Suchergebnisse

"Bringing a unique perspective to the burgeoning ethical and legal issues surrounding the presence of artificial intelligence in our daily lives, the book uses theory and practice on animal rights and the rights of nature to assess the status of robots. Through extensive philosophical and legal analyses, the book explores how rights can be applied to nonhuman entities. This task is completed by developing a framework useful for determining the kinds of personhood for which a nonhuman entity might be eligible, and a critical environmental ethic that extends moral and legal consideration to nonhumans. The framework and ethic are then applied to two hypothetical situations involving real-world technology-animal-like robot companions and humanoid sex robots. Additionally, the book approaches the subject from multiple perspectives, providing a comparative study of legal cases on animal rights and the rights of nature from around the world and insights from structured interviews with leading experts in the field of robotics. Ending with a call to rethink the concept of rights in the Anthropocene, suggestions for further research are made. An essential read for scholars and students interested in robot, animal and environmental law, as well as those interested in technology more generally, the book is a ground-breaking study of an increasingly relevant topic, as robots become ubiquitous in modern society"--

To what extent are decisions regarding Chinese investment in Africa motivated by environmental factors? A considerable body of work has examined the determinants of foreign aid among traditional donors, producing useful debates about the relative significance of recipient need or merit and donor interest. But far less scholarly effort has focused on the motivations of emerging donors and the role of environmental factors in influencing aid allocation. In an attempt to fill these gaps, this article uses statistical techniques to test the hypothesis that China deliberately invests in African countries with poor environmental performance for reasons related to recipient need or donor interest. Drawing upon project-level data regarding investments made by China in Africa from 2002 to 2012, the analysis suggests that Chinese development assistance grows commensurate with a country's environmental performance, but only to a point. After a state achieves a certain level of environmental quality, Chinese investments decline.

The global trend toward adopting environmental rights within national constitutions has been largely regarded as a positive development for both human rights and the natural environment. The impact of constitutional environmental rights, however, has yet to be systematically assessed using empirical data. In particular, expanding procedural environmental rights—legal provisions relating to access to information, participation, and justice in environmental matters—provides fertile ground for analyzing how environmental rights directly interface with conditions necessary for a functioning democracy. To understand the extent to which these provisions deliver on their lofty aspirations, we conducted a quantitative analysis to assess the relationship between procedural environmental rights and environmental justice, while also controlling for the extent of democracy within a country. The results suggest that states with procedural environmental rights are more likely than nonadopting states to facilitate attaining environmental justice, especially as it relates to access to information.

The Anthropocene requires of us to rethink global governance challenges and effective responses with a more holistic understanding of the earth system as a single intertwined social-ecological system. Law, in particular, will have to embrace such a holistic earth system perspective in order to deal more effectively with the Anthropocene's predicaments. While a growing number of scholars have tried to reimagine law and legal scholarship in a more holistic way, these attempts remain siloed. What is required is a shared epistemic framework to enable and enhance collaborative intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary research and co-learning that go hand in hand with thorough transdisciplinary stakeholder engagement. We argue that the nascent concept of earth system law offers such an overarching epistemic framework. This article serves as an invitation to fellow explorers from various legal fields, other disciplines, and from a wide range of stakeholders to explore new frontiers in earth system law. Our aim is to further stimulate the study of earth system law, and to encourage collaboration and co-learning in a fertile epistemic space that we share.