Search Results (120)

This article analyses the Italian Legislative Delegation Bill of 4 September 2025 (DDL 2025), which proposes the recontextualization of healthcare liability through the introduction of Article 590-septies into the Italian Criminal Code (c.p.) and the amendment of Article 590-sexies c.p. and of Articles 5 and 7 of the Gelli-Bianco Act (Law No. 24/2017). The study examines the extent to which the reform, if enacted, would produce a shift of criminal negligence liability from the individual frontline clinician towards the apex management figures of healthcare organizations—at both the corporate and hospital levels—and under what conditions such a shift would be compatible with the constitutional principle of personal criminal responsibility (Art. 27 Const.) and with the evidentiary criteria for criminally relevant omission. Adopting a doctrinal and jurisprudential analysis approach, the study formulates a falsifiable hypothesis, accompanied by four ex post verifiability indicators observable over a five-year time horizon following the possible entry into force of the provision. The analysis demonstrates how the DDL 2025 would recontextualize the notion of culpa—encompassing imperizia (lack of skill), negligenza (negligence), and imprudenza (imprudence), functionally comparable to forms of criminal negligence in common law systems—by linking fault assessment to contextual factors such as organizational deficiencies and resource scarcity. This approach would adopt a deflationary framework, establishing a distinction between avoidable human error and errors caused by systemic dysfunctions and foreshadowing a potential shift of liability towards apex management, who are required to ensure organizational models adequate to patient safety. This orientation, far from constituting a doctrinal novelty, would formalize ex lege a trajectory already established in civil and criminal case law of the Court of Cassation (Cass. No. 6386/2023, “Travaglino”), further intersecting with the administrative liability regime for organizations under Legislative Decree 231/2001. Significant interpretive challenges remain, related to the application of criminal liability criteria to the omissive conduct of healthcare managers, as well as to the contrasting international evidence on the behavioural effectiveness of medical liability reforms. The redefinition of top-management liability would therefore be configured not merely as a tool for the protection of the individual professional but as a derived constitutional guarantee of the right to health and the safety of care, pursued through formalized risk governance, the integration of incident reporting and organizational audit systems, the transition towards Enterprise Risk Management models, and the traceability of apex decision-making processes. Examples drawn from other European jurisdictions illustrate the heterogeneity of legal approaches to medical fault and frame the Italian proposal as a context-specific solution that nonetheless could contribute to the international debate on institutional and organizational accountability for patient safety. Full article

The article examines how recent developments in EU copyright law affect Slovenian legislation. The Slovenian system of collective management of copyright and related rights is currently under scrutiny by the European Commission, which has initiated infringement proceedings for failure to correctly apply the InfoSoc Directive and the Collective Rights Management Directive. The forthcoming Streamz decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union, initiated by the Belgian Constitutional Court, may further influence Slovenian copyright rules, given that both Slovenia and Belgium have implemented the Digital Single Market Directive by similar means. A pressing issue in Slovenian copyright law—recently addressed by the Higher Court of Ljubljana—concerns the collection, management, and distribution of the private copying levy as a permissible limitation to exclusive authors’ rights under the InfoSoc Directive. A thorough analysis of these issues reveals a complex interplay between EU and national law regarding the collective management of exclusive authors’ rights and various remuneration rights. Adopting a legal-dogmatic approach and applying textual, purposive, systematic and comparative legal methods, the article provides an overview of Slovenia’s copyright protection system, identifies potential incompatibilities with EU law, and proposes legislative solutions. Full article

Silk fabrics and caftans preserved in the Topkapı Palace Museum collection constitute a distinguished group of cultural heritage objects reflecting the advanced weaving technologies, refined metal-thread use, and sophisticated natural dyeing practices of Ottoman court textile production. In this study, selected ceremonial caftans attributed to five Ottoman sultans were examined through a multidisciplinary and multi-analytical approach to characterize their structural, chromatic, and chemical properties. Color characteristics were evaluated in the CIE L*a*b* color space, while yarn properties, weave structures, and production techniques were investigated by optical microscopy. The morphology and elemental composition of the metal threads were analyzed using scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM–EDX), and dyestuffs were identified by high-performance liquid chromatography with diode-array detection (HPLC–DAD). The results show that compound silk weaving structures were widely used in Ottoman court textiles, metal threads were predominantly silver-based and often gold-gilded, and dyestuffs with high fastness properties were preferentially selected. The revised manuscript situates these findings within a broader international literature on historical textile analysis and natural dye characterization, while using only a limited number of directly relevant studies from the authors’ previous work. The present study therefore provides new, object-specific and comparable data for the scientific documentation, material characterization, and conservation-oriented understanding of Ottoman textile heritage. Full article

Legal advocacy for parents involved in the public child welfare system in the United States is typically initiated only after a child has been removed and a dependency petition has been filed. For infants, removal at or shortly after birth constitutes a profound disruption of the parent–child attachment relationship and is increasingly recognized as an adverse childhood experience. This paper focuses on a summative program evaluation of the Family Intervention Response to Stop Trauma (FIRST) Legal Clinic in Washington State, a prevention-oriented model providing free, confidential legal advocacy and peer support to pregnant and postpartum parents prior to Child Protective Services (CPS) investigation or court involvement. Administrative data from 2019 to 2025 for 1232 eligible families were utilized to examine eligibility and referral patterns, reasons for ineligibility, and case outcomes. Findings demonstrated that eligible families with known outcomes avoided dependency court involvement entirely or experienced case closure without child removal, while a smaller proportion proceeded to dependency court filings. These findings highlight the need to reduce unnecessary child welfare system entry and mitigate traumatic disruption of the parent–child attachment relationship at birth by providing legal advocacy before investigation and court involvement. Full article

For two millennia, scholarship on the Zhuangzi has extracted doctrines, analyzed concepts, and dissected arguments, all of which is valuable and necessary. But in doing so, it has lost something essential: that these words are spoken by someone, that they emerge from lives, and that they belong to figures who appear, disappear, and reappear across textual landscapes. This study restores the drama to the doctrines by tracking a single name. Ziqi appears across eight chapters of the Zhuangzi as Nanguo Ziqi, Nanbo Ziqi, Nanbo Zikui, Dongguo Ziqi, Sima Ziqi, and simply Ziqi. His name wanders. Following him through caves, courts, scenes of instruction, vertiginous spirals into pity, armrest reveries, drunken collapses under trees, family picnics, and palaces of nothing whatsoever, this paper uncovers what a purely doctrinal approach cannot: that the philosophy of the Zhuangzi is inseparable from the lives that live it. Ziqi is not just a mouthpiece who robotically voices the abstract proposition “I lost myself” but a figure whose journey through the text gives those words their weight. More than illustrating doctrines, his journey creates the philosophy and constitutes its meaning. By reading Ziqi across his eight appearances and their variations, this study offers a model for reading the Zhuangzi as a textured literary world in which figures wander, words spill over, and meaning is made through the lives that live it. Full article

Recent Italian developments in end-of-life governance have intensified debate on self-determination, medically assisted suicide, and the constitutional limits of healthcare regulation. This article is a narrative review combined with doctrinal legal analysis and medico-legal commentary. It examines Tuscany’s Regional Law No. 16 of 14 March 2025 within the broader Italian framework shaped by Law No. 219/2017, Constitutional Court Judgment No. 242/2019, and the subsequent constitutional review culminating in Judgment No. 204/2025. The article pursues three aims: to reconstruct the national legal framework governing end-of-life decision-making in Italy; to analyse the structure and constitutional implications of the Tuscan statute; and to assess the medico-legal relevance of the persistent uncertainty surrounding life-sustaining treatments as an eligibility criterion. The analysis highlights two distinct but interconnected issues: the constitutional boundary between regional healthcare organisation and matters requiring nationally uniform safeguards, and the unresolved interpretation of life-sustaining treatments in clinical and legal practice. In light of Judgment No. 204/2025, the article argues that regional procedural intervention may reduce administrative uncertainty, but cannot replace coherent parliamentary legislation capable of clarifying substantive criteria, limiting territorial variability, and reinforcing the role of palliative care within end-of-life pathways. Full article

The recognition of a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right has reshaped global human rights discourse, yet its operationalisation remains uneven. This article examines how the African human rights system which is uniquely grounded in collective rights, has reframed environmental protection as a constitutive element of development, sovereignty, and justice. Through doctrinal and case-law analysis, it traces the evolution from the African Commission’s foundational jurisprudence in SERAC, which extended state duties to the regulation of private and transnational corporate actors, to the African Court’s landmark judgment in LIDHO v. Côte d’Ivoire. The study demonstrates how the Court transforms the aspirational ‘greening’ of human rights into binding obligations by articulating a robust duty of vigilance and linking environmental harm to violations of the rights to life, health, and development. It further shows that LIDHO inaugurates a post-sovereign model of shared and polycentric responsibility, in which state accountability encompasses corporate conduct within their jurisdiction and, potentially, beyond it. The article concludes that the African Charter’s collective framework offers an implicit regional model of ecological justice, one capable of addressing extractive asymmetries and informing emerging climate-related obligations across the continent. Full article

The Ottoman Empire possessed a multi-religious social structure whose continuity was maintained through legal and administrative mechanisms. While Muslims, Christians, and Jews preserved their religious identities within the imperial framework, conversion was a closely monitored and regulated process at both the individual and public levels. Because religious conversion had direct consequences for taxation, legal and social status, family structure, and communal affiliation, it became a matter of concern for the Ottoman legal order. In this context, the sharia courts constituted the primary institutional arena in which cases of ihtidā (conversion) were recorded, supervised, and given legal effect; they also produced the principal documentation that verified the procedural validity of conversion and secured the legal standing of new Muslims. This study examines the social and legal contexts of religious conversion in the Ottoman provinces through cases recorded in the sixteenth- to nineteenth-century court registers of the district of Rodosçuk. It challenges interpretations that portray ihtidā as a coercive and one-directional policy of Islamization, demonstrating instead that legal protection and economic opportunity could function both as outcomes of conversion and as enabling preconditions. The study also questions assumptions about systematic judicial bias against non-Muslims, emphasizing that in the Rodosçuk example the courts operated as a neutral forum accessible to different confessional communities. The evidence suggests that conversion unfolded through slow, gradual, and largely individual processes shaped by the combined influence of religious, economic, and social motivations. Full article

This article examines how political journalism can distinguish itself in a fast-paced information environment by providing in-depth contextualization and thereby contribute to the functioning of democratic societies in a digitalized world. Focusing on the ‘Causa Brosius-Gersdorf’—a highly polarized controversy surrounding judicial appointments to Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court in July 2025—we ask the following questions: to what extent can German-language podcasts offer in-depth analysis, and which types of contextualization can be observed across different podcast formats? The study is based on a qualitative content analysis of 39 episodes from 15 popular podcasts drawn from the German Spotify Top 200. Drawing on a theoretically grounded analytical framework comprising the categories ‘topics’, ‘dimensions of context’, and ‘relational levels’, we identify distinct types of contextualization. We analyze the distribution of these types using distant reading and interpret salient patterns through close reading. Our results show that the podcasts analyzed offer an in-depth contextualization of the issue, with a focus on political and societal evaluation. In doing so, they provide their audiences with orientation and therefore enable them to form their own well-founded opinions. Since we conducted our analysis at the level of individual statements rather than at the level of the news items themselves, our study advances research on quality in journalism, highlights the role of podcasts in digital transformation, and addresses the democratic value of contextualizing political communication. Full article

This article analyzes the governance of religious diversity in public employment through the study of Quebec’s Bill 21. It examines how the State uses neutrality to manage religious symbols, focusing on implications for pluralism and fundamental rights within democratic governance frameworks and diversity regulation in plural societies. It situates Bill 21 within Quebec’s longer legal and political trajectory, marked by failed legislative attempts, recourse to the “notwithstanding clause,” and deep social polarisation around the construction of a francophone, secular identity. Methodologically, the study combines doctrinal analysis of Canadian constitutional law with a detailed examination of European Court of Human Rights and Court of Justice of the European Union case law, as well as a critical discussion of the Bouchard–Taylor Commission’s model of “open secularism” and later reinterpretations by Bouchard, Taylor and Maclure. The article finds that Quebec’s lawmakers selectively invoke European jurisprudence and the language of neutrality to justify far-reaching restrictions on visible religious symbols, especially for officials with coercive powers such as judges, police and prison staff, in ways that go beyond typical European practice. It argues that equating impartiality with an appearance of strict neutrality reflects the cultural assumptions of the majority and produces discriminatory effects on religious minorities, limiting both freedom of religion and equal access to public employment. The conclusion contends that neutrality should be assessed primarily through officials’ conduct rather than their appearance and that more inclusive models of secularism—grounded in open secularism and reasonable accommodation—offer better tools for reconciling State neutrality, pluralism and fundamental rights. Full article

Pedestrian crashes cause the most injuries of all types of traffic crashes. Despite their direct judicial and societal impact, the automatic classification of legal responsibility remains largely unexplored. This work addresses this gap by formulating the responsibility assessment problem as a supervised multi-class classification task and proposing a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) based decision-support system. The objective is to establish the basis for a “robot judge” application that assists the Judicial Traffic Police (JTP), Courts, and Prosecutors in identifying cases with a clear level of responsibility in pedestrian crashes. This study draws on real-world data from reports by the Local Police of Badajoz (LPB) and Spanish Judiciary (SJ) judicial decisions. After rigorous data preprocessing, 14 meaningful binary variables were identified. The level of responsibility in a pedestrian crash depends on these 14 variables, which constitute the feature space used to model responsibility as a five-category output variable. We were able to reclassify the categories of each pedestrian crash and improve the metrics using the MLP model. More precise levels of responsibility could be determined. This would help the JPT and the Courts make more efficient and objective final decisions in similar cases. It would also enable them to focus their efforts on more complex cases requiring further investigation by human specialists. In turn, policymakers could take new measures to reduce pedestrian crashes by analyzing influential variables. Full article

The Belgian constitution establishes that communities shall dispense neutral teaching that also respects both religious convictions and non-denominational philosophical choices. The application of this article has led to several conflicts with the religiosity of parents and students, among which one stands out eminently: the prohibition of the Islamic headscarf in schools in Flanders and Wallonia. It is precisely in the first of these communities, Flanders, where the collisions between the principle of neutrality and the religious freedom of Muslim women who intend to continue wearing this religious symbol continue to be reproduced, not only for reasons of religiosity, but also of identity. Signally, one of the main problems lies in the difficulties in delimiting the extension of the concept of neutrality as a limit to religious freedom, a task in which there does not seem to be agreement, neither among the main agents of the education system nor even among the courts of justice of the community. The best proof of this are the last two developments in the matter, the European Court of Human Right judgment in the Mykias case and the unsuccessful attempt to ban the Islamic veil in the province of Flanders. Full article

This study evaluates the effectiveness of Jordan’s judiciary in overseeing electoral appeals within the framework of a constitutional monarchy. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, it combines doctrinal legal analysis of key constitutional provisions and Election Law No. 4 of 2022 with a comparative examination of electoral adjudication in Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon. The study is further strengthened by a structured content analysis of 120 appellate rulings issued between 2015 and 2023 and by qualitative insights drawn from anonymized interviews with judicial personnel engaged in electoral dispute resolution. Although Jordan’s legal framework formally empowers the judiciary to adjudicate electoral disputes, five structural limitations persist: narrow standing rules, rigid evidentiary thresholds, judicial reluctance to exercise investigatory powers, opaque reasoning in judgments, and the absence of specialized electoral courts. These constraints reflect systemic tensions between formal judicial independence and the realities of constrained discretion in hybrid regimes. An empirical analysis of 127 Jordanian electoral appeal cases from 2013 to 2020 reveals that a mere 7% of disputed electoral outcomes were overturned, whereas 73% of allegations were disregarded due to insufficient evidence. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that only 31% of rulings were publicly accessible, in stark contrast to the 89% accessibility rate observed in Tunisia. By identifying and addressing these systemic limitations, the study contributes to ongoing discourse on institutional reform and democratic resilience. In doing so, it underscores the importance of robust electoral justice mechanisms for sustaining public trust, rule of law, and inclusive governance—principles central to political and institutional sustainability as reflected in Sustainable Development Goal 16. Full article

Background: Adapted exercise and adapted sport are proven, low-cost interventions for chronic disease prevention, management, and social inclusion. However, in Italy, neither is explicitly included in the Livelli Essenziali di Assistenza (LEA; nationally guaranteed essential healthcare services), creating unequal access, fragmented governance, and unstable funding. Provision remains largely dependent on regional schemes such as Palestre della Salute and Attività Fisica Adattata (AFA). Methods: We conducted a narrative review integrating evidence from international guidelines, systematic reviews, and key Italian legislative reforms (Legislative Decrees n. 36/2021, 163/2022, 120/2023). We also examined policy frameworks from Germany, Sweden, and Norway to identify transferable components that could support the development of a nationally guaranteed, rights-based system for adapted exercise and adapted sport. Results: Consistent evidence shows that adapted exercise improves functional capacity, quality of life, and clinical outcomes while reducing hospitalizations and healthcare expenditures. Adapted sport further enhances psychosocial well-being, inclusion, and participation among people with disabilities. Based on this evidence, we outline a legal-policy framework for LEA integration that places the chinesiologo at the center of multidisciplinary health teams, defines national standards for assessment, individualized programming, and monitoring, and introduces accreditation mechanisms for facilities and professionals. A blended financing approach is proposed, combining National Health Service (SSN) coverage with income-adjusted co-payments and targeted public–private partnerships. Conclusions: Explicit LEA inclusion of adapted exercise and adapted sport would translate scientific evidence into enforceable rights of health citizenship and ensure uniform national provision, in line with constitutional principles affirmed by the Italian Court. Such reform would strengthen prevention and chronic-disease management and institutionalize the role of the chinesiologo within the SSN through nationally standardized yet regionally adaptable delivery models. Full article

This article examines the sacred narrative traditions surrounding Nūr Atā, a small town in present-day Uzbekistan, to explore how Muslim communities in Central Asia expressed their religious history. Drawing on seven manuscripts preserved at the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent, six in Persian and one in Turkic, the study identifies two distinct traditions that portray the town’s sanctity through prophetic miracle stories, hadith transmission chains, and Sufi cosmology. It explores how narrative form, linguistic variation, and intertextual references shape distinct devotional and historiographical claims. The topics addressed include the relationship between sacred narrative and historiography, the role of ritual practice in sacralizing space, and the textual transmission of spiritual authority. The sacred history of Nūr Atā offers a compelling vision of the town’s religious significance, communicated through both the content and structure of its narratives. These accounts position the town not merely as a local pilgrimage site but as a locus of divine favor embedded within the sacred geography of Islam. By linking the Prophet’s Miʿrāj, angelic testimony, and Sufi initiatic traditions to the landscape of Nūr Atā, the texts construct a genealogy of sanctity that aligns the local with the universal. In doing so, they articulate a vision of communal identity rooted in divine election, prophetic blessing, and spiritual legitimacy. The case of Nūr Atā thus underscores the need to treat sacred narratives, pilgrimage guides, and genealogical traditions as forms of historiography in their own right. These sources do not merely supplement court chronicles or administrative histories; they constitute vital modes through which Central Asian Muslim communities preserved collective memory, asserted religious authority, and inscribed themselves within the broader landscape of the Islamic world. Full article