Mapping of human rights abuses and international crimes is an increasingly common tool to evidence, preserve and visualise information. This paper asks, what does rights-informed mapping in the context of mass graves look like? What are the rights concerned and allied goals, and how might these practicably apply during a pilot study? The study offers an analysis of the goals and benefits espoused to accrue to mapping and documentation efforts, as well as an explication of rights arising when engaging with mass graves. Our findings underscore the imperative of understanding the full ramifications of the applicable context, in our case the life-cycle of mass graves. This will bring to the fore the rights engaged with the subject as well as the challenges with data points, collation and reporting as experienced in a pilot (Ukraine) where realities on the ground are not static but remain in flux.

In N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, core laws are written on stone. But the tablets are incomplete, open to interpretation and their authorship uncertain. Nonetheless, Stone Law forms the basis of the governance system. Ultimately, the narrative reveals that the Stone Laws are recent in origin and an instrument of subjugation whose claims to common sense belie its harms. This article considers immutability in law and the ways in which particular laws become as if written in stone. Constitutional law and jus cogens are two examples of immutable worldbuilding laws represented as inevitable, absolute, unyielding and perpetual. Debates in law and humanities on genre, performance, interpretation and the concerns of a particular era are often reflected and refracted through both the laws and the literature of an era. In particular, the practice of worldbuilding is used to demonstrate the wariness necessary when laws are represented as immutable.

This paper examines the core twin concepts of secularism and pluralism and their location within the Indian constitutional discourse, through a discussion of the hijab ban in the South Indian state of Karnataka. I suggest that attempts at Hindu majoritarian subversion of these core principles face challenges due to the structure of the Indian Constitution, and due to the constitutional agency and mutinies set in motion by women through their legal challenge of state action. I discuss the hijab ban in India and the two judgments on the ban as an example of this attempted subversion but also of its failure, suggesting that these judgments fall short in their reading of this interrelationship between secularism and pluralism. In doing so, I introduce a threefold analytical categorisation, pluralist constitutionalism, constitutional appropriation and constitutional derailment, to help us outline the tensions inherent in constitutional politics in the present.

This special issue aims to unravel the deeply intertwined dialectics between property and sharing. We do so by examining the paradoxes thrown up as legal forms of property interact with the emergent economic activity of sharing, and investigating how these may be resolved by designing institutional frameworks to better align their values. These paradoxes are sometimes productive, driving property and sharing forward to produce new configurations of use and privilege; sometimes disruptive, as sharing throws new light on how property orders economic and social relations by pushing against the boundaries of established property forms. But they are always revealing.

This article analyses shifts in consumers’ preferred forms of use following the rise of the access economy and evaluates the subversive potential of access as a non-hierarchical, open form of use. Access consists of an aggregation of multiple licenses that amounts to a consistent form of use and has social, cultural and legal implications. My definition of ‘access’ focusses on material practices of property rather than on formal legal categories, and I compare access to both formal and informal forms of long-term use. I explore themes of power and vulnerability and individualism and communities and consider whether access merely adds to the property landscape or provokes contested forms of use. The article reveals the complex relationships between ownership (and other forms of long-term possession) and access, as access both challenges ownership and reinforces its power. Ultimately, I conclude that access fails to achieve its subversive potential.

What would the ‘sharing economy’ look like if platform providers optimised for racial and other forms of diversity? This article considers that question. Following the Introduction, Part 2 of this article reviews the widespread nature of race and other forms of discrimination in platform technologies. Part 3 uses core strands of property theory to analyse the ways in which racial privilege translates into property entitlements. Part 4 discusses a range of reforms within property law that can contribute to eliminating the value – and ultimately the fact – of whiteness as a property entitlement in the platform economy.

An (ongoing) interrogation of colonial wrongdoing is important for debates on decolonisation, restorative justice, racial and gender equality and global political and socio-economic equality. This article presents a theoretical study of colonialism’s legal-political injustices and aims to (re)turn the discussion on colonialism to the field’s most powerful insight, i.e. that of of epistemic violence and injustice. This article also suggests that the reach of this historical injustice went much further than the politics of autonomy, usurpation of territorial rights, political disenfranchisement and resource appropriation. To address the question of colonialism’s distinctiveness as a political mission, which has been discussed in recent debates within analytic philosophy, it argues that colonialism’s epistemic injustice, which denied the very existence and the traditions of the colonised, is the foundational and distinctive feature of colonialism as a political system and which drives its continued impact to this day.