attention is paid to the new occupational risks that may appear in the digital sphere, such as cyber-bullying, but also the increase in more traditional psychosocial risks, and the difficulties that arise in achieving an effective assessment of these risks.

The chapter suggests that Kant’s relational account of legal obligation enables us to push the boundaries of non-positivism beyond any established legal practices. The first part fleshes out the demands of a radical version of non-positivism whose main characteristic is that it regards legal practices as non-necessary grounds of the demands of external freedom (legal obligations). The second part focuses on the use of Kant’s Universal Principle of Right (UPR) to underpin radical non-positivism. It proposes a relational reading of UPR according to which the independence of persons, as the central demand of external or juridical freedom, cannot be understood outside the relations of interdependence into which they enter in social life. In conclusion, the proposed reading of Kantian right complements and reinforces a radical version of non-positivism which places centre stage pre-institutional relations as foundational ingredients of the external freedom of persons (relations-first non-positivism). The key claim of the chapter is that Kantian right supports a relations-first account of legal obligation.

As discussed in Chapter 1, the primary focus of this book is on the potential of neurotechnology to support the rehabilitation of convicted persons by improving risk assessment and risk management – rather than on its potential for diagnosing and treating mental or brain disorders. Still, in some cases, neurorehabilitation might well become conducive or even crucial to the improvement of mental health in forensic populations. Brain stimulation to attenuate aggressive impulses might serve to reduce the mental distress experienced by some persons subject to these impulses. Furthermore, aggression can be a symptom of a recognised mental illness, such as a psychotic disorder, or may be a core feature of a disorder, as in intermittent explosive disorder. Diminishing aggression using neurotechnology could in such cases be relevant to the person’s mental health, which appears to be an interest protected by human rights law. For example, Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) recognises a “right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health”.

Telework presents two quite distinct faces: longer, more irregular work schedules; yet potentially a better reconciliation of work and family life, provided it is promoted. Yet the outcomes are clearly ambivalent. Teleworking in itself is no guarantee of co-responsibility or the transformation of gender roles. There is a risk that it is perceived as the most ‘appropriate’ working arrangement for women, in a way that perpetuates gender roles and, even, widens the labour gap. To address this danger, socio-economic and cultural alliances, policies and regulations must all row in the same direction and take steps to eliminate patriarchal structures and systemic discrimination This contribution emphasizes that telework is not gender-neutral because it brings paid work into the domestic sphere, a traditionally feminine domain where productive and reproductive spaces overlap. The chapter analyses the impact that labour legislation and business practices have on women, and explores issues to which teleworking gives rise in relation to working time and work–life balance. Additionally, and with the focus more firmly on business practices, the work addresses the opportunities afforded by telework as a working-time arrangement.

This chapter frames the debate between those who think that Kant’s philosophy of Right is in some way independent from his moral philosophy and those who do not in two ways. First, the chapter argues that Kant recognizes only two forms of practical reason, namely the pure practical reason of morality and the empirical practical reason of prudential self-love, and that if his philosophy of Right is not to be a version of Hobbesian prudence, it can only be a part of morality – namely, the coercively enforceable part. It argues further that the moral foundation of Kant’s philosophy of Right is the innate right to freedom, itself the correlative of our obligation always to treat humanity as an end and never merely as a means, since humanity is equivalent to the ability of each to set his or her own ends, that is, freedom. In the second part of the chapter, it is argued that the duties of individuals and rulers alike to both institute and maintain the civil condition, namely the state, make sense only as moral and indeed ethical duties, although not duties of virtue to promote self-perfection and the happiness of others.

Miscarriages of justice encompass more injustice than wrongful convictions or proven innocence. Proven innocence is the most severe rationing of justice, but it is popular, especially for non-lawyers and in mass imprisonment societies such as China and the United States. Originally used as a rationale for compensation in the United States, it now also rations post-conviction relief. It has been used to ration compensation in England since 2014 but was rejected in the 2024 Canadian reforms, creating a Miscarriage of Justice Review Commission. Some Australian states have been attracted to it in recent legislation, but the Chamberlain and Folbigg wrongful convictions have properly been corrected because of reasonable doubts about the guilt of the two women. Following Ronald Dworkin, there needs to be greater concern about inequality in the distribution of the risks of injustice. The danger of wrongful conviction reforms providing justice for a few while legitimating injustices for many is most acute in authoritarian societies such as China, but not absent in democracies. Comparative law, legal process and historical analysis can contribute to richer understandings of miscarriages of justice. Two different future scenarios, one that provides justice for less and another that provides justice for more, are outlined.