This introductory article challenges foundational assumptions that structure how international legal theory conceptualizes “the Global.” The prevailing approach remains anchored in a Eurocentric legacy that conflates the earth with a geometrically spherical, chronometrically linear, and cartographically fixed model of space and time. This triad has rendered “the Global” an ostensibly objective terrain—embodied by an iconic World Map of states that is presumably atheoretical and transhistorical. I argue this is a form of “misplaced concreteness,” which constrains international legal thought as it confronts increasingly fluid and non-contiguous patterns of global ordering that have become difficult to visualize via the reigning cartographic imaginary. Further, it ignores how “the Global” was constructed by multiple and intersecting types of power, which together manifested demarcations, borders, territories and states as proclaimed mimetic reflections of planetary reality. As contemporary challenges—ranging from e.g. climate change to cyber governance—create trans-territorial or planetary scales of consequence, time is ripe to unfold international legal theory beyond the legacy of a priori conceptualization. Accordingly, the special issue encourages bottom-up, practice-oriented approaches, inviting international lawyers to explore how global spatiality and temporality are actively (re)produced across diverse legal contexts—from mobility regimes and global value chains to counterterrorism forums and planetary systems. Rather than treating “the Global” as a fixed totality or singular map, this special issue reframes it as a historically engineered concept, shaped by ongoing practices of geo-political, geo-economic and legal world-making.

Contemporary practices of authority by states and non-state actors alike are at odds with international law’s orthodox time-spaces, causing disciplinary anxiety. As a result, although there is a sense of the importance of global value chains (GVCs), these are invisible to the disciplinary gaze. This is not limited to international law; neo-formalist contract law and private international law suffer the same fate. There is for some a turn to ‘the global’ to understand alterity. In this paper, I argue that understanding the time-spaces created by the practice of contracting can offer important reflection on, among other things, what ‘the global’ is. The paper explores the practice of exercising authority through contractual relations at the level of the individual contract, the chain as a whole, and the use of standardised contractual clauses and model contracts. The article suggests these contractual relations are constitutive not only of spatiality but of territoriality. As such, it is possible to reterritorialise global phenomena, and ‘the global’, that have until now been understood to have deterritorialised from state or international legal orders.

The article focuses on the Ukrainian official language policies and their impact on Ukrainian people-building, claiming the state promotion of Ukrainian as an exclusive language of public life and the ethnically-based understanding of the Ukrainian people, inevitably lead to the exclusion of non-Ukrainian communities from participation in democratic processes, politicise the already problematic language situation and risk undermining the role of Ukrainian as an official language.

For such an analysis, and a conceptualisation of how the state can shape the nature of the people, the article proposes a new theoretical understanding of the people as an organisational system, based on a functional adaptation of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory and Charles Taylor’s social imaginary.

The work presents an approach to the meaning(s) of dignity in the constitutional field that focuses, first and foremost, on answering the question: what is dignity? Four ways of characterising the notion are described, relying, where relevant, on the input obtained beyond the legal field – especially in that of philosophy. Although each of them accounts for a different kind of human property, an important commonality among them is stressed, which provides a pathway to understand the place of dignity as a constitutional end within a material approach to constitutions.

This article brings together different strands of literature to explore how time operates in international law as a technique of inclusion and exclusion. The question of reparations for enduring colonial and ecological injustices provides a useful entry point to examine, at a more granular level, the temporal foundations of the field and their distributive outcomes. Concepts of restitution, compensation, satisfaction as well as the doctrine of causation in the law of state responsibility, encode a specific understanding of time. This understanding, I argue, is embedded in a modernist worldview characterised by linear, abstract and universal notions of time. Calls for reparatory justice for colonial and climate wrongs attempt to defy and interrupt law’s forward motion by binding together interconnected (though unequal) pasts, presents and futures. In examining how international law reacts to those claims, and manages the conflict between law’s temporal abstractions and the concrete tempos of those seeking redress, this article reinvigorates the conversation on the politics of time in international law.

Migrant care workers are a marginalised group within Austrian society. Based on semi-structured interviews, this paper explores their real-life experiences and the problems they face and asks whether and how the law is relevant to their struggles. In short, migrant care workers are aware of some aspects of the law of the country in which they work, but they are reluctant to mobilise the law. Instead, they avoid disputes by using strategies such as leaving, denying or playing down conflicts. This behaviour can be understood by looking at the situation of migrant care workers in Austria. This paper also highlights the important role of migrant care workers’ networks and how these networks compensate for the lack of individual legal mobilisation.

There have been strong proponents and opponents in academic debates about the use of social science in legal practice. However, in such academic discussions, little attention has been paid to what legal practitioners think about social science and its use in law. The present study shows that legal practitioners have complex views about social science. Drawing on in-depth interviews, it shows that there are five ideal-types of ‘social science consciousness’: enthusiast, pragmatist, indifferent, critical optimist and opponent. The paper shows what the implications are for law and social science, as well as a new research agenda on social science consciousness.

Procedural justice considerations have long justified both the instrumental and intrinsic value of effective participation among court users, where ideals of impartiality, dignity and fairness remain pre-eminent. However, recent developments in socio-legal research as well as legal policy and practice point to an inchoate normative reframing of the law beyond procedural justice grounds, based on what we call the humanising imperative for effective participation. We utilise the philosophy of Hume to elucidate its distinctive features, namely the significance of partiality and the virtues of humanity. The paper further explores the putative enactment of the humanising imperative in three court settings in England and Wales – the Court of Protection, criminal courts and inquests – that indicates the precarity of this orientation in relation to procedural justice principles.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, notably ChatGPT, have emerged in legal practice, facilitating the completion of tasks, ranging from electronic communications to the drafting of documents. The generative capabilities of these systems underscore the duty of lawyers to competently represent their clients by keeping abreast of technological developments that can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their work. At the same time, the processing of clients’ information through generative AI systems threatens to compromise their confidentiality if disclosed to third parties, including the systems’ providers. The present paper aims to determine the impact of the use of generative AI systems by lawyers on the duties of competence and confidentiality. The findings derive from the application of doctrinal and empirical research on the legal practice and its digitalisation in Luxembourg. The paper finally reflects on the integration of generative AI systems in legal practice to raise the quality of legal services for clients.

Internationally, the home is legally protected as a bastion of private life, where one may retreat to and recollect oneself after a day’s work and enjoy family life. With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, working from home – facilitated by new collaborative information and communications technology (ICT) platforms and tools – became mandatory in several countries. For many, the workplace was brought into the home. This article examines how working from home on a mandatory basis during the pandemic affected employees’ perceptions and practices of privacy, and its implications for the legal understanding of privacy. With Norway as a case, it investigates the measures taken by employees and employers to safeguard privacy during this period. The data collection and method combine an interpretation of legal sources with qualitative interviews. The analysis shows experiences and practices that suggest a blurring of roles and physical spaces, and the adoption of boundary-setting measures to safeguard privacy.

This article investigates changes in the right to social assistance – a means-tested cash support programme, regulated by the Social Services Act – for irregularised migrants over a period of four decades, 1982–2022. The article makes the case that austerity policies have hollowed out the right to support, with significant repercussions for those with irregularised residency status. In doing so, it draws on a range of empirical data to shed light on the dynamics of legal change over time and across various settings, identifying both continuities and critical turning points. The latter include shifts in national or local migration policies, and novel intersections between migration law and social law, epitomised by court judgments that have redrawn the lines of inclusion and exclusion in the sphere of rights holders. The article also highlights continuous issues concerning inconsistencies in the legal sources made used of by courts, neglect of children’s interests and needs, and an application of requirements for participation in work-related activities that disadvantage migrants and citizens alike. Ultimately, the article offers insights into how social rights can be preserved in the context of increasingly restrictive migration and social policies.

Financial redress for victims of occupational diseases can be offered through no-fault compensation schemes. No-fault compensation schemes have an explicit mission in promoting perceived fairness and justice. The objective is to offer a quick, fair and just procedure and outcome, while preventing civil court procedures and restoring trust. However, the question is whether applicants of these no-fault schemes indeed experience perceived fairness and justice. This paper discusses the result of an in-depth interview study with fifty-eight victims involved in no-fault schemes for occupational diseases in the Netherlands. We focus on the role of perceived procedural justice, outcome concerns and trust in the (former) employer.

The crisis that now grips the ‘living earth’ establishes an intersection of climate and finance which entails questions of time: what does temporality mean in the context of both climate emergency and the processes of financialisation? In this paper, I intervene in these debates by reflecting on the reconstruction of time as a concrete legal object in the space of international investor-state arbitration. Over the past decade, international arbitration settlements, often using the accounting technique of discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis, have increasingly relied on a conception of investor-oriented time that offers an expansive future, a time of long-term unbroken integrity. I trace the complex but often uneven shifts in arbitration practices through which the future is reconfigured not as a proximate and conditional object but as a category, encoded in DCF, which is endlessly expansive. The time of the unbroken asset, I argue, is in urgent disjuncture with the time of transition.

Even after seven decades since it came into force, examinations of the Indian Constitution remain partial and incomplete. It is not widely known that the original ratified copy of the Constitution also makes a visual argument through the opening pages of every part. These elaborately crafted artworks, which are entirely negated in Indian scholarship, are structured in the form of a teleological and linear narrative, encompassing a claim of an unbroken link to an immemorial civilisation. Based on archival research and a hermeneutic that combines imaginal analysis, literary theory, historical scholarship and constitutional jurisprudence, this article will demonstrate that these constitutive images are the aesthetic foundation that imaginally binds the constitutional subject and the collective citizenry, and this article will show how its negation is closely tied to a foundational ambivalence that endures in constitutional law.