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.

This Article advocates for conceptualizing law as a design science, with a comprehensive approach that integrates formal, explanatory, and design dimensions of legal knowledge. By embracing the empirical aspects of legal scholarship, this perspective challenges the traditional image of lawyers as solely reliant on linguistic constructs. Instead, it positions them as social engineers capable of shaping legal norms and interpretations in alignment with societal needs. Through analysis and illustration of its application in diverse factual contexts, the Article underscores the necessity for this evolution in contemporary legal scholarship, particularly as teleological interpretation gains prominence in legal practice.

This Article provides the outline for a conceptual framework focusing on legal infrastructures, comprised of socio-material assemblages and entangled legal normativities that both enable and constrain human societies. Section A introduces the growing transdisciplinary field of infrastructural studies, which employs the notion of infrastructure as a tool for analyzing the constitutive relationship between society and essential material structures. It then draws out the analytical conjunction of law and infrastructure in the role ascribed to law within existing applications of infrastructural studies and the nascent engagement with infrastructural theory within the legal discipline itself. Part II develops a conceptual framework on legal infrastructures, outlining three avenues for how thinking infrastructurally may yield new perspectives on the dynamic relationship between law, social practices, and socio-technical materiality; (a) legal infrastructures as socio-material formations that generate societal effects (b) legal infrastructures as schemes of social practice that recursively entangle to produce new configurations, and (c) legal infrastructures as distributing norms across transnational and regime boundaries.

This Article is dedicated to what is arguably one of the most significant tests to which constitutionalism has been subject to in recent times. It examines the theoretical and practical challenges to constitutionalism arising from the profound technological changes under the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) in our emerging algorithmic society. The unprecedented rapid development of AI technology has not only rendered conventional theories of modern constitutionalism obsolete, but it has also created an epistemic gap in constitutional theory. As a result, there is a clear need for a new, compelling constitutional theory that adequately accounts for the scale of technological change by accurately capturing it, engaging with it, and ultimately, responding to it in a conceptually and normatively convincing way.

Legal experts—lawyers, judges, and academics—typically resist changing their beliefs about what the law is or requires when they encounter disagreement from those committed to different jurisprudential or interpretive theories. William Baude and Ryan Doerfler are among the most prominent proponents of this view, holding it because fundamental differences in methodological commitments severs epistemic peerhood. This dominant approach to disagreement, and Baude and Doerfler’s rationale, are both wrong. The latter is committed to an overly stringent account of epistemic peerhood that dogmatically excludes opponents. The former violates the conjunction of three plausible epistemic principles: Complete Evidence, considering all epistemically permissible evidence; Independence, in which only dispute-independent evidence is epistemically permissible; and Peer Support, which involves epistemically permissible evidence. Instead, I argue for jurisprudential humility—we ought to be more willing to admit we do not know what the law is or requires, and take seriously conflicting views.

The aim of this article is to open a new way of understanding corruption by examining its place within the law and culture of the European semi-periphery, with a focus on inter-war Romania. My intention is to operate a twofold displacement of the analysis of the anti-corruption and the status of constitutional practice in this context. First, I aim to reposition the question of political corruption within a jurisprudential and legal historical context. In this way I inquire what is the legal theoretical importance of political corruption in a post-dependency context? In other words, what can the representation of corruption entail for law, and for a particular legal historical trajectory within the European periphery. Second, I move towards exploring the context of the inter-war period as well as the discursive construction of political corruption within the law and through the fascist criticism levelled against it.

The Court of Justice of the European Union has been criticised increasingly for its approach to international law. While much literature focuses on reluctance to apply international law (ie refusing direct effect), this criticism also includes interpretation, arguably a more contentious area. The Court interprets international treaties through either the Vienna Convention or its own teleological method, with the latter increasingly applied. The legitimacy of applying localised methods of interpretation to international treaty law is debated in scholarship. Whether the Court’s case law applying international law is Völkerrechtsfreundlichkeit (friendliness to international law) is the focus of most contributions in this area. This Article seeks to move beyond that debate by demonstrating the Court should in all instances seek to achieve the legal imperatives of certainty and justice. It is explained that justice divides into ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ forms. Whilst ‘thin’ justice is widely accepted and amounts to treating like cases alike, substantive (‘thick’ justice) outcomes are inherently debatable. The Article proves the Court is failing to clearly distinguish cases (‘thin’ justice) and that case law is uncertain. There are also significant questions concerning ‘thick’ justice. The Court has been subject to criticism for substantive outcomes in this area, with the Commission and Council even seeking to limit its role. With case law that is uncertain and appears unjust it is argued that there is failure in this ‘integral part of EU law.’ The Court is now under increased pressure, and it is uncertain how it will respond. There are certainly cautionary lessons to be learned concerning the importance of paying proper attention to justice and certainty for EU law as a whole, and beyond.