The Year in Law 2025: Organised Crime, Algorithmic Transparency, and Climate Justice

Introduction

The year 2025 was marked by legal developments that, while diverse in place and subject, shared a common thread: the law’s ongoing struggle to keep pace with a rapidly changing world. Across jurisdictions and doctrinal fields, courts and legislators confronted a recurring question: whether our legal institutions remain adequately agile in order to address problems increasingly shaped by technological innovation, geopolitical instability, and the consequences of shifting policy choices. The answer, as the cases examined in this 2025 Commentary Issue suggest, is far from settled.

On a macro level, the broader context in which these legal developments unfolded was one of extraordinary turbulence. Armed conflicts caused devastating humanitarian tolls, most acutely in the Middle East, where the International Court of Justice was called upon not only to address state obligations on climate change but also, in October 2025, to deliver an advisory opinion concluding that the blocking of humanitarian aid to Gaza violated international law.¹ Global trade was disrupted by an escalating tariff regime introduced by the United States, with nearly half of all goods entering the country subject to new duties by the end of the year and the legality of many of these measures being challenged before the US Supreme Court.² The multilateral order found itself under strain, as binding international obligations were increasingly treated as optional and evidence-based findings by courts and UN bodies were dismissed or politically reframed.³ Against this backdrop of institutional stress and geopolitical fragmentation, it remains imperative for us to keep up with current global legal developments across different areas of law to uphold the legitimacy and primacy of the law.

On a more local level, attention shifted to a series of high-profile proceedings in domestic courts. In the United Kingdom, scrutiny focused on cases such as the Kneecap prosecution in London’s High Court as well as the proscribing of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. The Kneecap case, involving a member of the Belfast rap group accused of terrorism-related charges for allegedly displaying a Hezbollah flag during a gig, drew attention to how artistic expression and political speech can be cast as encouraging or glorifying terrorism.⁴ The Palestine Action case saw efforts by the UK government to declare the direct-action group a “proscribed organisation” under the Terrorism Act 2000, alleging their actions caused, or were intended to cause, significant criminal damage and impacted national security.⁵ Together, these cases have come to symbolise a broader tension in UK law: the extent to which expansive terrorism-related powers can be applied to activists and artists, and whether such applications risk blurring the line between activism and criminality. The UK courts were further tasked with settling legal tensions in the case of For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers, where the Supreme Court ruled that, under the Equality Act 2010, the legal definition of a “woman” is grounded in biological sex, an interpretation with far-reaching implications for equality law and trans rights.⁶

Moving across the Atlantic, the United States continued to follow pre-trial developments in US v Luigi Mangione, arising from the murder of a United Healthcare CEO, a case that remains ongoing and emblematic of broader debates around corporate power and criminal accountability.⁷ Meanwhile, in France, former President Nicolas Sarkozy remained in the spotlight: having been convicted of criminal conspiracy linked to illegal campaign financing, he was released in November 2025 after serving just three weeks of a five-year sentence, pending appeal.

In the EU more broadly, the regulatory landscape was transformed by the phased implementation of the Artificial Intelligence Act, the world’s first comprehensive legal framework for AI.⁸ Its adoption concluded a debate that had been building about how to balance the benefits of automated decision-making against the risks it poses to fundamental rights, non-discrimination, and procedural fairness. Yet even as this landmark legislation took effect, its practical implications remained deeply uncertain as the relationship between the AI Act’s transparency obligations and pre-existing GDPR rights had to be reconciled.⁹ It was precisely this gap that the Court of Justice of the European Union was called upon to address in its February 2025 ruling in CK v Dun & Bradstreet, where it considered what constitutes a “meaningful explanation” of algorithmic decision-making under Article 15(1)(h) GDPR.

Technological change was not only a matter for regulators. Within the criminal law domain, sophisticated digital tools have been utilised by criminal organisations. The FBI’s October 2025 decision to unseal an indictment involving a high-tech fraud scheme tied to illegal gambling challenged the common belief that the American Mafia belongs to the past. The operation involved members of La Cosa Nostra (LCN) families, professional athletes, and technology providers. Rather than showing an outdated criminal organisation, the case revealed how traditional crime networks continue to adapt by using modern tools such as X-ray card readers, barcoded decks, and cryptocurrency laundering. It suggests that technology and organised crime are not moving in separate directions, but evolving together.

Perhaps the most far-reaching legal development of 2025, however, occurred in the field of international climate law. On 23 July 2025, the International Court of Justice delivered a landmark advisory opinion on the obligations of states in respect of climate change, responding to a request initiated by the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu and adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2023.¹⁰ The Court determined that the 1.5°C temperature target under the Paris Agreement is legally binding, and that customary international law imposes a duty on states to prevent significant harm to the climate system. The opinion signals a potential shift in climate jurisprudence, providing litigants worldwide with substantially strengthened legal tools. The impact was immediately visible: in December 2025, 452 Japanese citizens filed a tort case against their government for inadequate climate measures, invoking the ICJ opinion directly.

These developments in algorithmic governance, organised crime, and climate accountability may appear at first glance to have little in common, yet they share a deeper structural similarity. In each instance, existing legal frameworks have been put to the challenge: between the physical and the digital, national versus transnational, and individual rights versus collective harms. This 2025 Commentary Issue of the Tilburg Law Review brings together three contributions that examine these developments in detail.

The Contributions

This Issue opens with a commentary by Ernesto Ugo Savona and Michael Victor Lo Giudice on the FBI’s 2025 indictment in US v. Aiello et al.¹¹ The authors dissect the rigged-poker scheme at the heart of the case, map the roles played by the various actors, including La Cosa Nostra (LCN) members, technology providers, and professional athletes. The authors consider what the indictment reveals about the contemporary structure and strategies of LCN. Their analysis suggests that, rather than disappearing, the five families have undergone an adaptive transformation.

Annelieke Mooij’s contribution examines the CJEU’s 2025 ruling in CK v. Dun & Bradstreet and the unresolved question of what constitutes a “meaningful explanation” of automated decision-making under the GDPR.¹² Drawing on computer science literature and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology’s framework for the perspective on “meaningful” explanation, Mooij proposes concrete criteria that could give substance to the Court’s standard. She also traces the risks of transparency, including gaming and adversarial attacks, and considers the judgment’s wider implications for the interpretation of the AI Act and for national administrative law, including Dutch jurisprudence on algorithmic tools in environmental regulation.

The Issue closes with Masako Ichihara’s commentary on Japan’s Climate Justice Case, a tort action filed in December 2025 by 452 plaintiffs against the Japanese government.¹³ Ichihara situates the case within the trajectory of Japan’s climate litigation, comparing it with five prior lawsuits that all ended in dismissal. The author highlights distinctive features of the case: its reliance on the ICJ’s advisory opinion, its open-access model of plaintiff recruitment, and its deliberate orientation toward public engagement. The commentary also identifies the challenge of maintaining cohesion among a large and loosely organised group of plaintiffs during what will likely to be a lengthy and drawn-out legal process.

Concluding Reflections

Read together, these contributions illuminate a set of tensions that involve different legal systems and doctrinal boundaries. Each raises questions about transparency and accountability: the transparency of criminal networks to law enforcement, the transparency of algorithmic processes to data subjects, and the transparency of state climate policy to affected citizens. And each demonstrates that the law’s responses in 2025 were tentative rather than definitive, perhaps raising more questions than they answered. This tentativeness is not a weakness, however, as it reflects the reality that the legal challenges posed by technological advancements, adaptive criminality, and the climate crisis are not resolved easily. This issue demonstrates that courts, legislators, and citizens across jurisdictions are engaged in the slow, iterative work of developing institutional responses to “wicked problems” that the coming decades will require.¹⁴

Looking forward to 2026, much is already on the agenda: the capture and trial of Nicolás Maduro;¹⁵ the continuing US-Israel conflict with multiple states in the Middle East, alongside disruption in the Strait of Hormuz and global fuel shortages; the arresting and charging of former Australian soldier Ben Roberts-Smith on five war crime murder charges relating to Afghanistan;¹⁶ the legal fallout from an EU top court ruling that Hungary’s anti-LGBTQ laws breach core European Union values and equality protections;¹⁷ confirmation that former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte is to stand trial before the International Criminal Court;¹⁸ and the implementation of the European Union Pact on Migration and Asylum. If the 2025 commentaries have demonstrated law’s increasing entanglement with complex social issues, 2026 promises to test further the capacity of our legal institutions to respond to the world’s wicked problems.