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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
DOI:
10.11648/j.ijls.20260904.13
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Views:
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
DOI:
10.11648/j.ijls.20260904.14
Downloads:
Views:
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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