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Research Article
Redefining Fiduciary Oversight in the Digital Age:
Board-Level Liability for Intangible Asset Vulnerabilities and Intellectual Property Loss
Issue:
Volume 9, Issue 4, December 2026
Pages:
442-452
Received:
16 September 2026
Accepted:
29 September 2026
Published:
20 October 2026
Abstract: The concept of fiduciary duty has long been framed around safeguarding a company's assets and finances. Corporate governance historically focused on safeguarding tangible property and financial assets. Today, the overwhelming majority of the market capitalisation of the world's largest public companies rests on their balance sheet, and the risks to enterprise value are now far more numerous, from catastrophic loss of intangible assets caused by trade secret cyber-thefts, uncontrolled deployment of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and unmonitored open-source code integration than the risks that the Caremark Doctrine was designed to protect against. Originating in Delaware jurisprudence and mirrored in mechanisms under the UK Companies Act 2006, the doctrine of board-level oversight liability has evolved to hold directors strictly accountable for systematic risk management. Today, passively delegating intangible asset risks to IT or legal departments without board-level escalation protocols fails to satisfy good-faith oversight standards. Expanding on recent legal decisions that extend oversight duties to corporate officers, this paper examines global governance failures in the digital age. It proposes a proactive framework that incorporates amended board charters, explicit reporting channels, and specialised insurance reviews to protect intangible assets across international jurisdictions.
Abstract: The concept of fiduciary duty has long been framed around safeguarding a company's assets and finances. Corporate governance historically focused on safeguarding tangible property and financial assets. Today, the overwhelming majority of the market capitalisation of the world's largest public companies rests on their balance sheet, and the risks to...
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Research Article
Growing Up in the Crossfire: Children, Youth and the Human Cost of Armed Conflict in Africa — Lessons from Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis
Nelson Agbor*
,
Abraham Eiluorior
Issue:
Volume 9, Issue 4, December 2026
Pages:
453-465
Received:
22 September 2026
Accepted:
30 September 2026
Published:
20 October 2026
Abstract: Armed conflicts across Africa have consequences for children and young people that extend far beyond immediate death, injury and displacement. They disrupt education, fracture family and community structures, expose children to recruitment, abduction, sexual and gender-based violence, economic exploitation and psychological trauma, and diminish their prospects for social and economic development. This article examines these consequences through the lens of Cameroon’s protracted Anglophone crisis, which evolved from peaceful protests in 2016 into an armed confrontation between state security forces and armed separatist groups in the North-West and South-West regions. Adopting a doctrinal legal methodology complemented by socio-legal and contextual analysis, the article evaluates the protection afforded to conflict-affected children under international humanitarian law, international human rights law, international criminal law and the African regional human rights system. Attention is given to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, its Optional Protocol on children in armed conflict, the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol II, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The article argues that the Anglophone crisis exposes a significant protection gap between the extensive normative architecture governing children in armed conflict and its implementation in protracted, fragmented non-international armed conflicts. It introduces the concept of cumulative conflict harm to explain how mutually reinforcing violations progressively erode childhood, agency and future opportunity. It concludes that protecting children requires moving beyond emergency humanitarianism towards accountability, continuity of education, psychosocial recovery, child-sensitive peacebuilding and long-term institutional reconstruction.
Abstract: Armed conflicts across Africa have consequences for children and young people that extend far beyond immediate death, injury and displacement. They disrupt education, fracture family and community structures, expose children to recruitment, abduction, sexual and gender-based violence, economic exploitation and psychological trauma, and diminish the...
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Research Article
Legal Reconstruction as a Policy Bridge: Advancing Criminalization of Online Gambling Amid National Differences
Muhammad Ali Nurhidayatullah*,
Agus Raharjo
Issue:
Volume 9, Issue 4, December 2026
Pages:
466-477
Received:
12 September 2026
Accepted:
23 September 2026
Published:
23 October 2026
Abstract: Online gambling is a rapidly growing global phenomenon affecting countries across the world and creating complex legal, social, economic, and technological challenges. However, each nation adopts different domestic policies that shape how it regulates, monitors, and enforces online gambling laws, resulting in regulatory fragmentation and difficulties in addressing cross-border gambling activities. This study aims to develop an ideal legal reconstruction framework for the future criminalization of online gambling amid divergent domestic policies. This research uses a normative legal method with legislative, conceptual, and comparative approaches to examine existing regulations, legal principles, and comparative practices concerning online gambling criminalization. The results indicate that an ideal legal reconstruction to address online gambling in Indonesia must encompass three strategic dimensions. First, reform substantive criminal law by establishing primary and additional penalties for both organizers and individual perpetrators of online gambling, including classifying offences by scale small, medium, and large imposing fines proportionate to the offender’s income, and applying supplementary sanctions such as fines and community service. Second, harmonization of domestic policies through international cooperation, extraterritorial enforcement, and alignment of national online gambling regulations to strengthen cross-border legal enforcement. Third, adoption of technological approaches in law enforcement through digital monitoring, private-sector involvement in blocking illegal gambling sites, and AI-based detection of suspicious transactions. These dimensions provide an integrated framework for strengthening Indonesia’s legal response to the evolving challenges of online gambling.
Abstract: Online gambling is a rapidly growing global phenomenon affecting countries across the world and creating complex legal, social, economic, and technological challenges. However, each nation adopts different domestic policies that shape how it regulates, monitors, and enforces online gambling laws, resulting in regulatory fragmentation and difficulti...
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Research Article
A Constitutional Compliance Architecture for Digital State Decision-Making in Mongolia
Issue:
Volume 9, Issue 4, December 2026
Pages:
478-488
Received:
16 September 2026
Accepted:
29 September 2026
Published:
23 October 2026
Abstract: Mongolian legal scholarship has traditionally examined constitutional supremacy, Constitutional Court (Tsets) review, and ordinary-court practice separately, leaving constitutional application as an integrated institutional system, and its extension to digital government, largely unexplored. This article reconceptualises Constitutional supremacy as a dynamic compliance system spanning the entire decision-making cycle. Using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, it analyses 117 Tsets decisions (1992-2023), 1,240 court judgments, and acts of state administrative bodies, and compares eight jurisdictions. The results reveal systemic under-application of the proportionality test (absent in 93.2% of Tsets decisions), unnamed interpretive methods (61.5%), incomplete implementation of decisions (34.2%), and marginal direct application of the Constitution by ordinary courts (5.7%). Regression analysis identifies proportionality as the strongest predictor of constitutional-application performance (r = 0.834; β = 0.421), confirming hypotheses H1 and H2. Drawing on the proportionality theories of Alexy and Barak, the article proposes a three-layered constitutional compliance architecture (foundational, instrumental, and mechanistic) and advances, as a theoretical proposition (TP1) not yet empirically tested, a Digital Constitutional Compliance Layer that embeds ex ante Constitutional checks into algorithmic public decision-making, informed by the digital-constitutionalism literature and EU regulatory instruments.
Abstract: Mongolian legal scholarship has traditionally examined constitutional supremacy, Constitutional Court (Tsets) review, and ordinary-court practice separately, leaving constitutional application as an integrated institutional system, and its extension to digital government, largely unexplored. This article reconceptualises Constitutional supremacy as...
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Methodology Article
Narrative Criminology and the Interactional Construction of Crime
Michael Bamberg*,
Owen Linden
Issue:
Volume 9, Issue 4, December 2026
Pages:
489-502
Received:
30 September 2026
Accepted:
14 October 2026
Published:
29 October 2026
Abstract: We put forth the argument that the criminal, as a recognizable social figure, is a narrative construct, produced through the positioning work performed in interactional settings where legal institutions operate. Taking courtroom closing arguments as the analytical site, we apply positioning analysis to two closing arguments from American legal drama television: a closing in Law & Order (Season 21, Episode 1), and a second from For the People (Season 1, Episode 10), with a third, a mercy killing trial, as methodological anchor and comparative baseline. The comparison yields three analytically distinct positions that extend the care-versus-justice dyad. The argument in the Law & Order case absorbs the care narrative into the prosecutorial stance and subordinates it, making the alignment with the traditional McCoy-era prosecutorial epistemology invisible to thematic readings alone. The defense argument in For the People goes further: it does not contest a competing ethical content but the justice framework's authority to frame. We describe this as a delegitimizing narrative, a third position in comparison. The finding has implications for narrative criminology, where contesting the construction of the criminal may require a different account of the institution doing the constructing, and for positioning analysis as a method, where it demonstrates the approach's capacity to distinguish moves that look structurally similar on the surface but are doing opposite work at the level of master narrative alignment.
Abstract: We put forth the argument that the criminal, as a recognizable social figure, is a narrative construct, produced through the positioning work performed in interactional settings where legal institutions operate. Taking courtroom closing arguments as the analytical site, we apply positioning analysis to two closing arguments from American legal dram...
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Research Article
Education as a Rehabilitation Strategy for Women in Selected Prisons in Kenya: The Practice, Challenges and the Way Forward
Ruth Joyce Nyawira Kaguta*
Issue:
Volume 9, Issue 4, December 2026
Pages:
503-508
Received:
5 October 2026
Accepted:
16 October 2026
Published:
3 November 2026
Abstract: Education is an important component of rehabilitation for women in prison, yet meaningful learning opportunities may be constrained by institutional priorities, limited resources and competing demands on prisoners’ time. This paper examines the provision of formal and non-formal education in selected women’s prisons in Kenya, identifies challenges in programme implementation and proposes measures to improve educational access and quality. The study drew on interviews with 70 incarcerated women and 36 key informants across five purposively selected prisons, supported by documentary review and observation. The inquiry considered programme organisation, instructional staffing, learning facilities, resource allocation and institutional support. Participants described tensions between education and routine prison work, shortages of trained teachers, inadequate classrooms and learning materials, inconsistent administrative support and limited monitoring of educational outcomes. The findings also suggest that access to educational programmes varied according to institutional arrangements and available resources. These observations reflect the experiences of the selected participants and institutions and are not intended as statistically representative estimates for all prisons in Kenya. The paper recommends a dedicated prison education administration and budget, a coherent policy framework for the delivery of education in custodial institutions, stronger coordination with education authorities, improved provision of learning materials and deployment of qualified teaching personnel. It further recommends systematic monitoring and additional research to inform prison education policy. As the fieldwork and several documentary sources are historical, these findings describe conditions during the study period and should not be treated as evidence of current practice in every Kenyan prison.
Abstract: Education is an important component of rehabilitation for women in prison, yet meaningful learning opportunities may be constrained by institutional priorities, limited resources and competing demands on prisoners’ time. This paper examines the provision of formal and non-formal education in selected women’s prisons in Kenya, identifies challenges ...
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Research Article
Must the Democratic Deficit of the European Union Go on - Remarks Based on Practice of EU Institutions, as Expressed in Official Statements
Magdalena Katz*
Issue:
Volume 9, Issue 4, December 2026
Pages:
509-516
Received:
11 August 2026
Accepted:
31 August 2026
Published:
9 November 2026
Abstract: Since its beginnings, the European Union strives for more democracy. One Treaty reform after another tries to make this supranational organization more democratic. Politicians, legal scholars and judges argue, how. Relevant discussions take place since tens of years and one has to wonder, why. The legal matter is, what could be the reason that one reform after another fails. Member States are either unable to create a supranational democratic organization or they do not want to. A closer look at the practice of EU institutions may provide an answer or at least it can offer some indications in this regard. Due to the fact, that citizens connect the democracy with a parliament, one started to design a European Parliament as their democratic representation. Until 1979, members of national parliaments were also members of the European Parliament, designated by the first. They enjoyed a double mandate. An aspiration for more democracy opened the way for a direct election to the Parliament 1979 that was supposed to solve the problem of democratic deficit of the EU. In fact, it did not. One decided to give more and more competences to the directly elected Parliament that - at the beginnings - was only supposed to be consulted on legislative drafts. Over the years, the Parliament became a co-legislator. Its opinion is as important as the one of the Council. So that the institutional context is considered to be sufficiently democratic. However, a further question arose. The question is if the legislative proceedings are democratic. Some may doubt since 85 - 95% of legal acts are being issued in the procedure of trilogues, the informal part of the EU legislative process.
Abstract: Since its beginnings, the European Union strives for more democracy. One Treaty reform after another tries to make this supranational organization more democratic. Politicians, legal scholars and judges argue, how. Relevant discussions take place since tens of years and one has to wonder, why. The legal matter is, what could be the reason that one ...
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Research Article
Reassessing India’s Medical Termination of Pregnancy Framework After the 2021 Amendment: A Doctrinal and Rights-Based Analysis
Issue:
Volume 9, Issue 4, December 2026
Pages:
517-521
Received:
29 September 2026
Accepted:
27 October 2026
Published:
13 November 2026
DOI:
10.11648/j.ijls.20260904.18
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Abstract: The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act (MTP) is the act that governs the rules and regulations behind aborting a fetus in India. It was first enforced in 1971. Since its enactment, the Act has been amended to reflect changing social attitudes, medical developments and the evolving circumstances surrounding reproductive healthcare in India. While it has made progress from its enforcement in 1971, its current framework still needs to be reviewed and reformed. Through an analysis of the clauses of Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 2021, and its implementation, this analysis argues that further reform is necessary since the Act still criminalises abortion, is ambiguous in many clauses and is doctor-centric rather than rights centric. This legal analysis will also consider whether the safeguards established in the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 2021 are able to balance the protection of the patients health and reproductive autonomy. It will also examine the practical consequences of the Act. This includes the availability of trained medical practitioners, social stigma and health care access. Counterarguments concerning the need for medical oversight, legal restrictions and safeguards against unsafe abortions will also be considered. Ultimately, this legal analysis suggests reforms aimed at shifting the framework of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 2021 towards greater individual autonomy and a rights-centric approach without compromising the safety of the patient. This paper uses a doctrinal and normative legal approach to examine India's Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 2021. The primary legal materials used are the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971, as amended in 2021, the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, and judicial decisions relevant to the topic at hand. Secondary materials include policy reports, articles and scholarly commentary on reproductive rights, medical decision-making and the implementation of abortion law. The analysis considers material available up to 2024. The ethical framework employed is principlism, specifically focusing on respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice.
Abstract: The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act (MTP) is the act that governs the rules and regulations behind aborting a fetus in India. It was first enforced in 1971. Since its enactment, the Act has been amended to reflect changing social attitudes, medical developments and the evolving circumstances surrounding reproductive healthcare in India. While ...
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Research Article
Beyond the Trenches of International Criminal Justice:
The Legacy of the Special Court of Sierra Leone
Charles Achaleke Taku*
Issue:
Volume 9, Issue 4, December 2026
Pages:
522-536
Received:
22 October 2026
Accepted:
31 October 2026
Published:
13 November 2026
DOI:
10.11648/j.ijls.20260904.19
Downloads:
Views:
Abstract: The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) was established on January 16, 2002, pursuant to an agreement signed by the United Nations (UN) and the Government of Sierra Leone with a mandate to prosecute persons who bore the greatest responsibility for serious crimes which were committed during the ten years armed conflict in Sierra Leone. The court officially closed in December 2013 and transferred its residual functions to the Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone (RSCSL). The RSCSL and its partners organized a legacy conference in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the seat of the Special Court, from 25-28 February 2024 to “Raise Awareness of the Contributions of the Special Court for Sierra Leone to International Justice, Peace and Security”. The conference was attended by over 300 participants across the continent of Africa and different parts of the world. Participants included judges, legal experts, victims across legal cultures in Africa and other courts and tribunals; representatives of international organisations, the diplomatic corps, lawyers, politicians, academics, present and former staff of the court. The Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission which operated side by side the SCSL and cultural mechanisms of justice were present at the conference. The Special Court experiment was a mix-bag of sterling successes, institutional challenges and innovations. From a conceptual and organizational perspective, the court set achievable standard-setting objectives without adequate resources to realize them. Nevertheless, the determination of victims and affected communities, often mischaracterised in some conflict situations as faceless actors in the theatre of war, led the court to success. This article highlights some of the challenges which the court encountered, successes which were recorded, innovations which were made, and the promises of hope that lie ahead. The paper examines African situations and victims ‘whose international criminal justice? problem which has come up in different forms before international criminal courts and tribunals. The paper discusses the problem and the solution which was provided by the Special Court and highlights the complementarity role of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone and cultural mechanisms which enhanced popular participation, collaboration, success and the credibility of the court.
Abstract: The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) was established on January 16, 2002, pursuant to an agreement signed by the United Nations (UN) and the Government of Sierra Leone with a mandate to prosecute persons who bore the greatest responsibility for serious crimes which were committed during the ten years armed conflict in Sierra Leone. The court o...
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