Does legal freedom satisfy?

Much political conflict in the world revolves around the issue of how much freedom to accord people. Liberal democracies are characterized by, e.g., the rule of law and a strong protection of civil rights, giving individuals a great deal of legally guaranteed freedom to lead their lives as they see fit. However, it is not known whether legal freedom suffices to make people satisfied with freedom. Our study explores that issue by relating seven indicators of legal freedom to the satisfaction people express with their freedom of choice. Using a sample of 133 countries over the period 2008-2018, and taking a panel-data approach, we find no robust baseline relationship. However, when exploring conditional associations by interacting the indicators with social trust, the rule of law is positively and increasingly related to satisfaction with freedom above and below a threshold level. Freedom of assembly is more positive for satisfaction with freedom the higher the GDP per capita and in democracies. Thus, for some types of legal freedom, formal legal institutions are complementary with culture, income and the political system in generating satisfaction with freedom.

Why and How Should the European Union Defend its Values?

This article provides a normative framework for evaluating the moral permissibility of various defences of European Union (EU) values against their violation in EU member states. This requires, first, a coherent interpretation of EU values as the values of liberal democracy; second, a clear notion of when they are violated; third, a theory of how liberal democracy can be defended with measures that are consistent with the values of liberal democracy themselves; and, finally, a discussion of what the EU's role is in this defence. The article argues that it would be permissible for the EU to combine a number of political, cultural, socio-economic and legal responses in a concentric defence of liberal democracy as long as they respect the separation of powers doctrine and do not rely on problematic notions of collective responsibility.

Legal Positivism's Internal Morality.

This article examines the jurisprudential arguments elaborated in David Dyzenhaus's The Long Arc of Legality. In particular, it looks into the main claim of the book: that the fact of 'very unjust laws' is central to illuminating the idea of law's authority, the elaboration of which Dyzenhaus takes to be the purpose of legal theory. The article analyses Dyzenhaus's own normative proposal in this matter, which consists of a version of legal positivism committed to Lon Fuller's principles of the internal morality of law, with the corollary of a conception of the judicial role as bound to a duty to apply these internal principles of legality when exercising their main function. While I cast some doubts on the feasibility of constructing the judge's function that way, in the end I celebrate Dyzenhaus's attempt at refining legal positivism's identity, especially in light of the ongoing debate with contemporary anti-positivism.

Is Every Law for Everyone? Assessing Access to National Legislation through Official Legal Databases around the World.

Countries all over the world document their statutory law in official legal databases (OLD), but the extent to which these provide effective access to (statutory) law remains unexamined. Ideally, an OLD should be (i) provided online and free for all without requiring registration or payment, (ii) searchable with regard to statutes' titles, (iii) searchable with regard to the full texts of statutes, (iv) provided in a reusable text-based format and (v) comprehensive in its coverage of at least the laws currently in force. To highlight the nature of OLDs as consumer products, we borrow a term from business operations research and refer to a database fulfilling these basic criteria as a 'minimum viable' OLD. We survey 204 states and jurisdictions to assess how far their country-level OLDs adhere to the minimum viability standard. We find that only 48% of them do; 12% of states do not seem to offer any online OLD at all; and a further 40% of countries offer legal databases that lack at least one of the criteria listed above. The quality of legal access is associated with geographical distribution (with Europe faring the best), economic development and a population's overall Internet usage. The results suggest that comparative legal research faces considerable hurdles when dealing with the Global South; that metadata-enriched digitalisation of legal corpora still remains a desideratum for at least half the world; and that the inaccessibility of law may carry high costs for legal practitioners and the wider public.

COVID-19 and erosion of democracy.

The main research question of this study is about the drivers of democracy backsliding during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a special focus on the rule of law and the state of democracy just before the shock. There is growing interest in the political implications of the coronavirus pandemic, debating mostly the misuse of emergencies and violations of various norms by governments; however the links between the current democracy erosion with institutional environment remain unclear. We use a novel global dataset covering the period of the first two waves of the pandemic (January-December 2020), and apply various econometric and machine learning tools to identify institutional, economic and social factors influencing democracy. Our results are of scientific and practical importance and imply that the stronger the rule of law and the higher the level of democracy, the lower the risk of democracy backsliding in the face of the pandemic.

[Analysis of the Importance of Incorporating Legal Education in Medical Education in the Context of the New Medicine Strategy].

In line with the Healthy China strategy, new requirements for medical education have been raised. Medical education against the background of a new model of medicine demands an effective response to its inherent complex elements concerning the rule of law. During the course of the implementation of the new medicine strategy, in face of the widening scope of medical risks, the growing awareness of patient rights, and the conventional logic of medical education, elements concerning the rule of law should be incorporated in medical education in the early stage so as to help medical practitioners develop the appropriate legal literacy and rely on ideas of rules, equality and ethical bottomlines to analyze and solve problems. Thus, medical practitioners would be better equiped to effectively respond to the legal problems they encounter in their medical practice. Legal education is the route of choice in response to the transformation in the mode of medical education and the attempt to solve complicated problems through medicine and the rule of law. Through legal education, the risks of technology embeddedness could be avoided, the relationship between patients and medical practitioners could be regulated in a standardized way, and the medical humanistic environment could be reshaped, thereby improving the quality and level of new medical education.

Imagining Resilient Courts: from COVID-19 to the Future of Canada's Court System.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has challenged an array of democratic institutions in complex and unprecedented ways. Little academic work, however, has considered the pandemic's impact on Canada's courts. This article aims to partially fill that gap by exploring the Canadian court system's response to COVID-19 and the prospects for administering justice amid disasters, all through the lens of resilience. After taking a forensic look at how the court system has managed the challenges brought on by COVID-19, we argue that features of resilience such as self-organization, flexibility, learning, and reflexive planning can contribute to the administration of justice during future shocks. We propose that the business of judging during shocks can become more integral to the business as usual of court systems. Imagining such a resilient court can be a way to step from COVID-19 to the future of Canada's court system.

La pandémie de la maladie à coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) a mis au défi un grand nombre d'institutions démocratiques, de manière complexe et inédite. Or, très peu de recherches universitaires se sont intéressées à l'impact de la pandémie sur les tribunaux canadiens. Cet article vise à combler partiellement cette lacune en explorant la réponse du système judiciaire canadien à la COVID-19 et l'administration de la justice pendant les moments de crise, dans l'optique de la résilience. Un regard attentif à la manière dont le système judiciaire a géré les défis occasionnés par la COVID-19 nous permet de voir que les aspects de résilience tels que l'auto-organisation, la flexibilité, l'apprentissage et la planification réflexive peuvent contribuer à l'administration de la justice lors de futurs chocs. Nous proposons donc que les procédures adoptées pendant les temps de crise deviennent une pratique plus courante. Un tel tribunal résilient serait une façon de passer au travers de la COVID-19 et d'aider le système judiciaire canadien à se propulser dans l'avenir.

The Need for an EU Expulsion Mechanism: Democratic Backsliding and the Failure of Article 7.

What should the EU do about the fact that some Member States are backsliding on their commitments to democracy, supposedly a fundamental value of the EU? The Treaty provisions under Article 7 TEU are widely criticized for being ineffective in preventing such developments. Are they legitimate? I argue that the ultimate sanction of Article 7 TEU falls into a performative contradiction, which undermines its ability to coherently defend fundamental values. Instead, expulsion from the EU is the appropriate, coherent and legitimate final political sanction for democratic and rule of law backsliding by a Member State. The argument has the following steps: In Part 1, I argue that the current Article 7 framework for responding to democratic and rule of law backsliding in the EU is normatively problematic, in that the mechanism currently in the Treaty undermines the values it purports to defend; in other words, it falls into a performative contradiction. It is undemocratic to deprive Member States of their right to vote in the Council while holding them subject to Council decisions. However, Part 2 studies relevant philosophical arguments from an adjacent literature on criminal disenfranchisement, concluding that allowing backsliding Member States to keep their voting rights in the Council also taints the democratic character of Council decision-making. In Part 3, I consider the resulting paradox in light of the literature on militant democracy. Could militant democracy justify Article 7? I argue not; even if we accept the hypothetical justifiability of militant measures, they are not legitimate here since a democratically acceptable alternative exists that would safeguard the democratic character and legitimacy of Council decision-making: expulsion from the Union. I also address a central objection to an expulsion mechanism-that it would require treaty change and is therefore practically impossible.

Two Types of Formalism of the Rule of Law.

The aims of this article are twofold: (i) to propose an explanatory framework, focusing on law-making acts, for accounting for whether the formal requirements of the rule of law are fulfilled; and (ii) to propose two further models within this framework. One model, which I call 'rulebook formalism', pertains to Parliament's law-making acts; another model, which I call 'rights formalism', concerns the courts' law-making acts. This distinction results from the different modality of law, ie the different natures of law-making acts. Drawing on speech act theory, I give a general account of the formal requirements as the success conditions of law-making acts. Then, applying this framework, I discuss the formal requirements for Parliament's law-making acts and the courts' law-making acts respectively.

Ad Hominem Criminalisation and the Rule of Law: The Egalitarian Case against Knife Crime Prevention Orders.

This article advances a novel account of ad hominem criminalisation that draws upon a distinct theory of the Rule of Law and its egalitarian foundations. Employing the recent and controversial example of Knife Crime Prevention Orders, as established by the Offensive Weapons Act 2019, it argues that the concept of civic equality is central to understanding the vice of ad hominem criminalisation as an aberrant form of government by law. This vice consists in the manner that such criminalisation individualises, differentiates and instrumentalises the regulatory subject, placing them outwith the bounds of civic equality as established by the Rule of Law.

Beyond the "weakness of the state": Canada's intervention in post-agreement Colombia.

During the 2021 mass protests in Colombia, and while international calls for the Colombian government to respect human rights were intensifying, Canada's position remained somewhat ambiguous. Part of Canada's ambiguity can be explained by a simplistic characterization of Colombia as a "weak state." This article assesses Canada's bilateral relationship by historizing the development of Colombia's governance in the key overlapping sectors of security, human rights, and natural resources. From extensive fieldwork, we distinguish two competing rationalities based on the articulation of the notions of "conflict" and "dissent" with the notion of the "rule of law." We believe that Canada's bilateral relation with Colombia in the last decades has overlooked the contradictions that exist between democratizing rationalities and antipolitical rationalities. As a result, Canada's foreign policy has been based on an overly simplistic conception of the relationship between development, security, and the rule of law.

In defense of dignity: Reflections on the moral function of human dignity.

This paper defends human dignity in two ways. First, by confronting the criticism that human dignity does not serve an important function in contemporary moral discourse and that its function can be sufficiently performed by other moral terms. It is argued that this criticism invites a danger of moral reductionism, which impoverishes moral discourse. The authority of moral philosophy to correct widely shared moral intuitions, rooted in experiences of grave injustices and wrongs, is questioned. Secondly, dignity is defended by showing what is needed to uphold it, both in theory and practice. It is argued, and demonstrated through examples, that human dignity as a universal value ascribed to human beings and the virtue of dignified action are intimately related. This is fleshed out in terms of Kant's analysis of respect in the practical sense and of virtue as a commitment to the value of dignity as a constitutive end of our moral order. It is furthermore argued that theoretical attempts to ground respect for dignity in human capacities lead to a moral impasse. It is necessary to act as if every human being is worthy of respect. This practical approach requires institutions and specified moral obligations that are integral to the democratic ethos and the rule of law, which guarantees the equal status of human beings. This practical task requires that we consistently tease out and act on the implications of these principles rather than seek deeper justification for the equal worth of humans, articulated in the term human dignity.

Towards a legal toolkit for disaster resilience and transformation.

Law is acknowledged as playing an important role in the growing field of disaster resilience. Still, a detailed inquiry into the possible relationships between law and disaster resilience remains largely absent from the discourse. This paper explores how legal thinking, approaches, and instruments can act as 'tools' in altering the nature and conditions of disaster risks. It looks at how state institutions can wield them and non-state actors employ them to participate in processes of change. Moving beyond a resilience literature that has tended to focus on law in terms of statutes, regulations, and human rights, this paper examines the ways in which legal reasoning, procedure, and substantive law can be instrumentalised to resist shocks, provoke incremental adjustments, or even foment transformational shifts in underlying risk conditions. It concludes by suggesting that law can offer both a breadth of insights for reconceptualising how power influences resilience and a number of instruments for challenging these power structures.

In-your-face Watergate: neutralizing government lawbreaking and the war against white-collar crime.

Ample official evidence exists that the Trump administration was the most corrupt in modern American history. Donald Trump's overall pattern of behavior not only resembled, but amplified that of major white-collar criminals. This paper has two main foci. First, it argues that government criminality and corruption were facilitated by rationales and excuses that denied effective social condemnation of such acts. Second, it considers how these defenses were weaponized by the Trump administration as part of a much larger and more deliberate "war on white-collar crime" more generally. As a result, enormous efforts are necessary to restore and strengthen regulatory and enforcement regimes, and transcend deepened political cleavages on such matters. Through a new hybrid neutralization technique, normalization of condemning the condemners, Trump exacerbated existing political differences and influenced supporters to at once ignore government crime and corruption, and accept new moral narratives that flew in the face of substantial evidence of criminality.

The Miracle of Mercy.

Many states governed by the rule of law provide for mercy powers, most prominently the power to grant pardons. This raises a potential conflict: the rule of law requires that like cases be treated alike. Mercy, on the other hand, is usually understood as being unfettered by legal principles, including the principle of treating like cases alike. Focusing on state officials' pardon powers as an example of mercy, this article argues that we should conceive of pardons as miracles. Like miracles which suspend individual laws of nature, pardons suspend legal rules on an individual and discretionary basis. Once suspended, the legal rules no longer apply to the given case, and consequently there is no conflict between pardons and the rule of law. As I will show, this discretionary suspension of legal rules is a prerequisite for pardons to fulfil their function as a corrective to undesirable legal results.

Precedent and the Rule of Law.

Courts may reason using precedents in various ways, but not all of them satisfy the rule of law. This article provides two ways that are compatible with this ideal and one which is not. In doing so, the article aims to explain the practice of following precedent in law and to offer criteria for evaluating its value. Two claims are defended. First, courts always have a reason to decide precedent-governed disputes by following precedent. This reason is a minimum requirement of the rule of law, and in some cases this reason may be reinforced in the form of an obligation. Secondly, depending on whether courts have a reason or an obligation to follow precedent, two modes of precedential reasoning may be identified. The article explains them in detail. The modes, together with the considerations that are reasons in favour of them or against them, provide a valuable philosophical foundation of precedent-following in law.

COVID-19 palaver: Ending rights violations of vulnerable groups in Africa.

This commentary amplifies the rising spate of human rights violations as laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa. It notes that while governments in the region have declared restrictions on social gathering, in a bid to upend the deadly contagion, rights violations of vulnerable groups by law enforcement officials are on the increase. It argues that the underlying rationale for such flagrant abuse of power stems from the dearth of a rights-based approach to police-public relations, indifference of political actors, and a grossly inadequate public health and social care infrastructures for undervalued and powerless groups. Policy implications are laid out while suggestions are offered to social work professionals given their longstanding commitment to national security and development.

Bioethics and the Rule of Law: A Classical Liberal Theory.

Heated debates over healthcare policy in the United States point to the need for a legal framework that can sustain both moral diversity and peaceful cooperation. It is argued that the classical liberal Rule of Law, with its foundation in the ethical principle of permission, is such a framework. The paper shows to what extent the current healthcare policy landscape in the United States diverges from the rule of law and suggests how the current framework could be modified in order to better approximate that ideal. Two objections are then answered. The first is that the rule of law cannot be realized due to the structure of legislatures. The second objection is that government should guarantee both liberty and all of the necessary conditions of autonomy.

Justice and rule of law failure in Haiti: A view from the Shanties.

Since 1995, significant investments have been made in justice reform initiatives in Haiti. The results, however, have been meager. Drawing upon data from a longitudinal study conducted in Cité Soleil between 2008 and 2011, this article illuminates the short-sightedness of top-down reforms that fail to meet the demands of the population, leaving them to fend for themselves. In the absence of a viable justice system Cité Soleil residents have resorted to alternative, and at times pathological, measures to exact some level of "justice". In this article, we contend that an empirically grounded base of knowledge of the demand side of justice and the promotion of trust-building strategies that engage the active participation of citizens in the country are necessary to enact and sustain justice and rule of law reform. Such an approach will create a venue to channel civil society's demands, build political will and facilitate coordination between stakeholders and Haitian society for self-sustained rule of law institutions and long-term peace building in Haiti.

Foreign aid and the rule of law: Institutional diffusion versus legal reach.

This paper examines the role of bilateral foreign aid in supporting the diffusion and enactment of common models and institutions of the rule of law among aid-recipient low- and middle-income countries. We ask whether aid targeted at security-sector reform and the rule of law influences the adoption of constitutional and legal reforms over time (institutional diffusion), and whether aid also supports more effective implementation of the rule of law, writ large (legal reach). We use event history and fixed-effects panel regression models to examine a sample of 154 countries between 1995 and 2013 to answer these questions. Our findings suggest that aid does increase the likelihood of adopting several rule of law reforms, but its effect on increasing the depth or quality of rule of law over time within countries is much less substantial. These findings suggest that though aid may play a role in supporting the diffusion of models contributing to state isomorphism among countries, it is less effective at increasing the pervasiveness and quality of such model's implementation. This discrepancy between the effectiveness of bilateral aid in promoting law on the books versus law in action in aid recipient countries calls into question the current approach to rule of law reforms.