Search Results (122)

The ongoing degradation of global forests has severely weakened ecosystem service functions, and traditional judicial remedies have struggled to quantify intangible ecological losses. China has become an important testing ground for restorative justice through the establishment of specialized environmental courts and the practice of environmental public interest litigation. Since 2015, China has actively explored and institutionalized the application of the concept of restorative justice in its environmental justice reform. This concept emphasizes compensating environmental damages through actual ecological restoration acts rather than relying solely on financial compensation. This shift reflects a deep understanding of the limitations of traditional environmental justice and an institutional response to China’s ecological civilization construction, providing critical support for forest ecosystem restoration and enabling ecological restoration activities, such as replanting and re-greening, habitat reconstruction, etc., to be enforced through judicial decisions. This study conducts a qualitative analysis of judicial rulings in forest restoration cases to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of restorative justice in compensating for losses in forest ecosystem service functions. The findings reveal the following: (1) restoration measures in judicial practice are disconnected from the types of ecosystem services available; (2) non-market values and long-term cumulative damages are systematically underestimated, with monitoring mechanisms exhibiting fragmented implementation and insufficient effectiveness; (3) management cycles are set in violation of ecological restoration principles, and acceptance standards lack function-oriented indicators; (4) participation of key stakeholders is severely lacking, and local knowledge and professional expertise have not been integrated. In response, this study proposes a restorative judicial framework oriented toward forest ecosystem services, utilizing four mechanisms: independent recognition of legal interests, function-matched restoration, application of scientific assessment tools, and multi-stakeholder collaboration. This framework aims to drive a paradigm shift from formal restoration to substantive functional recovery, providing theoretical support and practical pathways for environmental judicial reform and global forest governance. Full article

In Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the city of Philadelphia could not exclude a Catholic Social Services agency from the city’s foster care system because it would not work with same-sex couples. Access to foster care agencies, however, is a public benefit that should not involve religious qualifications interposed by a nongovernmental organization. When aided by public funds, religious organizations should not receive exemptions from nondiscrimination laws to deny potential clients services because they disagree with these clients’ religious beliefs, sexual orientations, or marital status. First, equal access to public funds is not neutral when it allows religious entities to limit the life plans of others who do not share their convictions. Second, religious entities should certainly be able to advance religion but not on the public dollar. Finally, although exemptions for these entities augment the free exercise of religion, especially when accompanied by public funds, they also amount to what has been termed a “shadow establishment”. Full article

This article examines LGBTQI+ asylum claims in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The data are part of a larger study that has identified 520 LGBTQI+ claims in the U.S. Circuit of Appeals from 1994 to 2023. It focuses on examples from the 115 cases that were granted a review and analyzes the logic that U.S. Circuit Court justices use when deciding to grant a review of a petition that was denied by a lower court, such as the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) and immigration courts. This article argues that the U.S. Circuit of Appeals contests lower court rulings from BIA and immigration court judges based on assumptions about credibility, discretion, persecution, and criminalization for LGBTQI+ asylum seekers. By granting reviews, the Circuit Courts provide an opening for the acceptance of queer asylum claims. Full article

The paper aims to determine the associations of mediators’ religiosity, assessed as self-reported religious belief and religious practice frequency, with their recognition of the existence of a work ethic of mediators, their personal approach to the occupation, their values, their adherence to the rules of mediation, and their perception of its objectives. The article is based on the results of a quantitative study conducted among Polish court mediators (n = 391). It was found that the mediators who were religious believers and regularly practiced their religion were more often convinced about the existence of a work ethic, treated work in their occupation as an opportunity to help people, and remained neutral in disputes, but they were also more inclined to violate the principle of impartiality by being prepared to conduct mediation in their friends or family members’ cases. Our research on mediators’ work ethic may be useful in raising the standards of mediator training in specific areas of specialization, including working with migrants and multicultural communities, enhancing the effectiveness of mediations, improving their quality, and boosting the level of disputants’ satisfaction. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed critical deficiencies in the United States’ legal system’s handling of emergency injunctions, particularly concerning religious freedom. This article examines the challenges courts faced in balancing public health measures with constitutional rights, focusing on the use of shadow dockets and the frequent dismissal of cases due to mootness. Analyzing key Supreme Court decisions and lower court rulings, we highlight the inconsistencies and delays that arose when addressing First Amendment challenges to pandemic-related restrictions. Arguments for procedural reforms, including expedited hearings and avoiding mootness dismissals in cases of national importance, are provided to protect fundamental rights during future public health crises. Full article

Buried in 1858, Cornelis Kok II’s grave lay undisturbed in Campbell, Northern Cape, until 1961 when a multiracial coalition, driven by their own sets of interests, unearthed the Griqua leader’s remains. The bones again took centre stage with the collapse of apartheid when different groups called for their return and reburial, with an assertion, variously, of ascendant Griqua, indigenous, Khoisan, and Khoikhoi identities. The 2007 reinterment again courted controversy and protest, while the contemporary neglect of the new gravesite symbolizes feelings of exclusion and marginalization among some Campbell Griqua today. By tracing the life history of Kok II’s remains, well past his natural life, we demonstrate how they serve as a flashpoint mobilized by actors with different aims and objectives at different moments. These motivations range from scientistic confirmation of genealogy and identity under apartheid rule, to post-apartheid calls for repatriation anchored to a global indigenous rights framework, to factional contestations over ownership. Marshalled towards different political projects, for all these actors, the bones nonetheless serve as a resource and link to a 19th century frontier past. Full article

Ritual slaughter—understood as the killing of animals without prior stunning for religious purposes—constitutes a legally and ethically intricate domain, situated at the intersection of animal welfare, freedom of religion, public health, and consumer protection. This review offers a critical examination of the influence exerted by international and supranational jurisprudence—most notably the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union—on the regulatory landscape governing ritual slaughter. While the right to religious freedom enjoys robust protection under European constitutional and human rights frameworks, recent judicial decisions have affirmed the legitimacy of national legislative measures mandating pre-slaughter stunning, insofar as such measures pursue objectives of animal welfare and transparency in the public interest. Particular attention is devoted to seminal rulings originating in Belgium and within the broader EU context, with a focus on the application of the principle of proportionality as a legal mechanism for balancing colliding fundamental rights. The analysis further engages with the scientific and ethical discourse surrounding animal suffering and the legal obligations tied to consumer information and labeling. Taken together, these developments reveal an emergent trajectory within EU law toward the progressive tightening of regulatory standards governing ritual slaughter, shaped by an evolving jurisprudential understanding of animal welfare imperatives. Full article

Medical assistance in dying (MAID) remains a sensitive and evolving issue in Europe, frequently linked with discussions about human freedom, life dignity, and healthcare policy. While national consensus in Italy is absent, the Region of Tuscany has enacted Law No. 16/2025, which establishes a MAID procedure based on recent Constitutional Court rulings. The commentary aims to provide a preliminary analysis of the new law, addressing ethical, medico-legal, and social issues that emerge in relation to the Italian and global debate on the topic. The law establishes a three-stage process based on four eligibility criteria: irreversible disease, psycho-physical suffering, life-support dependence, and informed consent. However, Tuscany’s model poses medico-legal and ethical concerns, particularly about the boundaries of regional legislative competence, the duties of healthcare professionals, and the possibility of intra-national inequity or “health migration.” In addition, critical organisational implications derived from informed consent and lethal drug self-administration impede clinical implementation in some individuals with mental or neurological disorders. The lack of clarity in the different steps of the procedure, the uncertain supervision system, and the potential consequences for specific categories of vulnerable people underline the need for comprehensive national regulation. A future regulatory framework must balance procedural clarity with individual autonomy and equitable access, bringing Italy in line with larger European context for end-of-life care. Full article

The rise of information technology and artificial intelligence has sparked debates on data protection in various fields. Data protection has been addressed in court rulings long before Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (LGPD). This study analyzes jurisprudence related to data protection by examining 10,009 documents from the Brazilian States’ courts collected through a web scraping process in an online juridical platform without restricting the period of publication. This analysis reveals document distribution among state courts, with the southeast and southern regions being the most productive, and identifies key terms in each state court. This provides a deeper understanding of the legal processes surrounding data protection issues in each Brazilian region. Full article

The circulation of Il Principe in the British Isles increased significantly in 1584, thanks to the editor John Wolfe. His aim was to spread Machiavelli’s works not only in England but also across Europe and Italy, where the book had been included in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum since 1557. Machiavelli’s advice to rulers on how to acquire and maintain power, ensuring peace and stability, attracted a diverse readership, from members of the royal court to reformers, philosophers, legal scholars, and even playwrights like Shakespeare. This paper, departing from the influence of The Prince in England, focuses on how the ambiguous figure of the principe nuovo served as a model for discussing diverse forms of government and political theories. It will be shown that Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure enters the political debate by representing Duke Vincentio as the embodiment of a tyrannical Machiavellian prince, offering an indirect criticism of the rule of King James I of England and VI of Scotland. Full article

Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, including deep learning and rule-based approaches, often function as black boxes, limiting transparency and increasing uncertainty in decisions. This study addresses spurious correlations, defined as associations between patterns and classes that do not reflect causal relationships, affecting AI models’ reliability and applicability. In Natural Language Processing (NLP), these correlations lead to inaccurate predictions, biases, and challenges in model generalization. We propose a method that employs Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques to detect spurious patterns in textual datasets for binary classification tasks. The method applies the K-means algorithm to cluster patterns and interprets them based on their distance from centroids. It hypothesizes that patterns farther from the centroids are more likely to be spurious than those closer to them. We apply the method to public procurement datasets from the Court of Auditors of Piauí (TCE-PI) using models based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Logistic Regression with text representations from TFIDF and Word Embeddings, as well as a BERT model. The analysis is extended to the IMDB movie review dataset to evaluate generalizability. The results support the hypothesis that patterns farther from centroids exhibit higher spuriousness potential and demonstrate the clustering’s consistency across models and datasets. The method operates independently of the techniques used in its stages, enabling the automatic detection and quantification of spurious patterns without prior human intervention. Full article

The regulation of end-of-life decisions has been the subject of intense debate for years, marked by the challenge of reconciling two fundamental ethical principles: preservation of life and individual self-determination. From a legal perspective, numerous court rulings have outlined an evolving framework, highlighting the difficulty of establishing a regulatory approach that balances constitutional rights with ethical values. This study examines key Italian judicial decisions, with a particular focus on recent Constitutional Court rulings regarding end-of-life issues, and discusses the underlying ethical and humanistic perspectives. We aim to explore the key ethical and legal issues arising in the context of end-of-life regulation. Judicial developments demonstrate an increasing recognition of individual self-determination in accessing assisted suicide despite persisting ongoing ambiguities and regulatory gaps. The end-of-life debate underscores the urgency of moving beyond abstract and schematic approaches, favoring a perspective that integrates multidisciplinary expertise and human sensitivity. Ensuring effective access to palliative care and comprehensive social and healthcare systems is essential to alleviate suffering and provide genuine alternatives to assisted suicide. Full article

More than three decades ago, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruled that individuals who are not competent (alternatively referred to by the Court as insane) at the time of their scheduled execution cannot be put to death. Despite the years that have passed since the Court’s decision and the literal life-or-death stakes involved, competency for execution (CFE) remains underexplored in the psychological, psychiatric, and legal literature. A number of important legal and ethical issues that arise when a person on death row maintains they are not competent to be executed are still unresolved even after the landmark Supreme Court cases such as Ford v. Wainwright (1986), Panetti v. Quarterman (2007), and Madison v. Alabama (2019). In this first-of-its-kind descriptive study, we analyzed the demographic and case characteristics of the 28 successful Ford claimants—individuals in the United States who have been found to be incompetent to be executed and compared them to the general death row population and homicide cases nationwide. Our findings reveal some similarities but also some differences between these claimants and the general death row population and homicide cases: the successful Ford claimants are exclusively male (in keeping with the general prison population on death row), relatively older, and underrepresented among White and Latinx inmates (i.e., Black claimants are more successful than their White and Latinx counterparts at evading execution). Nearly all (96%) suffer from schizophrenia, with 79% experiencing psychiatric comorbidity, yet only 54% received any significant treatment before or after the criminal offense. The claimants’ cases also involve a higher proportion of child victims, male family members, and female non-family member victims, as well as more multiple-victim cases (not indiscriminate) and fewer intraracial homicides. Fewer victims are male, and more are female. However, the cases do not align with typical male-on-male violent crimes or femicide patterns, such as those involving sexual or domestic violence. Additionally, systematic psycho-legal deficiencies are prevalent, including a low rate of mental health evidence (61%) presented at trials and some cases lacking psychiatric involvement in CFE evaluations. Temporal influence and drastic state variations on CFE evaluation are also noted. Although the small sample size limits generalizability, this small-scale descriptive study offers a number of important insights into the complexities of CFE decisions and lays the groundwork for future research and policy development. Full article

Every year, more than 700,000 people die by suicide worldwide, a quarter of whom are between 15 and 29 years of age. In Spain, suicide has surpassed road traffic accidents as the leading non-natural cause of death in this age group. Although its overall incidence remains low, the number of suicide attempts continues to rise, indicating an upward trend. Despite being recognized as a significant public health issue, the media often refrains from reporting on suicide to prevent the Werther effect, thereby avoiding the potential propagation of suicidal behavior. This is a form of self-censorship in the exercise of freedom of information, a right recognized by the Spanish Constitution, which also undermines the right of citizens to receive such content. The Spanish Constitutional Court has determined that public interest is a mandatory requirement to endorse the legitimacy of a news item in case of a clash with any of the rights that legally limit freedom of information. This article aims to analyze whether, in those exceptional cases in which the rule of silence is broken, the information on suicide in young people is in line with the jurisprudential concept of public interest, above privacy, honor or self-image and, especially, above the protection of children and adolescents. As a research method, this study analyzes a selection of news articles on suicides of minors, published in Spanish digital newspapers and compiled into a self-developed database. These articles are examined through the lens of the Spanish Constitutional Court’s doctrine on freedom of information. The findings indicate that public interest is unequivocally justified when news coverage focuses on aggregated data regarding suicide or suicide attempts among minors. However, when reporting on the suicide of an individual minor, the justification from the perspective of freedom of information depends on the specifics of each case, requiring a careful balance between public interest and the protection of fundamental rights. Full article

The article examines the changes to Italian legislation on assisted reproductive technology (ART) resulting from rulings by Italian courts, highlighting unresolved ethical–legal issues and potential future regulatory approaches consistent with these decisions. Additionally, it addresses the amendment defining surrogacy as “universal crime”, effective as of 18 November 2024. Through an analysis of decisions by the Constitutional Court and the Court of Cassation, it emerges that Law No. 40/2004 has been deemed unconstitutional in relation to the following: heterologous fertilization, the number of embryos that can be created, cryopreservation, the implantation of only healthy embryos, and access to ART for fertile couples. Controversial aspects include the fate of surplus embryos, access to ART for single individuals, and the recognition of parenthood for same-sex couples. The “universal crime” classification of surrogacy raises the possibility of legal consequences for individuals engaging in surrogacy abroad, even where it is lawful. Courts are unlikely to legislate on the allocation of surplus embryos without parliamentary intervention or to allow single individuals access to ART, given the perceived inconsistency with the child’s best interests. However, case-by-case evaluations are essential for recognizing non-biological or non-genetic parents in same-sex relationships and for assessing the effectiveness of the universal crime approach in safeguarding rights and public health. Full article