This article examines the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled decision support systems in targeting operations and their implications for proportionality assessments under international humanitarian law (IHL). Emphasizing the primacy of the duty of constant care and precautions in attack as obligations that must be exhausted before and during proportionality assessments, the article advocates for a fuller understanding of civilian harm. It traces the historical trajectory of “quantification logics” in targeting, from the Vietnam War to contemporary AI integration, and analyzes how such systems may reshape decision spaces, cognitive processes and accountability within the context of armed conflict. Specifically, the article argues that over-reliance on computational models risks displacing the contextual, qualitative judgement essential to lawful proportionality determinations, potentially normalizing civilian harm. It concludes with recommendations to preserve the space that human reasoning occupies as central to IHL compliance in targeting operations.

When judging how ‘fair’ voting rules are, a fundamental criterion used by both scholars and politicians is their ability or inability to produce proportional results – that is, the extent parties’ seat distribution after the elections accurately reflects their vote shares. How about citizens? Do citizens care about how proportional the outcome is? Or do they judge the outcome solely on the basis of how well (or poorly) their party performed? Taking advantage of a uniquely designed survey experiment, this article investigates the causal effect of proportionality on voter support for voting rules in four countries: Austria, England, Ireland and Sweden. The results show that proportionality drives support for the voting rules not above, but beyond party performance. There is little cross‐country variation, which suggests that proportionality is appreciated in different contexts with little status quo bias. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the causal mechanisms linking electoral rules to voter support.

This article uses Arash Abizadeh to illustrate the appeal and difficulties of the claim that random selection is a more democratic way to select a legislature than election. It agrees with Abizadeh that representative democracy cannot be reduced to the right of voters to choose their legislators. However, it challenges his view that elections are inherently inegalitarian because they enable voters to discriminate unfairly among electoral candidates and his assimilation of gyroscopic to descriptive representation. Finally, the article highlights the difficulties of justifying random selection while rejecting election on egalitarian grounds. It therefore concludes that democratic equality requires more, not less, attention to the ethics of voting and to the conceptual, moral, and political dimensions of citizens’ claims on elected office.

The proportionality between crime and punishment is made, and the way it is made makes for a certain kind of criminal law. By analyzing how punitive measures are justified in Swedish criminal law and crime policy through appeals to proportionality, the Article demonstrates how proportionality has been made and remade to legitimize an increasingly punitive crime policy, obscuring the reasons for these legislative changes. The Article thus calls for the principle of proportionality to be dismantled and employs a discursive approach to reverse-engineer claims of proportionality in Swedish legislative proposals. The purpose of this approach is to make visible the meanings and limits of the contemporary crime policy understanding of crime, punishment, and a just criminal law.

This article discusses the potential influence of the existence of an underlying armed conflict in Gaza on the applicability and application of jus ad bellum. It rejects the Israeli ‘displacement’ approach whereby jus ad bellum does not play a role during an ongoing armed conflict as it finds no support in the sources of international law, in particular state practice. The article then provides possible explanations for the Israeli reliance on ‘displacement’ regardless of its shaky foundations: namely, the preference to provide overall justification for the operation, to avoid difficult political topics, and to allow Israel freedom of action in other arenas (such as Lebanon and Syria). Regardless of such findings, the article acknowledges that jus ad bellum faces challenges to its application during hostilities. It analyses the right of self-defence, as Israel has relied on such right to justify its use of force in Gaza, addressing relatively briefly jus ad bellum necessity while focusing on the various approaches to jus ad bellum proportionality, and the differences between such approaches when it comes to the legality of the use of force in self-defence in Gaza. Ultimately, the article argues that states must provide clear pronouncements on this issue to prevent the adoption of an overly permissive approach to the regulation of jus ad bellum during hostilities.

Under the rule of law, everyone has a constitutional right to a remedy—that is, access to a court that decides a dispute over private rights and obligations according to the law of the land. Dispute resolution agreements are an instance of reflexive contracting, in other words, agreements on which substantive and procedural rules shall govern a contractual relationship. Where the choice for one or both parties is for a law or forum other than that applicable by default, dispute resolution agreements contain a waiver of the constitutional right to a remedy according to the law of the land. Party autonomy—that is, the freedom to contract on the rights and remedies applicable to the main contract—is conferred by reflexive contract law, that is, the law applicable to dispute resolution agreements. In this article I argue that reflexive contract law, in specifying the conditions under which reflexive contracts are enforced by the state, shall reflect the extent to which agreements to arbitrate, on forum selection, or on choice of law interfere with the constitutional right to a remedy. Coherent requirements as to the form and validity of consent, ex-ante information, or ex-post judicial control shall be proportional to the entailed dangers and the proficiency of the involved parties. However, as dispute resolution agreements are regulated by diverse instruments on the national, supranational, and international levels, consistency is very difficult to achieve. Moreover, the US and EU regulatory approaches regarding the protection of consumers and employees seem to be incommensurable.

The article examines how the Czech courts addressed restrictions on the right to conduct business during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although grounded in the Czech authorities’ response to the health crisis, the analysis extends to broader conclusions about the necessity of upholding rule-of-law principles. The article therefore highlights how constitutional imperatives of proportionality, equality and the justification of government actions must be preserved in judicial review, even in times of crises.

Calls to defund the police gained prominence with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and take various forms. Depending on what will be defunded, the idea has attracted support from different parts of the political spectrum. The politicized nature of the debate often cuts short reflection on how best to assess proposals to defund the police. This article takes up that task. It begins by developing a typology of defund measures: abolitionist cuts, abolitionist reallocation, disaggregative cuts, and disaggregative reallocation. It then outlines a framework to evaluate policing and defund measures, drawing on criteria from the ethics of defensive force. Since policing relies on force, it faces a high justificatory bar and must satisfy the principles of just aim, proportionality, and necessity. The state should not fund unjustified forms of policing that violate those principles. Different violations, though, demand different policy responses.