Chapter 11 focuses on ancient ‘contracts’, with specific reference to commerce, property and other economic activities for which there is relevant evidence. The chapter begins with urbanization in southern Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium bce, bringing together archaeological, material and written evidence in order to introduce a broad working idea of ‘contracts’. The next section moves on to a discussion of technical ancient terms and concepts, noting the ‘considerable terminological instability in the common English translations of the original terms’. The following section turns to ‘contracts’ between states, whilst the next develops a comparative analysis of ‘oaths in interpersonal agreements’. The following two sections analyse specific questions surrounding the use of writing and ’the contract of sale’, noting that there is surviving evidence for the use of (different forms of) contacts of sale across every ancient legal system. The chapter concludes by drawing together a set of generalized conceptions of ‘contract’ and briefly suggesting that long-distance trade - among other factors - may lie behind some of the similarities - for example the use of seals - evident across the extant ancient evidence.

This Handbook brings together a global team of private law experts and computer scientists to examine the interface between private law and AI, which includes issues such as whether existing private law can address the challenges of AI and whether and how private law needs to be reformed to reduce the risks of AI while retaining its benefits.

Whether AI should be given legal personhood should not be framed in binary terms. Instead, this issue should be analysed in terms of a sliding-scale spectrum. On one axis, there is the quantity and quality of the bundle of rights and obligations that legal personhood entails. The other axis is the level of the relevant characteristics that courts may include in conferring legal personhood.

The theory of law put forward in this book is founded on the idea of interdependence. Interdependence generates goods taking the form of a community. In law a community involves common legal obligations pertaining to goods. The WTO Agreement establishes a “club good.” Its essence is the equality of opportunity for economic operators in members’ markets. These legal arrangements have given rise to enormous networks of global supply and value chains. At the same time, however, they have generated unease at de-industrialization and exposed critical vulnerabilities. Whereas at the time of the WTO’s founding in 1995 the unconditional interdependence called for in the WTO Agreement might have been regarded as beneficial, today it is seen as less so. Consequently, the club good of the organization appears to be splintering into individual goods composed of specific trading relationships. Consequently, support for the organization and its dispute settlement system has ebbed. Nevertheless, there appears to be recognition of residual worth in the WTO Agreement and its dispute settlement system, which may continue to serve as a locus for transformative solutions.

This chapter provides an introduction to Swiss contract law. It discusses the Code of Obligations as the main source of law, the fundamental principles of Swiss contract law, the notion of an obligation as the effect of the contract, the formation of contracts, including pre-contractual liability, as well as the notions of offer and acceptance. This chapter then turns to the principles applicable to the interpretation of contracts and the principles governing the validity of contracts. This chapter further discusses the notion of agency, general terms and conditions as well as the various categories of contracts found under Swiss law. This chapter moreover explores the significant issues of the performance of the contract and breach of contract. Finally, this chapter analyses the extinguishment of obligations as well as the concepts of the assignment of a claim and the assumption of debt.

In the past two decades, scientists, think tanks, international organizations and NGOs have highlighted how climate change may lead people to migrate internally and across international borders. The International Organization for Migration has sought a role in understanding and responding to the issue of climate related migration. IOM staff began a series of workshops, conferences, research and reports on climate and migration, when most member states were reluctant to discuss, let alone finance projects, on the topic under the auspices of IOM. However, over time IOM staff successfully shifted member states’ understanding of the organization’s role to include work on climate change and migration. IOM staff worked with a few sympathetic states and other stakeholders (such as universities, NGOs and private funders) to initiate climate change projects, and over time convinced the IOM Council that climate change migration was a strategic priority for the organization. IOM reshaped its obligations to states, despite its projectized and heavily earmarked funding structure.

This introductory chapter sets the stage for the contribution advanced in this volume. First, it provides a brief overview of IOM’s history and structure. Second, it offers a primer on IOM’s entry into the UN system as a related organization in 2016. Third, it situates the book in relation to the core concepts underpinning it, including the obligations, accountability, and expansion dynamics of international organizations (IOs). Fourth, it draws out key themes running through the volume, particularly in relation to grounding assessments of IOM in international law; understanding IOM’s roles as a norm ‘breaker, taker and shaper’; analysing IOM as a protection actor; and developing more complex accounts of institutional change at IOM. Fifth, it maps out the structure, scope and limitations of book. Finally, it reflects on the legal and political implications of this volume, focusing on the need to recast the IOM Constitution to centre not only the organization’s obligations to its member states but also to the migrants it claims to serve.

Chapter 9 proposes a universal accommodation mandate, which would allow employees to request modifications to the structural norms of the workplace (when and where work is performed) and to request modifications to how the physical tasks of the job are performed. This chapter explains how the mandate would work, discusses various applications of the mandate, briefly addresses logistical issues, and then responds to the anticipated criticisms.

This chapter expands on the concept of reciprocity, looking at how it can be defined, its key characteristics, and the three key functions it plays: in norm creation, as a condition, and in execution of the law. It examines the defining elements of reciprocity: proportionality, relativity, equality, and interdependence. The chapter goes on to examine the nature of reciprocity, and its relationship to custom and general principles, two sources of international law. It illustrates how it is reciprocity’s relationship with the structural characteristic of sovereign equality in international law that explains many of its roles and defining characteristics.

The conclusion highlights some conclusions on the nature and role of reciprocity in public international law, on the basis of the analysis in foregoing chapters. It highlights the link between reciprocity and the principle of sovereign equality, before briefly outlining the functions, limits, and some of the specific meanings of reciprocity in public international law.

This chapter analyzes reciprocity in the social sciences, historical forms of law, and domestic contexts, including the law of contracts and in federal States, to shed light upon some of reciprocity’s fundamental characteristics. Reciprocity is not incompatible with the existence of a community, but necessarily requires a social relation, and one of its defining characteristics is its relationship with equality. Rather than being a negative concept, based on occasional and discontinued instances of interaction on the basis of reactions to conduct, reciprocity is a concept fundamental to the existence of social relations, and inherent to ideas of justice and fairness.

One of the great joys and benefits of ageing is the possibility of being in very long-term friendships – such friendships, by their very nature, are not available to the young. These friendships ground strong reciprocal special obligations. Such long-term friends have very strong obligations to care for each other as they age and as they become vulnerable as a result of declining mental and/or physical strength. These long-standing intimate relationships, insofar as they ground strong special obligations, are precisely what a friend ought to be thinking about as she is moved to care for her friend. Thus, in thinking about a duty, one is thereby thinking about the valuable relationship that has bound one to one’s friend over an important and extended portion of one’s life. Acting from a special obligation to a long-term friend is to act in precisely the right sort of caring way.

Chapter Five charts human dignity in its second constitutive stage, characterized by the rise of international human rights law. Its first expressions in the 1920s (which echoed developments in connection with slave trade and slavery in the nineteenth century) and later in 1944 (with the Philadelphia Declaration), must be considered in the light of the decisive adoption of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, in 1948, and the adoption of the Convention against Genocide later that year. But it is difficult to consider these entry points, however important, as sufficient for the consolidation of human dignity in the form of human ‘rights’. In earnest, the consolidation process was not completed until the adoption of the two human rights Covenants in 1966, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

Chapter One is devoted to the clarification of the methodological structure. It characterizes the analytical framework developed to study the place of human dignity in international law introducing its four main components: (i) the definition of the concept of dignity and of the main analytical distinctions used in the study; (ii) the characterization of the processes of progressive recognition of human dignity in international law, which are referred to in this study as ‘constitutive stages’; (iii) an analytical cartography of different legal instruments, understood as specific ways of formulating a norm (principles, rights, obligations, crimes), on which the analysis of the legal expression of human dignity in international law is subsequently conducted; and (iv) the main overall narrative and argument regarding the place of human dignity in international law developed in the study.

This chapter begins with a real-life example that sets the scene for the core question engaged in this book: what is the substantive content of the obligations corporations have in relation to fundamental rights? The goal of the book is to develop a general legal analytical framework to answer this question at an intermediate level of determinacy that can guide decision-making in concrete cases. It also considers the institutional changes required to give effect to the framework and render it meaningful. In so doing, it highlights the union of substance, process and institutional design. The chapter outlines the methodological approach I adopt: it combines international and constitutional law; straddles the boundary between public and private law; engages insights from disciplines such as philosophy, economics and political science; and combines the normative and descriptive. The chapter also provides an outline of the structure of the argument in this book and brief description of what is accomplished in each chapter.