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This book provides guidance to the laws of whistleblowing in the EU banking and financial sector.

Covering all the relevant EU legislation, including the Directive on the protection of whistleblowers, the book provides insights from France, Luxembourg, and Ireland alongside the relevant international, Council of Europe, and US laws. Following the adoption of the Directive on whistleblowing, the book offers the necessary understanding of the legal landscape, relevant case-law analysis, and examples stemming from EU and US jurisdictions.

Providing clarity and expert analysis in a complex area, the book is a must-read for researchers, government officials, and practitioners.

Colonial Intellectual Property: The Case of the Congo examines the implementation of the Belgian system of intellectual property in the Congo. For the colonized people, some realms of colonial intellectual property such as patents remained closed for a long time, and other domains opened possibilities for participation, such as copyrights. Based on research in unpublished archives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Belgium, this book is the first to trace the history of intellectual property in the Congo, following a chronological and thematic structure.

The first chapter focuses on the implementation of the patent system in colonial Congo and examines the activity of international entrepreneurs who considered patent-taking as an investment in a coercive colonial regime. Chapter two turns to trademarks, and examines both the sociology of entrepreneurs, and the use of stereotypes in brand images. Chapter three further examines the issue of geographical indications of origins, as well as design registration and the place of the commons. Copyrights are the main theme of chapter four. During the postwar era, a group of Congolese musicians exercised their rights in the management of their intellectual property dues. They worked in partnership with the Kinshasa branch of a Belgian collective management society, until they founded in 1959 the SACO, Societe des Auteurs congolais. Chapter 5 then turns to the decolonization, during which the Democratic Republic of the Congo became an independent voice in the international associations for intellectual property.

This book will appeal to all those interested in the history of colonialism in Africa.

Ausgezeichnet mit dem Brigitte Knobbe-Keuk Preis 2025.

This book explores how AI systems trained on neurodata are redrawing the boundaries of dignity, autonomy, and legal personhood.

It reveals the emerging reality of NeuroAI: a world where machinelearning models anticipate our thoughts before we have even formed them. As neurotechnologies evolve, AI systems move beyond interpreting brain signals in labs and headsets to harvesting neurodata (whether extracted through direct interfaces, inferred from everyday behaviour, or reverse-engineered via predictive modelling) from users who never consented or even knew they were being monitored, transforming the subconscious into a commodified dataset.

Drawing on case studies from criminal trials, law enforcement, and consumer technologies, the book reveals how Big Tech and platform operators increasingly treat neurodata as a resource for monetisation. Across the EU and the USA, emerging AI and data-protection regimes, including the EU AI Act and GDPR, as well as the US Fourth Amendment and HIPAA frameworks, offer incomplete or inconsistent safeguards against NeuroAI trained on neurodata to model and predict thoughts, emotions, or intentions, leaving cognitive inference primarily in a legal grey zone.

Indispensable for legal scholars, technologists, and regulators, this critical roadmap illuminates the gaps in current law and identifies the safeguards needed to protect our most intimate inner lives. In a future where thoughts can be inferred, monetised, and weaponised without ever accessing the brain directly, this book shows us where the law must catch up before our minds, our rights, and our freedoms are turned into the next frontier of exploitation.

This book offers a fresh feminist perspective on prostitution. It challenges the 'sex work' perspective, drawing on experience from rape law and #MeToo campaigns in Ireland and elsewhere to develop a new legal concept of 'compromised consent'.

This concept justifies the introduction of Nordic Model laws banning the purchase of sex. It recognises that an individual consent to sell sex is necessarily compromised by structural exploitation within the vastly profitable global sex industry.

While 'sex work' proponents increasingly dominate academic discourse on prostitution, this book asserts that they have co-opted the language of feminism to mask the immense power and patriarchal control exerted by the industry. Their view of 'consent' is based on a dangerous premise. They cannot say that those who sell sex do so out of mutual desire; rather consent is portrayed as an expression of individual choice, thus ignoring the intersectional gendered collective context within which commercial sex transactions take place worldwide.

By contrast, this book argues that presumptions of 'consent' in prostitution directly undermine the legal principles of affirmative consent and contemporary law reforms hard-won by feminist activists on rape and gender-based violence. A view of consent as 'compromised' within the sex trade derives from socialist theorising, as well as from legal re-conceptualisations of consent in other settings. It also reflects the reality of conditions within the sex industry.

This book will be of great interest to students, academics, policy makers and feminist activists. It makes a significant contribution in challenging the dominant thinking within a highly polarised literature.

Through an examination of the underlying technology driving digital currencies, this book offers a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms governing their operation, clarifying complex legal concepts and confronting the pressing issue of anonymity inherent in digital currency transactions.

The book focuses on two categories of digital currencies: cryptocurrencies (eg, bitcoin) and in-game currencies (the currencies used in the closed virtual environment of a game). Despite their differences in governance - cryptocurrencies being decentralised and in-game currencies being centralised - they share significant similarities in terms of anonymity, which presents a notable issue within the anti-money laundering (AML) framework.

Against the backdrop of both the international AML standards developed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the European Union AML regime, the book examines the AML compliance stage of the private sector and, specifically, the collection and retention of data relating to digital currency users. It analyses the new AML Regulation, alongside the 5th AML Directive, the Market in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) Regulation and the 'Travel Rule' Regulation, to construct a complete picture of the obligations imposed on virtual asset service providers and to assess whether the new framework disproportionately interferes with the right to privacy and data protection of the end user. In doing so, the book offers the first legal assessment of the proportionality of private-sector AML obligations in the field of digital currencies based on the argument that, in this context, EU AML law is increasingly transforming into a surveillance regime.

This book explores gender justice, power relations, and social transformation in India by providing an ethnographic, socio-legal view of Nari Adalats (women's courts) and the family disputes that take place before them, in rural northern Karnataka, South India.

The book offers an ethnography of the everyday workings of Nari Adalats based on qualitative interviews, document analysis, and participant observation in a variety of settings where family law and gender justice are negotiated. The book argues that it is essential to examine societal legal forums and the social dynamics within the family (and its social environment) to better understand how changes in gender and power relations can occur. Chapters analyse five cases of Hindu, Muslim and tribal women pursuing claims, and seven further cases of lower caste Hindu women who became judges of the Nari Adalat (one of them a jury member); taken together, they provide rich insights into how successful legal outcomes are achieved, and the structural conditions inherent in the space. Ultimately, the book highlights how Nari Adalats are fundamentally women-centred spaces that challenge gender hierarchies, feminize the public sphere, and reconceptualise gender and ethnic relations in rural India.

Providing an exploration of caste, class, and religion in the wider context of gender justice, the volume will appeal to scholars and postgraduates in the fields of socio-legal studies, in particular gender and justice issues, gender studies, South Asian studies, and legal anthropology.

This book argues that the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 solved the historic French-German conflict over control of the coal deposits of the Ruhr valley. The product of a political bargain among the United States, France and Germany, the Treaty of Paris introduced radical new rules into the European order. For the first time in European history, cartels and powerful anticompetitive concentrations of economic power were banned.

The volume ties the problem of ensuring secure access to Ruhr coal to the larger security dilemma that long haunted French-German relations. It argues that, in effect, wars and cartels were alternative solutions to the same underlying dilemma in the period from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, which featured three wars and two armed occupations involving France and Germany. It discusses the importance of the economic complementarity between coal and ore in relation to the economic and security relations between France and Germany. Above all, it highlights the role played by the novel competition law regime in permanently ending the old cycle of wars and cartels that had cursed Europe through the end of World War II.

Beyond Wars and Cartels will be invaluable to those interested in postwar European history seen from a new angle as well as specialists in antitrust and competition law who compare US and American law, historians and political scientists.

Through the theoretical lens of law and science and technology studies (STS), this book investigates the 'ethification' of the EU regulatory framework on AI.

Discourses on ethics have been proliferating in recent policy, legislative and industry-led AI regulatory initiatives in the European Union (EU). In parallel, Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics has become institutionalized at different levels. Focusing on three EU-based case studies - research ethics committees, advisory expert groups and standardization bodies - this book critically evaluates the legitimacy of AI ethics, through the 'good governance' principles of accountability, transparency, and participation. Despite the EU's aspiration to promote a distinctive ethical approach centred on trustworthiness and human-centric AI, the book shows how ethical considerations often assume a technocratic form, lacking the robust checks and balances and democratic credentials typical of traditional forms of technology regulation. In response, the book argues for a recalibration-a deflation or re-politicization-of the role of ethics in the governance of AI.

This book will appeal to scholars, EU officials, civil society actors and private-sector practitioners, working at the interface of law, ethics and technology, and especially those with interests in the regulation of AI.

Dabei ist es vor dem Hintergrund eines verfassungskonformen Ausgleichs von Freiheit und Sicherheit bedeutsam, Eingriffe in digitale Sphaeren durch normenklare Befugnisse und verfahrensrechtliche Begrenzungen zu regulieren. Dies betrifft namentlich die Ueberwachung (auch) des Surfverhaltens im Rahmen klassischer TKUe-Massnahmen sowie die Infiltration informationstechnischer Systeme, um Verschluesselungstechnologien zu umgehen. Dem Antagonismus von technischen Moeglichkeiten und rechtlichen Beduerfnissen begegnet die Untersuchung mit grundlegendem Reformbedarf und einer dogmatischen Weiterentwicklung des allgemeinen Persoenlichkeitsrechts: einem ≫Recht auf Vertraulichkeit intrapersoneller Internetkommunikation≪.

This book proposes a comprehensive legal framework for regulating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), integrating insights from law, economics, and process management.

Adopting a structured, future-focused, and risk-based approach to address the unique challenges of AGI regulation, this book validates the "singularity scenario" as a legitimate field of scientific inquiry. It critically examines the limitations of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act in governing AGI, and introduces a foundational four-level analytical model rooted in transaction cost theory. Through a detailed exploration of the what, who, and how of regulation, the book maps the risks associated with AGI, discusses the potential role of electronic legal personhood, and develops a practical legal framework aimed at ensuring AGI's trustworthiness and alignment with human values. Ultimately, it argues for proactive, rather than reactive regulatory strategies in anticipation of the technological singularity.

The book will be of interest to researchers in the field of the law of emerging technologies, artificial intelligence and regulation.

Philosophers have long discussed the ethical and epistemological issues raised by vaccines, but these issues have assumed new significance since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This volume focuses on vaccine hesitancy as a case of deep overlap of ethics and epistemology.

Vaccine hesitancy stems from a range of concerns, many of which are fueled by misunderstandings about vaccine technology, conspiracy theories, or misconceptions about scientific research. While some grounds for vaccine hesitancy are clearly irrational, other concerns appear more reasonable. This is the first volume to offer a comprehensive exploration of the interplay of epistemological and ethical dimensions of vaccine hesitancy from a post-COVID perspective. The chapters in the first part of the volume reflect on the epistemology of vaccine hesitancy. They address issues related to trust and expertise, probability literacy, and epistemic justice. The second part covers the ethics of vaccine hesitancy and the implications for public policy. These chapters explore the moral implications of free riding, as well as the complex interplay between individual rights, public health, and the collective good. Together, they help us to consider where the line between personal freedom and civic responsibility should be drawn.

The Ethics and Epistemology of Vaccine Hesitancy will be of interest to philosophers and graduate students working in epistemology, applied ethics, bioethics, philosophy of medicine, and political philosophy.

Through biographical investigations of gang members' life histories, this open access book illustrates the range of causes, motivations, and consequences associated with being a gang member.

Gangs are one of a small number of truly global social phenomena, present across time and space all over the world. Partly as a result of this ubiquity, gangs are inherently revealing social institutions, and can be connected to a range of fundamental human activities, such as the exercise of power, capital accumulation, socialization, identity formation, territorialization, or the articulation of gender relations, amongst others.

At the same time, however, gangs are also frequently associated with an almost pathological form of violence, generally represented as engaging in senseless forms of brutality, and gangsters are popular global scapegoats. Such representations make it all the more urgent to understand what it is that truly motivates individuals to become gang members, why they undergo particular trajectories, and what the long-term consequences of gang membership might be.

Through a comparison of thirteen life histories of gang members from twelve different countries around the world, this book offers a nuanced and sensitive overview of the global gang experience. Life histories are ideal lenses through which to explore these issues due to their ability to simultaneously reflect both the uniqueness and the embedded complexity of gang lives, but also their capacity to offer fundamentally relatable portraits that elicit empathy and humanize individuals.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council grant (no. 787935).