Chapter 2 juxtaposes the myth of proprietary authorship embodied in the legal idiom of ‘work’, ‘author’ and ‘originality’ with the realities of print production in late eighteenth-century Germany. I problematise the conventional view of the literary work as an intellectual creation of a personal author through a paratextual reading of Kant’s 1785 essay that reconstructs its underpinning historical processes and conditions. This analysis includes not only the epitextual background of the German Enlightenment and the role therein played by periodicals such as the Berlinische Monatsschrift, but also the peritextual features of catchwords, signature marks and front matter that appeared within and alongside Kant’s text. I argue that these paratexts lead us back to the print machinery of the German Enlightenment: a socio-technological assemblage of human actors interacting with technologies, which Kant and others sought to steer so as to address the problem of print saturation. The existence of such a machinery, one that preceded the authorial figure, perturbs copyright law’s attachment to original authorship. Insufficient to deal with the complexities of the book’s emergence, the terms and doctrines of copyright law tend to suppress the deep historicity of literary production.

Concerns about the role of prejudice and racial discrimination first expressed by Voltaire and Zola were often at the forefront of pre-DNA campaigns to correct wrongful convictions. Despite this, the American innocence movement frequently neglected the role of racism in wrongful convictions. It neglected links between lynching and frequent DNA exonerations, where white victims misidentified Black men. Racism was recognized in the wrongful convictions of the Exonerated (Central Park) Five but not in other similar wrongful convictions of Black teenagers. Trump mobilized anti-Black racism in his calls for the Five to be executed. The role of both anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism in the 1971 wrongful conviction of Donald Marshall Jr. for the murder of a Black teenager in Canada is examined. A 1989 public inquiry into this wrongful conviction did not ignore racism in the same way as similar American inquiries into wrongful convictions. Patterns of anti-Indigenous racism and the role of stereotypes in the wrongful conviction of Indigenous men in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States are identified. Finally, the place of anti-racism in the future evolution of innocence movements is discussed.

The question of how politics and ethics connect, if at all, in our societies is crucial, especially given today’s socio-economic and geopolitical challenges. Commentators have sought answers in Kant’s texts: the relation between the Categorical Imperative (CI) as the fundamental principle of ethics, and the Universal Principle of Right (UPR) as the fundamental principle of politico-legal norms, has been variously interpreted as one of simple dependence, simple independence, or complex dependence. Recent interpretations increasingly agree that Kant was not a simple independentist. However, questions persist about the philosophical significance of Kant’s account, specifically whether certain aspects of his thought inconsistently commit him to simple independentism. One aim of this chapter is to illustrate this critical strategy starting from a specific interpretation of the UPR. It is argued that, although robust, this interpretation is not the most accurate. While this strategy opens new avenues for further objections to Kant, the chapter concludes that the complex dependentist reading is philosophically the most convincing to date.

The rapid development of data analytics, computational power, and machine/deep learning algorithms has driven artificial intelligence (AI) applications to every sphere of society, with significant economic, legal, ethical, and political ramifications. A growing body of literature has explored critical dimensions of AI governance, yet few touch upon issue areas that directly resonate with the diverse context and dynamics of the non-Western world, particularly Asia. This chapter therefore aims to fill the gap by offering a contextual discussion of how Asian jurisdictions perceive and respond to the challenges posed by AI, as well as how they interact with each other through regulatory cross-referencing, learning, and competition. Premised upon an analysis of the diverse regulatory approaches shaped by respective political, legal, and socioeconomic contexts in such jurisdictions, this chapter identifies how Inter-Asian Law has emerged in AI governance in the forms of regulatory cross-referencing, joint efforts, and cooperation through regional forums and points to potential venues for normative interactions, dialogue, best practices exchanges, and the co-development of AI governance.

This chapter examines the narrative of cybersecurity in China’s mass media, with a focus on the domestication of cybersecurity and its subsequent challenge to democracy. While much ink has been spilled over cybersecurity in (Western) democracies, less is known about the narrative and discourse of cybersecurity in an authoritarian context and its implications for global Internet governance and security. This chapter fills this gap by exploring news narratives on cybersecurity in China’s domestic mass media after the enactment of the Cybersecurity Law of the People’s Republic of China in 2017. Drawing on computer-assisted semantic network analysis of 9,094 news articles and commentaries, this chapter uncovers how the Chinese regime is adopting a discourse of cybersecurity to legitimize and consolidate its control over the Internet and to counter the challenges of global Internet connection. This domestication discourse is further utilized to place blame on the West for cyber threats. This chapter concludes with thoughts on the domestication of cybersecurity by authoritarian regimes like China and the challenge of defending cybersecurity.

Chapter 7 transitions to the use of failure arguments in international law, examining how they have been used to justify expanding the authority of international bodies. It begins with an analysis of the UN’s Uniting for Peace Resolution and examines the role of failure arguments in the 1990s discourse on state failure and development cooperation. This chapter highlights the challenges of invoking arguments from failure within an international framework, where constitutional principles like separation of powers are less clearly defined. Drawing on Part I, the chapter emphasizes that failure arguments suppose a quasi-constitutional context including expectations of mutual support and cooperation. This only rarely exists in international settings, with the United Nations being one of the exceptions in this regard. The chapter also points to the need to consider political power structures when dealing with arguments from failure, noting the neo-colonial undertones of such arguments in some cases.

The influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the law and legal order of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region might seem not to be a case of inter-Asian law because it occurs within a single jurisdiction. Yet, Beijing has employed a wide range of means to shape Hong Kong’s legal order, ranging from making or interpreting PRC law for Hong Kong, to mandating or pressing for local lawmaking in Hong Kong, to more diffuse influences on Hong Kong’s legal order and its context. Chinese influence has made Hong Kong law less liberal and democratic and more like the PRC’s. The China–Hong Kong case shows the spectrum of modes of inter-Asian legal influence, the complexity of the relationship between transplants or exports of legal models and legal influence, and the issues that lie ahead in an era of possible competition between China and the United States/the West for legal influence.

In the framework of the common objective of this volume, this chapter focuses on the technological element –expressed in AI– which is usually part of the definition of remote work. This chapter discusses how AI tools shape the organization and performance of remote work, how algorithms impact remote workers rights and how trade unions and workers can harness these powerful instruments to improve working and living conditions. Three hypotheses are considered. First, that AI systems and algorithmic management generate a de facto deepening of the subordinate position of the worker. Second, that this process does not represent technological determinism but instead the impact of human and institutional elements. And finally, that technological resources usually are more present in remote work than in traditional work done at the workplace. These hypotheses and concerns are addressed in several ways: by contextualizing the issue over time, through a multi-level optic centered on the interactions of different levels of regulation, by examining practical dimensions and finally by exploring the implications for unions and worker agency.

We tend to think that we are prima facie morally entitled to determine the course of our own lives to some degree, and to make our own decisions about matters that are personal to us. Dworkin speaks of our “right to make decisions about the character of [our] lives”. Feinberg suggests that we plausibly have a personal domain over which we are “sovereign” and hence where we “alone” have the final say about “what is to happen”. And Akhlaghi defends the idea that we have a pro tanto or defeasible moral right to “autonomous self-making” – viz. a pro tanto moral right to autonomously decide to make certain “transformative choices” that will influence how our lives will go and who we will become.

This concluding chapter synthesizes the book’s findings and addresses broader trends such as declining trust in state institutions, governance crises, and the expanding role of constitutional law and judicial review. These trends not only elevate expectations of courts to address systemic issues but also increase calls for legal flexibility in the interest of bringing about certain outputs, including through arguments based on failure. The chapter cautions against the potential slide into authoritarianism that such flexibility could enable, emphasizing the need for careful and restrained application of these arguments in public law. It ends by highlighting the need for more North-South comparison and exchange to help address those challenges.

This chapter asks whether there is anything we might productively characterize as an Inter-Asian approach to religion–state relations. I use the example of the Essential Religious Practices (ERP) Doctrine as a window into this analysis. The ERP Doctrine offers the best-case argument for the existence of an Inter-Asian approach to religion–state relations because, after its initial articulation by the Indian Supreme Court, it has been widely influential within South and Southeast Asia. I use two of the contexts where ERP analysis has been influential – Malaysia and Sri Lanka – to show how there has indeed been significant conceptual migration within Asia with regard to religious freedom jurisprudence. The ERP Doctrine’s travels are clearly reflected in the flow of jurisprudential ideas and via robust campus-court exchanges. At the same time, differences in the theoretical networks and sociopolitical contexts within which the ERP Doctrine has traveled prevent it from constituting a homogenous and hermetically sealed Inter-Asian approach.