The COVID-19 crisis has been accompanied by an extensive use of indicators, such as those related to COVID infections and deaths, but also a good number of COVID policy indicators. This paper discusses these indicators from the perspective of a legal scholar with an interest (and some expertise) in comparative law and empirical legal studies. This means that this paper does not engage in the details concerning epidemiological and medical issues of COVID infections and deaths. Rather, it focuses on two main issues: first, it develops and maps a general causal scheme of indicators and their underlying real-world phenomena in the COVID crisis; second, it shows how such a causal scheme has been, and can be, applied in comparative empirical legal research. Yet, it also notes the difficulties of proving causal relationships and some attempts to overcome them.

This paper explores the complex iteration of ethnic identity and legal culture amongst the Chakma peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh and the hill territories of Tripura, India. Its hypothesis is that the stigma of tribal identity is more likely to be sustained in situations of ‘weak’ pluralism – that is, where the customary system is formally annexed to the state. However, such stigma is more likely to be dispelled where numerous, competing legal jurisdictions collide in a ‘strong’ pluralism expressed as a relatively autonomous legal domain, overlapping legal jurisdictions and in the presence of a productive and potentially creative ‘interlegality’. Conversely, strong state recognition of identities, such as can be found in India, appears to be linked to weak local pluralism, creating an insular and inward-looking community that embraces stigma and the preservation and use of customary practices. In conclusion, this paper asserts that formal state recognition in a situation of legal pluralism tends to freeze identities in a facsimile of the colonial trope of tribe, whilst conflict between the communities and the state generates new and resistant identities and new iterations of customary law.

In this paper, I take George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's thesis that metaphors shape our reality to approach the judicial imagery of the new criminal justice system in Mexico (in effect since 2016). Based on twenty-nine in-depth interviews with judges and other members of the judiciary, I study what I call the ‘dirty minds’ metaphor, showing its presence in everyday judicial practice and analysing both its cognitive basis as well as its effects in how criminal judges understand their job. I argue that the such a metaphor, together with the ‘fear of contamination’ it raises as a result, is misleading and goes to the detriment of the judicial virtues that should populate the new system. The conclusions I offer are relevant beyond the national context, inter alia, because they concern a far-reaching paradigm of judgment.

This paper provides an engagement with, and highlights the depth of, Peter Fitzpatrick's careful examination of myths that grounded modern law and its colonial instances. That grounding is shown to be premised on a concealment of basic contradictions behind fictions of a unified law, even though it only appears through negations of others. Intersecting patterns of marginalisation are shown to be constitutive of modern and colonial law, so it is not surprising that current protests should address a basic exclusionary racism that Fitzpatrick's work signalled. It concludes with some reflections on what his work might mean for three current debates.

The spread of COVID-19 has seen a contest over health governance and sovereignty in Global South states, with a focus on two radically distinct modes: (1) indicators and metrics and (2) securitisation. Indicators have been a vehicle for the government of states through the external imposition and internal self-application of standards and benchmarks. Securitisation refers to the calling-into-being of emergencies in the face of existential threats to the nation. This paper contextualises both historically with reference to the trajectory of Global South states in the decades after decolonisation, which saw the rise and decline of Third-World solidarity and its replacement by neoliberalism and global governance mechanisms in health, as in other sectors. The interaction between these modes and their relative prominence during COVID-19 is studied through a brief case-study of developments in Kenya during the early months of the pandemic. The paper closes with suggestions for further research and a reflection on parallel trends within Global North states.

In this brief tribute, I pursue the long-promised imaginary conversation with Peter Fitzpatrick and engage two themes: the nature of an abyss and the conversion of Karl Marx from a revolutionary thinker to a best exemplar of evolutionary thought. If these themes make some sense, a good way of being with Peter is a further exploration amidst us all.

The paper is a study of the gender-based stigmatisation process of elite professionals in an international legal field. It uses commercial arbitration as an example of an international profession and adds to the prevalent understanding of gender inequality by developing a framework called ‘invisible stigmatisation’. The main theoretical framework is supported by twenty-two semi-structured interviews conducted across five international arbitration jurisdictions and two original datasets. These data have helped to contextualise the nuances of gender-based stigmatisation in prestigious arbitral appointments and at the echelons of international arbitration law firms. The paper establishes that the stigmatising experiences drive elite female professionals and their gender-equality consciousness. These experiences also lead to them devise innovative strategies to minimise the effects of gender inequality on their professional lives.

In this paper, we adopt an experimentalist approach to determining the content of international human rights for assessing national mandatory work programmes for recipients of social assistance (MWPs). This approach implies going back and forth between law and experience in order to determine the better way to secure human rights in an ever-changing environment. After having identified six criteria for evaluating MWPs in the soft case-law of international bodies, we confront this emerging international human rights framework with an empirical study on MWP practices in the Netherlands. This confrontation reveals that specific aspects of the capability for voice of working welfare recipients are absent in the human rights framework and that the framework is not gender-neutral. Including these aspects, we construct an experimentalist human-rights-based instrument that is suitable for evaluating national MWPs.

I have long felt that Peter Fitzpatrick's 1987 paper, ‘Racism and the innocence of law’, should be closely studied by all law students during, or shortly after, their induction to the study of law. These concise notes on the paper are written primarily in tribute to a friend, colleague and mentor but, in writing them, I hope also to demonstrate how this early instance of a theory about how law is intertwined in racial capitalism could be taught in those law schools that harbour ambitions to be not only critical, but also decolonial. Inevitably, in such a short piece, choices have had to be made about which aspects of the paper to foreground and which to leave out entirely. I trust that my decision to focus on those aspects that can be more readily comprehended by a student with limited knowledge of legal theory and substantive fields of law will not be thought to have unduly watered down its meaning.

This paper investigates the data life-cycle of contact-tracing apps (CTAs) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights the socio-legal implications resulting from the design and technology choices that software developers inevitably make. These choices are often neglected by policy-makers due to the inherent technical complexity of algorithmic decision systems and to certain naive belief in technological solutionism. In particular, this paper shows, first, that technology-harvested data do not reflect an objective representation of reality, and therefore require a context within which to be understood and interpreted for policy and legal purposes; and, second, that the use of data analytics to extract insights from these data enables the production of computational indicators. By looking at how CTAs are used to implement pandemic-mitigation restrictions such as lockdowns, quarantines, social distancing and testing, the paper ultimately brings forth the ways in which technologies – and thus their bias and ways of framing social reality – become embedded in the law.

The impact of ‘bad’ science on judicial decision-making is a thorny aspect of the relationship between science and law. This study employs doctrinal and empirical analysis to explore two Italian judgments that asserted a causal link between childhood vaccines and autism. Using a combination of actor–network theory and legal pragmatism, we uncovered a network of actors and institutions internal and external to the legal system enabling these impactful decisions that went on to contribute to a crisis in vaccination coverage in Italy. These include trial strategies, resources, communication practices between arms of government, awareness and responsiveness of institutional actors, and institutional mechanisms governing the integration of scientific expertise into the legal process. By forensically analysing how a ‘zombie idea’ received a patent of legitimacy in the Italian context, this study provides useful lessons for legal systems grappling with complex and contested public health matters.

The EU has progressively introduced antidiscrimination enforcement measures like the duty to set up Equality Bodies (EBs) that applies to the ground of racial or ethnic origin, among others. Until recently, however, EU law only envisaged vague standards for EBs that allowed a wide range of national configurations. Building on international benchmarks, this paper draws a set of dimensions considered necessary to improve promotion-type EBs responsiveness to discrimination. These dimensions are applied to the British and Spanish EBs to illustrate how the gaps left by EU law may lead to the design of ineffective bodies. The paper argues that EBs can contribute to effectively tackling discrimination if they are designed to be responsive at individual and systemic levels. The 2018 EU Recommendation on Standards for EBs makes a step forward in that direction, but its practical relevance may be limited by its non-binding nature.

When listening to a recently rediscovered home cassette recording of South African musician and activist Hugh Masekela, which was a gift from the late legal theorist Peter Fitzpatrick in 2004, unleashed are a series of recollections and reflections on the distinctiveness and significance of Fitzpatrick's scholarship, especially in relation to the emerging field of critical legal studies in improvisation. This short piece recalls Peter's boundless wisdom, kindness and generosity, and the lasting impact that his thought and texts have had on his students, colleagues and readers the world over.

In this essay, I discuss the legal theorist, Peter Fitzpatrick's, reading of philosopher Michel Foucault. My intent is to show how and why Foucault was important to Fitzpatrick and what this reveals about the latter's practices of reading. I characterise this particular reading in three ways. First, against the disciplinary tendency to assume that Foucault is more useful to lawyers for how he approaches law (as method), Fitzpatrick takes seriously what Foucault has to say about law as a conceptual matter. Fitzpatrick hence reads Foucault as a legal thinker. Second, Fitzpatrick does not restrict himself to the conventional archive of Foucauldian texts that legal scholars routinely consult, but reads more widely and creatively in his search for law. Third, Fitzpatrick reads Foucault open-endedly and generously rather than instrumentally or dismissively – textual ambivalence and contradiction are always, in his hands, sources of creative possibility and insight. This leads into some concluding reflections about Fitzpatrick's practice of critically rereading thinkers – all thinkers, not simply Foucault.