{"title":"Disinformation and Democracy on the Docket: Reformulating the Approach to Electoral Disinformation under the ECHR.","authors":"Katie Pentney, Ethan Shattock","doi":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqaf026","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>With the pending case of <i>Bradshaw and others v United Kingdom</i>, the European Court of Human Rights finds itself at a crossroads: it can either cement its free elections jurisprudence under article 3 of Protocol 1 (P1-3) of the European Convention on Human Rights or it can recalibrate and refine it to better safeguard the electorate's democratic rights in the face of electoral disinformation and foreign information manipulation and interference. This article makes the doctrinal and normative case for the latter option. We scrutinise three limitations in the jurisprudence: first, the Court's individualised approach to electoral falsehoods under P1-3, at the expense of the <i>electorate's</i> rights as informed democratic participants; second, the focus on <i>reactive</i> positive obligations to combat electoral disinformation, rather than proactive measures to ensure the free expression of voter choice; and finally, the lack of clarity about how the rights to free elections and to freedom of expression should be read harmoniously where they conflict.</p>","PeriodicalId":47225,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Journal of Legal Studies","volume":"45 4","pages":"980-1010"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12688649/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145726194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Law, Philosophy and the Susceptible Skins of Living Beings.","authors":"David Enoch","doi":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf022","DOIUrl":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf022","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Catherine the Great (apparently) wrote to the French philosopher Diderot something along the lines of: 'You philosophers are fortunate. You write on paper, and paper is patient. Unfortunate emperor that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.' Catherine expressed, I think, an important insight, that is true of the law as well: the law writes on the susceptible skins of living beings. This does not mean, of course, that we should not philosophise about the law, or that we should not take advantage of the benefits of having patient paper to write on. But as we do so, we should philosophise about the law all the time fully realising that the law itself does not write on patient paper, but on the susceptible skins of living beings. This has important implications to how we should-and how we should not-do philosophy of law. This article elaborates on these implications-both in general and using more specific examples.</p>","PeriodicalId":47225,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Journal of Legal Studies","volume":"45 4","pages":"872-895"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12688659/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145726572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Affirmative Action in Criminal Justice.","authors":"Benjamin Ewing","doi":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf017","DOIUrl":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf017","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Even if a hiring process is merit-based and non-discriminatory, it may still fail to ensure substantive fairness if some applicants lacked a fair opportunity to develop their qualifications to compete. A familiar potential remedy for the problem is 'affirmative action', in the sense of preferential treatment for job candidates who lacked a fair opportunity to develop their job qualifications. I defend two analogous contentions about criminal justice. Even if criminal sentencing is formally fair-ie free of discrimination and bias-it may still be substantively unfair because some disadvantaged offenders have lacked a fair opportunity to develop their capacities and structure their choice environments to fortify themselves against resorting to crime. And the criminal justice system might implement a form of 'affirmative action in criminal justice' by mitigating the punishment of offenders who are culpable for crimes but lacked a fair opportunity to avoid becoming so.</p>","PeriodicalId":47225,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Journal of Legal Studies","volume":"45 3","pages":"702-726"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12395250/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144973661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Does Nature Need Rights?","authors":"Lael K Weis, Robert Mullins","doi":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqaf021","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Rights of nature (RoN) appear to provide a promising alternative to anthropocentric environmental rights. But do they meet the demands of transformative green constitutionalist projects? This article addresses that question by examining the juridical dimensions of RoN. We draw on empirical studies of RoN laws to identify and examine the challenges of redeploying 'rights' and 'legal personality'-concepts associated with liberal normative frameworks-in the service of green normative theory and its fundamental concern for ecological well-being. We reject the dominant rights-based paradigm, which locates the green potential of RoN laws in constituting nature as a rights-bearing legal subject, and we propose an alternative: the governance paradigm. Our alternative locates the green potential of RoN laws in reconfiguring authority relations and supports ecocentric legal frameworks instead of RoN: emphasising ecocentric values and duties instead of rights, and ecological community membership instead of legal personhood.</p>","PeriodicalId":47225,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Journal of Legal Studies","volume":"45 4","pages":"839-871"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12688650/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145726591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Algorithmic Decision-Making, Delegation and the Modern Machinery of Government.","authors":"Oliver Butler","doi":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf018","DOIUrl":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf018","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The development of the principle of non-delegation in administrative law was a response to the perceived needs of a 'modern machinery of government', which emerged in post-war 1940s Britain. While it ostensibly sought to ensure that decision-makers appropriately retain their decision-making discretion, and through that political accountability, it has developed into a permissive doctrine that facilitates significant delegation of decision-making within public administration. As algorithmic decision-making (ADM) is increasingly used in public decision-making, it is necessary to question whether it remains fit for the modern machinery of government of the 2020s and beyond. This article considers the limitations of the doctrine in the context of public ADM, considers the shift in doctrinal approach that would be needed to accommodate this emerging machinery and concludes that the doctrine faces serious challenges in accommodating ADM in public decision-making.</p>","PeriodicalId":47225,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Journal of Legal Studies","volume":"45 3","pages":"727-752"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12395227/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144973648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Luca Enriques, Yoon-Ho Alex Lee, Alessandro Romano
{"title":"The Placebo Effect of Insider Dealing Regulation.","authors":"Luca Enriques, Yoon-Ho Alex Lee, Alessandro Romano","doi":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf019","DOIUrl":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf019","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Insiders can profit from material non-public information pertaining to their own firm by trading in the shares of their own company (traditional insider trading) or in the shares of other companies whose stock prices may also be affected by such information (shadow trading). We show that traditional insider trading and shadow trading have the same consequences for financial markets and corporate governance, but only the former is pursued aggressively by regulators in the European Union, the UK and the United States. Drawing on a variety of evidence, including a survey of 200 retail investors, we suggest that, rather than protecting unsuspecting outside investors, such an arrangement enables insiders to profit at their expense. The ban on the more salient practice of traditional insider dealing regulation lulls outside investors into a false sense of security, thus effectively operating as a placebo, whilst insiders can still profit by engaging in shadow trading. We further argue that, ironically, this arrangement may nonetheless be efficient.</p>","PeriodicalId":47225,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Journal of Legal Studies","volume":"45 3","pages":"753-774"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12395251/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144973950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Critical Consideration of Two Methodologies of General Jurisprudence.","authors":"Jorge Cortés-Monroy","doi":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf020","DOIUrl":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf020","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Whether in the form of conceptual analysis or as grounding reduction, armchair theorising has been the main method of theory construction in general jurisprudence in the English-speaking world. Given important deficiencies in this way of proceeding, empiricist jurisprudence, particularly in the form of reductive naturalism, has emerged as an alternative to armchair theorising and has gained some support within the discipline. In this article, I argue that both of these methodological positions ultimately provide us with partial and thus inadequate explanations of the <i>complex</i> social phenomenon of law. In their failure, however, each position does get something right. I then further argue that to make good of these positions' strengths and simultaneously correct their shortcomings, we need to be able to navigate between the self-understanding of participants of the social practice of law and the viewpoints of social scientists and critical observers.</p>","PeriodicalId":47225,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Journal of Legal Studies","volume":"45 3","pages":"775-800"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12395247/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144973656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"<i>The Constitutive Demands of Corrective Justice</i>.","authors":"Joanna Langille","doi":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf016","DOIUrl":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf016","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Ernest Weinrib's recent book, <i>Reciprocal Freedom</i>, considers the implications of his Kantian corrective justice account of private law for other aspects of the legal order (including distributive justice, constitutional rights and the rule of law). The book addresses an important ambiguity left open in Weinrib's past work: whether corrective justice places any limits on the substance of what can count as private law (what Kant calls 'constitutive' requirements). At first, Weinrib appears to deny this, implying that corrective justice is merely 'regulative'-that it helps judges interpret private law in a way that is more coherent and just, without excluding any particular legal content. But a closer reading reveals that he accepts such limits: private law that violates the innate right of persons is non-authoritative. This reading changes our understanding of Weinrib's work, and requires us to consider whether Weinrib can still claim to have a positivist account of law.</p>","PeriodicalId":47225,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Journal of Legal Studies","volume":"45 3","pages":"821-838"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12395231/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144973608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"<i>Procedural Justice and Prison Legitimacy: Towards a Democratic Model of Inmate Participation</i>.","authors":"Chloé Deambrogio","doi":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf013","DOIUrl":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf013","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The procedural account of prison legitimacy proposes that inmates' compliance with correctional institutions depends more on whether they feel that prison guards treat them fairly during their daily interactions than on whether the guards' decisions are ultimately favourable to them. In <i>Crime, Justice, and Social Order</i>, Anthony Bottoms and Alison Liebling provide a compelling overview of their work in this area, highlighting the importance of respectful relationships for building feelings of trust in penal institutions and advancing a humanitarian account of legitimacy that is sensitive to the moral and relational dimensions of order maintenance. Despite their important contribution, Bottoms and Liebling's procedural approach advances a precarious notion of legitimacy that depends too heavily on the fair treatment of inmates by prison guards and too little on methods of inmate participation that might help the institution align its values with those of prisoners, creating a more stable, and truly normative, commitment towards compliance.</p>","PeriodicalId":47225,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Journal of Legal Studies","volume":"45 3","pages":"801-820"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12395248/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144973595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Putting the Brakes on Infrastructure? Judicial Review Challenges to HS2 and the Critique of 'Litigant Power'.","authors":"Sam Guy","doi":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf015","DOIUrl":"10.1093/ojls/gqaf015","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A growing critique regards judicial review as inhibiting infrastructure delivery on the basis of what I term 'litigant power', which may come to represent the dominant political critique of judicial review under the Labour administration. This differs from classic concerns of judicial power, focusing on how legal challenges by project opponents-notwithstanding their doctrinal outcome-can produce delay and embed a chilling overcaution among industry and policy makers. Having articulated the litigant power critique alongside judicial power, the article explores judicial review's impacts on infrastructure delivery through a case study of the legal challenges to England's High-Speed 2 railway project. I argue this litigation presents little evidence of judicial overreach, but in some ways supports litigant power concerns. Nevertheless, I suggest the litigant power critique risks oversimplification, especially in view of the radical reform often proposed, and it also downplays chilling effects associated with the constitution's centralisation of government decision-making power.</p>","PeriodicalId":47225,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Journal of Legal Studies","volume":"45 3","pages":"669-701"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12395228/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144973896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}