Remote working – strongly widespread during the covid-19 pandemic –is today one of the main forms of innovation in the world of work. As always, within innovation phenomena we have static elements, from the past, and dynamic elements, looking to change the status quo. Consequently, the evaluation of remote work may be either conservative or innovative. Remote work can be considered as a simple re-proposition of the Fordist-Taylorist Enterprise that does not actually change the characteristics of employment as a not democratic relationship involving the worker submission to the employer managerial, control and disciplinary power. On the other hand, remote work can be recognized as the symptom of a broader cultural, organizational and process change in the firm, allowing the worker to conquer new spaces of freedom and autonomy, which not only allow for a new balance in the relationship between work and life, but also redefine both the factual and juridical connotations of subordination. This chapter analyzes this second perspective and, on the basis of legislation and collective bargaining, tries to define the elements of change in the concept and morphology of subordination within the employment relationship.

This chapter advances the argument that jurisdictional arbitrage is not merely a tactic of tax or liability avoidance, but a distinct form of power – rooted in autonomy, control, and legal engineering – that enables CCMCEs to reshape their operating environments. Drawing on insights from corporate strategy, international political economy, and the CORPLINK project, it reframes arbitrage as a modality of power akin to the creation of a ‘hidden empire’. Through the modular structure of the CCMCEs, MNCs exploit legal and jurisdictional fragmentation to escape regulatory constraints, minimize costs, and amplify market valuation. This structural agility insulates them from state oversight, enabling them to strategically socialize costs and privatize gains. Unlike traditional theories that depict corporate power as relational or behavioural, the chapter argues for a third dimension: power as autonomy – the ability to opt out of constraints by rearranging legal structures. This form of rule-based transgression is monopolized by a global elite of corporations, investors, and advisory firms who exploit regulatory differences not by violating rules but by mastering them. Jurisdictional arbitrage, then, is a primary mechanism of modern corporate power and a central driver of global inequality.

Chapter 6 will compare how shareholders in the three countries monitor management by voice from the perspective of the tradeoff between management autonomy and monitoring management. Japanese and Chinese corporate laws give shareholders wider decision-making power compared to the US corporate law. On the other hand, Japanese and Chinese corporate laws provide an ambiguous fiduciary duty of directors, which allows management to balance stakeholder interests, while the US law provides a strict fiduciary duty to shareholders. The three countries share similar disclosure regulations, both by corporate law and securities regulation. Institutionalization of stock ownership structure strengthened shareholder activism since the 1990s in the United States, and now Japan is catching up. In China, shareholder activism is historically nearly absent; however, the China Securities Investor Service Center (ISC) has raised a substantial number of shareholder activism cases and has become influential in Chinese corporate governance.

Machine-readable humanity is an evocative idea, and it is this idea which Hanley et al. spell out and critically discuss in their contribution. They are interested in exploring the technological as well as the moral side of the meaning of machine-readability. They start by differentiating between various ways to collect (and read) data and to develop classification schemes. They argue that traditional top-down data collection (first the pegs and then the collection according to the pegs) is less efficient than more recent machine readability, which is dynamic, because of the successive advances of data and predictive analytics (“big data”), machine learning, deep learning, and AI. Discussing the advantages as well as the dangers of this new way to read humans, they conclude that we should be especially cautious vis-à-vis the growing field of digital biomarkers since in the end they could not only endanger privacy and entrench biases, but also obliterate our autonomy. Seen in this light, apps (like AdNauseam) that restrict data collection as a form of protest against behavioral profiling also constitute resistance to the inexorable transformation of humanity into a standing reserve: humans on standby, to be immediately at hand for consumption by digital machines.

Chapter 6 uses this new understanding of chilling effects to elaborate the dangers of chilling effects both on an individual level and societal scale. The chapter elaborates the two dimensions of chilling effects – repressive and productive. The former speaks to how chilling effects today can repress speech and other rights on a mass scale; the latter speaks to how chilling effects are conforming effects, and thus produce conforming and compliant behavior on a societal scale, which has critical implications for individual identity, development, autonomy, and equality, but is also corrosive to democracy and democratic societies.

Failures of environmental law to preserve, protect and improve the environment are caused by law’s contingency and constitutional presumptions of supremacy over the self-regulatory agency of nature. Contingency problems are intrinsic to law and, therefore, invite deployment of technologies. Constitutional presumptions can be corrected through geo-constitutional reform. The latter requires the elaboration of geo-constitutional principles bestowing authority on nature’s self-regulatory agency. It is suggested that principles of autonomy, loyalty, pre-emption, supremacy and rights have potential to serve that aim and imply proactive roles for technologies in environmental governance. Geo-constitutional reform is necessary to prevent the fatal collapse of the natural regulatory infrastructure enabling life and a future of environmental governance by design. Once environmental catastrophe has materialized, however, geo-constitutionalism loses its raison d’être.

This chapter examines some ways in which human agency might be affected by a transition from legal regulation to regulation by AI. To do that, it elucidates an account of agency, distinguishing it from related notions like autonomy, and argues that this account of agency is both philosophically respectable and fits common sense. With that account of agency in hand, the chapter then examines two different ways – one beneficial, one baleful – in which agency might be impacted by regulation by AI, focussing on some agency-related costs and benefits of transforming private law from its current rule-based regulatory form to an AI-enabled form of technological management. It concludes that there are few grounds to be optimistic about the effects of such a transition and good reason to be cautious.

In Chapter 6, I analyze a set of in-between and underground sites. I show that these places have worked in tandem with Imam-Hatips but also in competition with them. Like Imam-Hatips, these sites eschewed conventional politics, focused on early and prolonged habituation to alternative lifestyles, and advocated for a totalistic vision of Islam. But unlike Imam-Hatips, parallel education sites pursued dispositional training in its most rigorous form (mainly because they were unchecked by authorities) while also connecting individuals within them to a countercultural milieu so as to facilitate the prefiguring of an Islamic society. Specifically for this reason, I argue, underground sites constituted the main foundation of Islamist politics. The chapter draws from a series of vignettes to delineate the process of creating the pious subject through politicizing personal habits and convincing individuals that making their lives congruent with religion is an indispensable aspect of solving society’s problems.

Regulation of the beginning and end of life raises myriad medical, legal, philosophical, moral and ethical issues. It also implicates a range of rights, most notably the right to life, freedom from ill-treatment and the right to private life. This chapter considers the ways in which State regulation of abortion, withdrawal/refusal of medical treatment and assisted dying engage rights protected by the ECHR. In particular, this chapter examines when life begins for the purposes of Article 2 (right to life) and whether the right to life precludes or, indeed, requires that States enable access to assistance in dying. Domestic law is considered, demonstrating the ways in which the margin of appreciation operates to confer a significant degree of latitude on States to regulate the beginning and end of life.

Jan KlabbersThis epilogue takes stock of the volume and sketches some of the ramifications: if the vacuum assumption (i.e. international organizations only interact with their member states) no longer holds, assuming it ever did, then what? The author proposes that international organizations are better seen as political and economic actors in their own right. They may be given a function upon establishment, but usually develop a certain autonomy. This renders them closer to administrative agencies and offers a more realistic foundation on which to build further legal thought – and thus might be able to take third parties into account.

This chapter explores the role of law in organizational interaction. In contrast with recent work on international institutional law that seeks to overcome functionalism and make legal sense of interaction, this chapter argues that interaction among international organizations is a legally constituted phenomenon, in two specific senses. First, law constitutes the space of the interaction (that is, the ‘organizational ecosystem’). Second, law provides the background norms for organizational autonomy and the vocabulary for the decoupling of the organization’s practice and its formal goals. Such a decoupling through institutional law allows international organizations to flexibly interact with each other and adapt to external pressures. Thus, in its dual role, international law provides the building blocks of interaction, playing a crucial role before the need to ‘regulate’ interaction even appears.

This chapter lays out the ways in which Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851) influenced the development of the concept of thought experiment. Ernst Mach (1838–1916) is currently more often credited with laying the foundations of contemporary views, and he is sometimes thought to have been little (if at all) influenced by Ørsted. Against these standard accounts, I will show that Ørsted’s and Mach’s descriptions have key features in common. Both thinkers hold that thought experiments: (1) are a method of variation, (2) require the experimenter’s free activity, and (3) are useful in educational contexts for guiding students to arrive at certain conclusions on their own (i.e., to genuinely appropriate new concepts). The process of variation is guided by the search for invariants, some of which do not directly appear in experience. Since it is important that teachers and students be able to bring the same ideal objects to mind, thought experiments play a key role for both Ørsted and Mach in math education. While Ørsted’s emphasis on the role of thought experiments in math has been proposed as a reason why his descriptions are not relevant for contemporary use of thought experiments, I will show how their role in mathematical thinking – stemming from Kant’s descriptions of the method of construction in geometry – are part of a wider account of thought experiments that encompasses their role in the sciences and also philosophy.

Kierkegaard and Ørsted were not just contemporaries but personally knew each other. In this chapter, I argue that Kierkegaard probably learned the term Tankeexperiment from Ørsted. This chapter contextualizes Kierkegaard’s use of “imaginary construction” (Experiment) in his work as a whole, including his well-known uses of paradoxes. I will show how the core elements of Ørsted’s account – thought experiment as a method of variation, the need for free and active constitution, and the use of thought experiments for facilitating genuine thought – are echoed in Kierkegaard’s discussions. Along the way, I will describe some decisions on how to translate Experiment and Tankeexperiment that are unfortunate in some ways and fortuitous in others, as I will explain. In these ways, Kierkegaard indirectly takes up Kant’s proposal that “construction” (i.e., Experiment in Danish) is a means of achieving cognition.

This is an account of Kant’s understanding of the conditions of the possibility of willing in general. Kant’s definition of the will as “a capacity to act in accordance with the representation of laws” is analyzed at length, and I argue that this capacity is present not only in maxim-making but also in the making of judgments regarding how the world works imbedded in hypothetical imperatives. I provide a discussion of the nature of hypothetical imperatives, their relation to maxims, and their relation to the categorical imperative. The chapter concludes with a defense of Kant’s derivation of the categorical imperative from its mere concept, highlighting the central role played by the concept of autonomy in it. The upshot of this chapter is that the use of the higher faculty of intelligence must be present if the will is to operative at all.