Volume 15, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Law and Boundaries 2014, Guest Editor: Tomaso Ferrando

The contemporary proliferation of drones and other forms of aerial interventions herald the (re)emergence of air policing as the principal modality for the fabrication of order in the global periphery. Air policing is predominantly framed by international legal analysis as merely ‘killing from above,’ yet this designation obfuscates the concomitant occupation of airspaces entailed by drones and other aerial technologies. Such occupations constitute an assertion of jurisdiction in nominally sovereign airspaces authorised by latent imperial legality. The history of air policing reveals a genealogy of ‘aerial imperial formations,’ enfolded within the abstract airspaces regulated by international law notions of ‘complete and exclusive’ sovereignty. Through a focus on the spatio-legal construction of airspace, this paper proposes a reframing of the nexus of sovereignty, jurisdiction and territory, and suggests that we conceive of the principle of indivisible sovereignty as propounded under international law as profoundly entangled with the conception of sovereignty as divisible that animates jurisdictionally complex imperial law .

Since the early years of the occupation, Israel has promoted a settlement policy and encouraged Israeli Jewish citizens to live in new communities it established in the OPT. Over the years, the Israeli and Palestinian populations living in separated cities and villages, situated side by side, over the entire Occupied West Bank, have been placed under the jurisdiction of two different sets of laws. The creation of this segregated legal regime in the OPT was indispensable in order to keep the original Palestinian population subordinated to military rule, denied civil rights and any democratic representation, and to carry out the settlements policy of the State of Israel. This article demonstrates through a critical analysis of case law, how the Israeli High Court of Justice, through the selective use (and misuse) of the law of military occupation, not only has legitimatized the creation of a segregation regime in the OPT but also has actively contributed to its formation by providing the State with the necessary legal tools required to design and implement it.

Acknowledging that urban spaces are an amalgamation of multiple normative orders, the city will be explored as a site of encounter through a spatio-legal reading of the biography of Django (Dregni 2004) about life in La Zone, a conflux of shanty towns on the ramparts of Paris. Drawing on interlegality and a Foucauldian reading of space, chaotic refractions of counter-hegemonic practices are evoked through a close reading of Django’s experiences in this peripheral ‘no-man’s land’. Such spaces demand an alternative reading whereby, rather than emphasising exclusion, they can be seen to actually infiltrate the protected city and define its ongoing lawscape.

This paper concerns how legal mechanisms intended to address domestic violence (DV) can be better designed to adequately consider its gendered impacts and complexity. I analyze two traditional legal approaches to DV: a focus on women-only mechanisms and a gender-neutral approach. I then analyze two jurisdictions that have adopted such approaches to DV: Brazil and the United States, respectively. While each approach has benefits, both also have significant costs. I argue that it is possible to imagine an alternative, substantially more flexible system that is neither focused on women nor is gender-neutral. This alternative, which I call the mosaic approach (MA), aims at making DV law and policy more effective, and more just, by focusing on a mosaic of vulnerabilities, which may be more or less related to gender. The MA then proposes using an empirically-based mosaic of DV policies that match and address these vulnerabilities. At the core of the MA is an insistence upon an ongoing public scrutiny of the political choices that lurk behind resource allocation and vulnerability prioritization. Because public policy and law require some degree of generality, the risk of stereotyping in policy-design is probably unavoidable. This paper argues that the best response to this concern is to bring it to the very forefront of policy-making by actively grappling with how we categorize and prioritize people.

This paper seeks to examine the concept of climate justice and how it is employed by different actors and for different ends. This will be done through an exploration of invocations of climate justice in discussions about a proposed adaptation strategy, namely ‘climate-ready seeds’. The impacts of climate change are often perceived as a form of injustice, because the most vulnerable regions and people suffer disproportionately while having contributed least to causing climate change. Adaptation strategies intended to alleviate this suffering can be viewed as a pursuit of climate justice. At the same time, some argue that certain adaptation strategies cause more injustice than they alleviate. Climate justice movements thus also aim to correct the injustices caused by adaptation strategies. Critics of climate-ready seeds contend that this proposed adaptation strategy is a profitable business for seed corporations, but does not benefit poor farmers. Even though different actors use the concept of climate justice for different purposes, they often invoke similar notions of ‘rights’. I argue in this paper that reliance on rights in all accounts of climate justice in discourses about climate-ready seeds plays a hand in obscuring the distinct aims and ends contained in the idea of climate justice.

Proportionality has been largely misunderstood both by its proponents and by its critics. On the one hand, it has been wrongly regarded as a more transparent and at the same time a more controllable alternative to other types of legal discourses. On the other hand, it has been incorrectly viewed as a realm of unlimited subjectivity and pure politics. In fact, proportionality oscillates between law and politics, trying to reconcile the two yet constantly falling into one or another. The article studies the dialectical structure of proportionality and explores proportionality as an argumentative practice.