'The EU Charter on Rights of Nature – colliding cosmovisions on nonhuman relations' by Marie-Catherine Petersmann in Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa and Costas Douzinas (eds) Non-Human Rights (Elgar, 2024) comments  The movement of granting ‘rights to nature’has become prominent in academic debates. Much has been written on the self-proclaimed ‘revolutionary’potential that ‘rights of nature’present to overcome the destructive world-ecology brought about by capitalist modes in inhabiting the Earth. Granting rights to ‘nature’has been described by some as a practice of ‘legal animism’, and by othe ..read more

Sophia, the animatronic ostensibly granted Saudi citizenship, is discussed in 'Sophia the Robot as a Political Choreography to Advance Economic Interests: An Exercise in Political Phenomenology and Critical Performance-Oriented Philosophy of Technology' by Jaana Parviainen and Mark Coeckelbergh in Thiemo Breyer, Alexander Matthias Gerner, Niklas Grouls and Johannes F M Schick (eds) Diachronic Perspectives on Embodiment and Technology (Springer, 2024) 57–66.  The authors comment  Controversy arose when a humanoid robot named “Sophia” was given citizenship and did performances all ove ..read more

In Medical Board of Australia v Chu (Review and Regulation) [2024] VCAT 89 the Tribunal states  With the agreement of the respondent, the Tribunal finds as follows: Between 20 January 2018 and 18 October 2018, contrary to section 82(1) of the Crimes Act 1958 (Vic) (‘Crimes Act’), the respondent obtained financial advantage by deception by billing private health insurers in the amount of $24,005.75. Between on or about June 2016 and February 2018, the respondent improperly accessed, stored and used clinical records of patients at the Jesse McPherson Hospital without any therapeutic purpos ..read more

In Redland City Council v Kozik [2024] HCA 7 Gageler CJ and Jagot J. state     1 In the Preface to the second edition of Mason and Carter's Restitution Law in Australia, the authors referred metaphorically to the "restitution common of the law" being "tended by judges". They encouraged preparedness on the part of judges to "tear out weeds, however ancient". In the factual circumstances giving rise to the present case, Redland City Council ("the Council") tore out actual weeds from part of the actual common – in the form of waterways – within its local government area. The Council al ..read more

In Westpac Banking Corporation v Summerscales (No 2) [2023] NFSC 5 Besanko CJ has considered a claim, as part of a property dispute, that Norfolk Island is outside Australian law.  Under the heading 'Mr Summerscales’ Response to Westpac’s Claim' the Court states   Mr Summerscales has filed two Defences in the course of this proceeding.  His first Defence was filed on 31 August 2023. In that Defence, he did not raise any matter which specifically related to the loan agreement or the mortgage or Mr Summerscales’ alleged default under the provisions in either of those docum ..read more

In Butterfield v. LeBlanc et al, 2007 BCSC 235 states   [7] Mr. Butterfield claims that, due to the way punctuation is used in statutes, all governments are corporations. He also claims that Canada does not exist as a federal nation and that the provinces are independent nations. The thrust of the arguments is that the prosecution of him was unlawful, and he should be compensated.  [8] Much of Mr. Butterfield’s argument is based on the use of grammar that he says leads to a number of conclusions, including that governments are corporations and do not have the authority to pas ..read more

'Immunity Through Bankruptcy for the Sackler Family' by Daniel G Aaron and Michael S Sinha in West Virginia Law Review (Forthcoming)   In August 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked one of the largest public health settlements in history: that of Purdue Pharma, L.P., reached in bankruptcy court. The negotiated bankruptcy settlement approved by the court would give a golden parachute to the very people thought to have ignited the opioid crisis: the Sackler family. As the Supreme Court considers the propriety of immunity through bankruptcy, the case has raised fundamental quest ..read more

'Granular biopolitics: Facial recognition, pandemics and the securitization of circulation' by Mark Andrejevic, Chris O’Neill, Gavin Smith, Neil Selwyn and Xin Gu in (2024) 26(3) New Media and Society 1204-1226 comments  The COVID-19 pandemic has provided opportunities for facial recognition technology and other forms of biometric monitoring to expand into new markets. One anticipated result is the wholesale reconfiguration of shared and public space enabled by the automated identification and tracking of individuals in real time. Drawing on data from several industry trade shows, this a ..read more

'Reconstructing Critical Legal Studies' by Samuel Moyn in (2024) 134 Yale Law Journal   It is an increasingly propitious moment to build another radical theory of the law, after decades of relative quiescence in the law schools since the last such opportunity. This essay offers a reinterpretation of the legacy of critical theories of the law, arguing that they afford useful starting points for any radical approach, and not merely cautionary tales of how not to proceed. The essay revisits the critical legal studies movement in particular and imagines its reconstruction. Critical legal stu ..read more

'Three Reconstructions of ‘Effectiveness’: Some Implications for State Continuity and Sea-level Rise' by Alex Green in Oxford Journal of Legal Studies comments  Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are uniquely threatened by rising sea levels. Not only does the retreat of their coastlines place them in danger of losing maritime territory; the concurrent possibility of their landmasses becoming either uninhabitable or completely submerged also threatens their very existence. According to one understanding of the law that governs the continuity and extinction of states, political communi ..read more