This is the edited transcript of a seminar on 27 February 2020 organised at Warwick Law School in appreciation of the work of Peter Fitzpatrick. Peter was seriously ill at the time but was desirous of online participation. Sadly, the seminar was the last public performance by Peter prior to his death. A variety of themes in Peter's work are discussed, including his critique of H.L.A. Hart, his notion of ‘slow reading’, the relationship between theory and grounded engagement with people, the idea of community and relationality, the role of the critic, self-criticism, the impossibility of law, decoloniality, occidentalism, mythologies and governmentality, and the significance of narratives.

The Indian government has recently introduced legislation to regulate ‘altruistic’ surrogacy while banning ‘commercial’ surrogacy amidst the criticism that India has become the ‘baby factory’. In the past decade, academic discourse has raised socioethical and legal issues that surfaced in the unrestricted transnational commercial-surrogacy industry. Most of the literature and ethnographic studies centred on the issues of informed consent, autonomy, decision-making and exploitation. With the proposed legislation, the Indian government has shown its will to regulate surrogacy, including the medical intermediaries as well as the contract between the intending parents and the surrogate mother-to-be. The present paper addresses the legal and socioethical context in which India introduced the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2019. It examines the extent to which the proposed law responds to the legal challenges and socioethical concerns that surfaced in the course of unregulated transnational commercial-surrogacy arrangements in India. It argues that, even though the proposed legislation addresses and responds to some of the legal and ethical concerns such as informed consent and legal parentage, it stops short of ensuring the welfare and well-being of the surrogate. Second, the legal certainty of parentage and the child's rights comes at the cost of the physical and psychological well-being of the surrogate. Finally, it argues that, by presupposing the surrogate as an autonomous agent and yet imposing the requirement of marriage, the Bill overlooks the sociocultural realities of patriarchal hierarchies entrenched in Indian society – that, in its conception of ‘family’, the focus on the ‘traditional’ family not only presents a narrow view of the heteronormative family and perpetuates the patriarchal notions of gender roles, but also fails to take into consideration maternal pluralism in surrogacy arrangements, undermines the modern family and, above all, discriminates against the single person's and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities’ right to found a family. Since many countries that served as centres for international commercial-surrogacy arrangement (such as Cambodia, Thailand and Nepal) have recently started to take steps to prohibit or limit transnational surrogacy arrangements, the analysis of Indian law in the present paper will provide a useful context within which these countries can effectively regulate surrogacy while safeguarding the surrogate's rights and interests.

Pre-trial detention is used extensively in Latin America as a systematic practice implemented by courts. Despite this fact, few empirical studies have analysed the role of defence attorneys in pre-trial incarceration. This paper attempts to describe the actions taken by lawyers in order to free their clients during the judicial process, using new empirical evidence collected from the incarcerated population in Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Chile, Mexico and Peru. Results suggest that public defenders request conditional release less frequently but do so more effectively than their private counterparts.

This short paper intends to set out a general theory underpinning the process of contractualisation of public international law. In doing so, it explains that this has chiefly been engineered through the establishment of a third sphere of regulation – in addition to the spheres of domestic law(s) and international law – namely transnational law. Both private actors and states operate through this sphere, chiefly because of its flexibility, decreased transaction costs and access to capital (which is scarce in the other two spheres). These benefits of transacting in the transnational-law sphere and the contractualisation of pertinent relationships come at a cost. Such a cost, from the perspective of human rights and parliamentary sovereignty, is explored by reference to two case-studies. The second of these, on the outsourcing of indigenous land rights, is predicated on the research and observations offered by Bhatt (2020).

While private corporations have become increasingly influential in the global economy, a comprehensive legal framework for their activities is missing. Although international and regional legal instruments may govern some aspects of, for instance, international investments and the supply of goods and services, there is no overarching structure for assessing the impact of large-scale private projects. In the absence of such a comprehensive framework, specific rules of private law allow profit-seeking companies to expand their activities on an economic basis, mostly without having to heed social concerns (Pistor, 2019). This is particularly problematic insofar as multinational companies have obtained power to set the rules for their engagement with states, organisations and individuals, for instance in the form of transnational investment contracts. Given the fragmented nature of the legal sphere in which such contracts are elaborated and performed, those who face the harmful consequences of such investments may not be able to participate in decision-making processes. The contracts remain in ‘wild zones’ of globalisation (Fraser, 2014, p. 150), where powerful private companies rule.

The theme of the book symposium ‘The Rule of Law in Transnational Development Projects’ is, as Bhatt's Concessionaires, Financiers and Communities (2020) and Lander's Transnational Law and State Transformation (2020) highlight, ripe for critical reflection. The two books reveal the power wielded by private for-profit actors in the co-constitution of legal norms, often at the expense of local communities in development-investment settings. The co-constitution of legal norms by private actors via ‘contracts’, ‘policies’ and ‘intermediaries’ (Bhatt, Lander and Taekema, Book Symposium Introduction in this issue) development permeates rule of law in the public sphere, including in ways that affect the application of domestic and international legal norms relating to human rights. Of course, rule of law may be defined by ‘thick’ conceptions … as a just system of laws ‘consistent with international human rights norms and standards’ (UN Secretary General, 2004, para. 6) or ‘thin’ conceptions with more formalistic requirements that do not prescribe political or social values. Deontological questions aside, even in its ‘thinnest’ conception, rule of law means that legal norms ‘should be publicly promulgated; be predictable in their application; apply to all citizens, including government officials; and be subject to some form of neutral adjudication in the event of disputes as to their interpretation or application’ (Trebilcock, 2011, p. 209). Yet, rule of law has often been applied ‘to favour entrenched elites over resistance groups, vested interests … over civil disobedience, official actors over unofficial actors and property owners over protestors’ (Simpson, 2012, p. 9).

By foregrounding a widened view of the rule of law in transnational legal processes, the works under discussion in this symposium can support innovative critical perspectives on global health law –a field that has gained wide attention due to the spread of COVID-19 around the world (Lander, 2020; Bhatt, 2020). Legal and socio-legal scholars in the decade and a half before the pandemic worked on locating global health law and articulating its underlying principles. Lawrence Gostin's 2014 monograph offers a synoptic view centred on international institutions (e.g. the World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, UN Human Rights Council) and problems (e.g. infectious-disease response, tobacco control), along with an elaboration of its normative basis in universal moral principle and international human rights law (Gostin, 2014). Struggles over access to essential medicines and intellectual property in the early 2000s are, for example, represented in terms of the right to health constraining international trade law. Andreas Fischer-Lescano and Guenther Teubner's 2004 reading is oriented more by social theory than by doctrinal or ethical frames (Fischer-Lescano and Teubner, 2004, pp. 1006, 1008). A functional health regime has ‘differentiated out’, they observe, and operates as a discrete communication system across borders, albeit one that is threatened by the preponderant economic system. On this model, the battle for access to medicines amounts to ensuring, via human rights guarantees, that the rationality of the health system is not replaced by that of its economic rival in legal and policy communications (Fischer-Lescano and Teubner, 2004, pp. 1030, 1046).

We are sympathetic to the research aims of the two books examined by this symposium and their desire to understand law's role in generating and contesting social injustice. We are also intrigued by the proposal in the Introduction to this symposium, notably to expand the normative reach of the rule-of-law ideal to private actors, in order to transform it into an ally of counter-hegemonic action. In our research, we share a similar research focus (development projects), methodology (case-studies) and concerns (harmful effects of development interventions) with the authors of the two books. Accordingly, in this contribution, we want to think together with the editors of the symposium – by examining the case-study of the Hidroituango project in Colombia (hereinafter, ‘Hidroituango’) – whether the rule of law can indeed be reimagined to limit the arbitrary exercise of power by private actors, and what benefits this might create for dealing with social injustice. However, since neither Bhatt nor Lander advances an explicit account of rule of law in their books, our critique in this piece is addressed not at them, but rather at the theorists and advocates of rule of law as a political ideal.

It is observed in the Introduction of this special issue that the rule of law has been an integral part of the development of democratic systems of government in national states and features powerfully within contemporary ‘good-governance’ promotion in the Global South by development financial institutions (DFIs). However, the rule of law is predominantly used to emphasise the importance of stability of contract and protection of property in connection with transnational development projects (TDPs) and does not so much focus on the general stability of (e.g. indigenous) rights, access to justice and fairness. Thus, it is important to deviate from a narrow interpretation of the rule of law and include the role of all types of actors in safeguarding this rule of law.

By browsing the website of Land Matrix, one can measure the extent of land-related large-scale investments in natural resources (LRINRs) and place it on the world map. At the time of writing, the extent of these investments covers an area equal to the surfaces of Spain and Portugal together – or, for football fans, around 60 million football pitches. These investment operations have often been saluted as instrumental to achieve the developmental needs of host countries and as the necessary private counterpart to state (and interstate) efforts aimed at (sustainable) development goals. Yet, the realities on the ground offer a scenario characterised by severe instances of displacement of indigenous or local communities and environmental disruptions. The starting point of this short essay is that these ‘externalities’ are generated through the legal construct enabling the implementation of these investment operations. As such, this contribution lies neatly in the line of research set forth in the excellent books of Kinnari Bhatt and Jennifer Lander, from the perspective of both the development culture shaping these investment operations and the private–public environment in which these are situated. The essay tries and dialogues with both components, while focusing at a metalevel on the theoretical shifts potentially geared to turn a ‘tale of exclusion’ into a ‘tale of inclusion’.

The contributions to this Special Issue, and the books to which they relate, are premised on the idea that the Rule of Law relates to private relationships. I challenge that idea. By exploring solely theoretical ideas, I argue that the Rule of Law – as it is usually defined – does not relate to private relationships and, in consequence, the nexus necessary to invoke a Rule of Law-solution in the circumstances outlined in the books is absent.