Judge Frank Easterbrook once argued that rather than establish narrowly defined areas of legal research, scholars should stick to the study of general rules, which can be applied to any number of subject areas. The specific target in Judge Easterbrook’s crosshairs was cyberlaw, which was ascendant in the 1990s. His argument, and the metaphor within, is worth quoting at length: Lots of cases deal with sales of horses; others deal with people kicked by horses; still more deal with the licensing and racing of horses, or with the care veterinarians give to horses, or with prizes at horse shows. Any effort to collect these strands into a course on “The Law of the Horse” is doomed to be shallow and to miss unifying principles. Teaching 100 percent of the cases on people kicked by horses will not convey the law of torts very well. Far better for most students – better, even, for those who plan to go into the horse trade – to take courses in property, torts, commercial transactions, and the like, adding to the diet of horse cases a smattering of transactions in cucumbers, cats, coal, and cribs. Only by putting the law of the horse in the context of broader rules about commercial endeavors could one really understand the law about horses.

Remote work in Korea rapidly accelerated mainly with digitalization and covid-19, posing challenging issues for traditional labor law in this country. The practice of long working hours, and the crisis of the country’s low birth rate and aging population demand fundamental changes of working style. With the development of information and communication technology, traditional ways of direct command and supervision by employers seem to be reduced, while the discretion of workers expanded. However, technologies themselves also make possible more detailed direction by employers - even by the contractors of the employers. The character of the employment contract as a mutual contract presupposes fair distribution of obligation and responsibility. Changing situations surrounding working conditions such as remote work may encourage the re-distribution of responsibility. This chapter explores the impact of remote work on the employers’ responsibility from the standpoint of the response by Korean regulation and policies.

Chapter 4 engages with one of the core examples for failure arguments in practice, i.e. the development of structural reform litigation. It traces the development and application of structural reform litigation across various jurisdictions, including the United States, South Africa, India and Colombia. After an overview of the development of public law litigation in the United States in the Civil Rights Era, it turns to consider similar developments in the three Global South jurisdictions. The chapter shows how courts in all of these systems have invoked governmental failure to justify both innovative judicial procedures and expansive remedies in cases involving systemic rights violations. It explores the dynamic role of the judiciary in addressing governance breakdowns. Some courts have focused primarily on ensuring compliance with past judgments, while others have assumed a broader role in response to political malfunction, sometimes even in a quasi-populist manner.

This chapter explores how citizens in the Frisian area of the Netherlands joined forces to combat disinformation through the project "De Pit" from September 2022 to September 2023. The project involved three independent regional learning communities with diverse participants investigating and exposing disinformation. The goal was to empower communities to fight disinformation as part of an active community at their local library, (vocational) school, or university. We conducted a multiple experimental case study to analyze how these communities establish rules, roles, and agreements to critically collect, analyze, understand, and report on the information surrounding them in online and offline spaces. Considering the different backgrounds, level of education, ages, and geographical locations enables us to learn if people create similar or different solutions to fight disinformation. Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development framework has supported us in understanding these learning communities and how the participants have developed a research approach enabling them to interpret the facts behind information circulating in the public sphere. Our research indicates that learning communities, backed by local institutions such as libraries, schools, and universities, can provide a secure space for acquiring and practicing skills. This can help in efforts to reduce polarization online and offline by engaging individuals from various backgrounds. Learning communities focus on creating a safe environment where individuals can self-govern with expert guidance. Our study suggests that defending democracy may begin within offline communities, fostering discussions on both local and global issues. Finally, as part of this chapter, we present a ‘roadmap’ with conditions and recommendations to implement a successful learning community to inspire and support others in setting up similar initiatives.

Inter-Asian Law is starkly absent from constitutional accounts of reproductive rights in Asia. Instead, Asian jurisdictions tend to draw from the Global North, with the United States Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade occupying norm status. To explicate the potential of Inter-Asian Law in transforming reproductive rights, an act of imagination is required, suspending Roe as the central comparative frame and introducing alternate, hypothetical referents from Asia. This chapter conducts this task at two stages. First, it develops imagination as a method of comparative constitutional law. Second, applying the imaginative method, it hypothesizes what reproductive rights might look like if Nepal served as a referent for India and India as a referent for Bangladesh. In documenting explicit shifts in the constitutional construction of these rights, the chapter cements the place of Inter-Asian Law.

Chapter 3 both deepens and problematises the legal understanding of literature by attending to the making and perception of typefaces, particularly the Breitkopf Fraktur typeface in which Kant’s 1785 essay was set. Close reading a 2001 House of Lords decision, Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd v Marks & Spencer Plc, allows us to see that literary copyright and published edition copyright, though pertaining to the respective labours of authors and publishers, nonetheless share an ‘originalist’ aesthetics of the book that affirms the myth of proprietary authorship. To dislodge copyright’s originalist aesthetics, I revisit and compare Fichte’s and Kant’s accounts of the printed book in late eighteenth-century Germany, which, in their own ways, anticipate and undermine the contemporary legal perspective. Unlike Fichte, Kant recognised the visual materiality of the book, including the perceptibility of its typeface and typesetting, which pointed to an historical domain of embodied interactions. Guided by Kant, I attend to two aspects of the material history of the Breikopf Fraktur typeface: the history of its production and the history of its perception. This material history of the typeface, which reveals the deep interactions between human actors and print technologies, acts as a counter-image to copyright’s originalist aesthetics.

Can neurotechnologies be used responsibly in the rehabilitation of convicted persons, respecting fundamental freedoms and rights? This is the question we have endeavoured to answer throughout this book. The human rights challenges generated by new and emerging neurotechnologies have been widely noted by scholars, ethics committees and human rights bodies. This has prompted a debate on how and to what extent human rights protect – and should protect – against unsolicited interference with our brains and minds. In a recent report on the impact, opportunities and challenges of neurotechnology in relation to human rights, the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee concluded that neurotechnologies can affect human rights in a “unique manner”. Therefore, developing an actionable human rights approach is of the “utmost importance”. Some of their concerns relate to the potential use of neurotechnology in the criminal justice system, holding that “most of the applications proposed are extremely problematic from a human rights perspective”. For example, they consider that “forceful extraction of information from detainees or offenders through the use of neurotechnology is prohibited”.

The first part of this chapter examines how commentators in both adversarial and inquisitorial systems have looked to the other system as a means to prevent wrongful convictions. Those in adversarial systems have been attracted to inquisitorial commitments to truth-finding, aversion to plea bargaining and fact-based appellate revisions. Those in inquisitorial systems have looked to the role of the defence counsel in calling and cross-examining witnesses and public and transparent fact-finding. The second part illustrates some differences among inquisitorial systems by contrasting the correction of wrongful convictions in Sweden and Norway and the different use of guilty pleas in China and Taiwan. The next part examines how German, Italian, French, Chilean and Japanese systems remedy wrongful convictions, including through fact-based revision procedures. Finally, trends in the use of guilty pleas and summary procedures in those countries are examined. Although it is diminishing, inquisitorial systems still have an advantage over adversarial systems because of their caution in relying on guilty pleas and summary procedures for serious offences.