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Articles


The Origins of Art: ‘Sentio ergo sum’
Art has been part of our being for millions of years—possibly even before the beginning of our genus Homo—without being understood as what we now call art. From the beginning, it was simply another way of knowing, probably our first, of coping with what confronted us in our environment as a necessary way of surviving in it and sharing that knowledge with others. It sprang from an emotional reaction to what existed outside of us and how we translated that feeling to pass it on

Don Foresta
30 min read


‘Big Brother is Watching You’: The Use of Live Facial Recognition by Law Enforcement Agencies and International Human Rights Law
The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall […]. The...

Udit Mahalingam
22 min read


Digital Government at the Crossroads
Introduction Governments have launched a series of ambitious digital strategies over recent decades to improve how they operate and...

Jerry Fishenden
21 min read


Location, Location, Location: Jurisdiction and Enforcement in the Land where Location Does Not Exist
Introduction Legal dramas often focus on the climax of courtroom arguments and verdicts. In doing so, they gloss over crucial aspects...


Blockchain’s Potential in Addressing Statelessness
The emergence of blockchain technology is creating solutions to key issues that stateless people face. Stateless people and their...

Aleksejs Ivashuk
19 min read


The Airspace Tribunal and the Right to Live Without Physical or Psychological Threat from Above: In Conversation with Shona Illingworth and Nick Grief
Shona Illingworth is a Danish-Scottish artist and Professor of Art, Film and Media at the University of Kent, UK. Her work examines the impact of accelerating military, industrial, and environmental transformations of airspace and outer space and the implications for human rights. She is co-founder with Nick Grief of the Airspace Tribunal ( https://airspacetribunal.org/ ). Recent solo exhibitions include Topologies of Air at Les Abattoirs, Musée—Frac Occitanie, Toulouse (2022

Aidan Johnson
20 min read


Freedom to Think in the Age of AI: In Conversation with Susie Alegre
Susie Alegre is a leading international human rights lawyer who has worked on the most challenging legal and political issues of our time, such as human rights and security, combating corruption in the developing world, and protecting human rights in light of the rise of artificial intelligence. In our interview, Susie unravels the key issues she exposes in her book Freedom to Think , which received wide acclaim and was chosen as a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and

Nadia Jahnecke
23 min read


A Journey through the Many Faces of Accountability: In Conversation with the Legal Advisors at eyeWitness to Atrocities
Anna Gallina is a Legal Consultant at eyeWitness to Atrocities. Julianne Romy formerly worked as a Legal Advisor at eyeWitness to...

eyeWitness to Atrocities
24 min read


Making Consent Meaningful Again: A Review of the Online ‘Consent’ Model and Alternative Approaches
I. Introduction From atoms to bits, digital convergence has made science fictions come true.[1] Web, mobile applications, smart homes,...

Jialiang Zhang
10 min read


The Dawn of the Digital Age is Upon Us: Is Artificial Intelligence a Substantial Threat to the Law in the Twenty-First Century?
Introduction There has been an epochal shift from the traditional industries established by the Industrial Revolution, including hand production methods in machines[1], to a post-Industrial Revolution economy based upon information technology, widely known as the Digital Age.[2] Lord Sales has referred to computational machines as ‘transformational due to their mechanical ability to complete tasks…faster than any human could’.[3] The twenty-first century has seen an enhancem

Jamie Donnelly
32 min read


Can Modern Appropriation Art be Reconciled with Copyright Law? A Closer Look at Cariou v. Prince
Artists have drawn ideas, thoughts, and concepts from the works of others for centuries. However, copyright infringement issues frequently arise in the contemporary world. The case discussed in this piece concerns contemporary artworks from the ‘Canal Zone’ series by Richard Prince. Most of the works had photographs by Patrick Cariou incorporated in them, which were previously published in Cariou’s Yes Rasta book. Following an analysis of appropriation art history, postmode

Marysia Opadczuk
15 min read


‘We’re All Mad As Hell Now’—How ‘Network’ (1976) Captures the Anti-Politics of Social Media
‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ is a phrase that has been raptured up into the popular English lexicon, cited, quoted, parodied, remixed, and dissolved into an ironic confirmation of the satire that produced it. It was the most iconic line from Network (1976), a now-classic film that told the dark tale of a fictional American network news anchor, Howard Beale (played by posthumous Academy Award-winner Peter Finch), whose blooming madness was exploite

Katherine Cross
21 min read


The Glitz and Glamour of the Metaverse
At the heart of the metaverse stands the vision of an immersive Internet—a gigantic, unified, persistent, and shared realm.[1] To the...

Danielle Jump
14 min read


Holding War Criminals to Account: The Challenges Presented by Information Warfare
The physical battlefield of the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia is being closely scrutinised by the global community: each day,...

Alexandra Agnew, Mishcon de Reya
11 min read


Copyright in the Digital Age: Analysing the Achievements and Flaws in the EU Copyright Exceptions Domain
Copyright exceptions are an important part of international and European copyright frameworks, designed to ensure the balancing of...

Daniel Mooney
23 min read


Art in the Time of NFTs: Navigating the Challenges and Role of NFTs in Artists’ Reclamation of Control over their Publicity Rights
I see NFTs as a way to innovate, empower others and push the boundaries of how artists interact with their fans. I see NFTs…as the future...

Bo Hyun Kim
20 min read


New Technology, Ancient Battle
Since the detection of massive Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election, there has been a morass of studies analysing the manipulation, fakes, and distortions, particularly on the Internet, which seem to assault the very notion of truth. In the US, we have been horrified and perplexed by the huge numbers of people who believed, without much evidence, that there had been massive fraud in the 2020 presidential election, of whom hundreds attacked the bui

Askold Krushelnycky
11 min read


Theory and Politics under Technofeudalism: In Conversation with Yanis Varoufakis
As a theorist, economist, politician, author, and co-founder of two transnational democratic and progressive movements, Yanis Varoufakis is a political Renaissance man who has captured some of the main social, political, and economic movements of our times. He catapulted to fame as Greek finance minister in 2015 where he displayed a strong opposing voice to European powers in a time of turbulent financial crisis. Varoufakis has continued to be a leading voice for change. In 2

Teresa Turkheimer
29 min read


The Twenty-First Century: A Bumpy Ride
Introduction COVID-19 should not have struck us so unawares: similar viruses, SARS and MERS, had emerged within the last 20 years, and global pandemics had been widely discussed. So why were even rich countries so unprepared? It’s because politicians and the public have a local focus. They downplay the long-term and the global. They ignore Nate Silver’s maxim: ‘The unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable.’ Indeed, we’re in denial about a whole raft of newly emergent th

Lord Martin Rees
18 min read


A Bit of Conversation: A Scientific Fiction
SCENE. Manhattan. Street with jazz club and apartment building on a muggy late summer evening. The tired leaves on the trees are damp with rain. Yellow cabs whoosh by, nearly drowned out by a thrum of cicadas. A door swings open from the jazz club, releasing a bubble of music into the street and ALAN, CLAUDE, and JOHNNY, three young men engaged in animated conversation. ALAN : [ To CLAUDE. ] Brilliant. Thanks for bringing us. We couldn’t have heard this in London. CLAUD

Srinivasan Keshav
13 min read


Judges, Carpenters, and Computers: A Craft-Based Perspective on Judicial Decision-Making
Is a judge more like an artist or a scientist? This seems to be a trick question, and yet extreme versions of both perspectives have, at one time or another, been advocated. For instance, James Boyd White, often regarded as the founder of the ‘Law and Literature’ movement, considered lawyers to be artists, and the solving of complex legal problems to be akin to high art.[1] Conversely, Christopher Columbus Langdell, once Dean of Harvard Law School, believed that ‘law is a sci

Reuben Andrews
13 min read


The Sustaining Cosmos
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1.5.167–68),...
Jonathan Jones
7 min read


Enclosing or Democratising the AI Artwork World
Introduction Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled prediction algorithms create multiple challenges to existing ideas about human agency and how the results of this agency may be governed. Weak or absent transparency in the operation of computational systems is changing the meaning of individual autonomy as AI enables vast numbers of new capabilities previously designed and implemented by humans.[1] The prevailing wisdom is that AI innovation is best driven by commercial mar

Robin Mansell
16 min read


‘Alterers’ Filtering out Artists: Using the ‘Public’ Perspective to Preserve Moral Rights over Digital Art
In the digital age, the sharing of images is prevalent across a variety of online platforms. Instagram, one of the largest of these, can provide an up-and-coming artist with an audience of over one billion users. Some already predict the platform’s decline. Kenny Schachter recently commented that, given Instagram’s ever-changing format, ‘it is only a matter of time before the powers that be get too greedy and the ease and accessibility of the app decline’.[1] Yet platforms li

Thomas Hood
9 min read
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