bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
From Eco-Anxiety to Eco-Resilience
Authors: Buzzell Linda , Chalquist Craig
Published: October 2022

“Eco-anxiety” is the now-popular term for realistic fear in the face of multiple collective ecological crises, from contagions to climate change and many others. All share the disruption of our delusion of being separate from and superior to the natural world. Every crisis shakes this delusion even as it destabilizes individuals and communities left without adequate governmental or societal support, forcing us to find our own resources. This chapter lays out a blueprint for “eco-resilience”: the craft and science of enduring and even flourishing in a time of ongoing cycles of stress. This blueprint combines practices and ideas from many fields and areas of life to offer practical means of personal and communal adaptation in a context of Fourfold Caring: care of self, of others, of Earth, and of imagination.
The Complex Role of Anxiety in Public Engagement
Authors: Rocque Rhéa , Cameron Laura , Mauro Ian
Published: October 2022

Research in psychology suggests that to move people toward action on societal challenges, moderate feelings of anxiety may be optimal, accompanied by clear, simple, and accessible instructions of ways individuals can take action. The complex and intersecting crises of COVID-19 and climate change provide a unique opportunity for exploring the relationship between anxiety and action. Drawing on literature from the fields of climate change psychology and climate communications, this chapter provides a critical analysis of the parallels and divergences between the COVID-19 pandemic and the issue of climate change with regards to anxiety and public engagement for action. Various attributes of both crises, such as psychological distance, sensorial limitations, and personal and collective efficacy beliefs, are discussed as important areas of comparison.
Behavior Change During COVID-19
Authors: Garivaldis Filia , Iqbal Muhammad
Published: October 2022

This chapter discusses the human response to the global crisis that is COVID-19, in the context of behavior change, drawing on relevant evidence from research and theory to demonstrate how it is that in the current crisis humans are facing a threat to their way of life. The authors argue that the intuitive response to this threat interferes with common sense and the ability to do the right thing, and further challenges the notion that humans are rational and logical in their decision-making. Suggestions are made to mitigate feelings of threat at an individual and societal level, including the need for social policies that condemn social behaviors that fuel rather than stifle anxiety, and the application of evidence-based approaches to how the byproducts of threat can be circumvented.
Adapting to Eco-Anxiety
Authors: Moonga Fred
Published: October 2022

Based on a literature review of climate change, mental health, globalization, and case studies, as well as the author’s experience of living in rural communities, this chapter analyzes the anxiety brought about by climate change among rural communities in Zambia, which are predominantly reliant on agriculture, and how people there adapt to these changes. The author argues that while climate change causes anxiety among humans, their own impact on nature contributes a great deal to these changes. Thus, to reduce climatic changes and their effects, humans’ negative actions on nature need to be controlled. The chapter ends with suggestions on future research and measures to alleviate pathologies associated with climate change.
Psychiatric Ward Lockdown in Latin America
Authors: Buitrago Juan Evangelista Tercero Gaitán
Published: October 2022

This chapter covers the pandemic’s effect on mental healthcare in three Latin American countries: Colombia, Argentina and Perú. The author details the preventive lockdown of a specialized psychiatric hospital in Colombia, and also describes the experiences of both psychiatrists and general practitioners in the transition from an open psychiatric ward to a strictly quarantined service, meant for the containment of a possible COVID-19 outbreak in a service with had no specialized experience dealing with epidemics or infectious outbreaks. Also describes the emotional response from the frontline clinicians versus the changes defined by the administrative team, and the challenges that sudden, unplanned global events have on local psychiatric services.
Sounding the Environmental Benefits of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Southern Nigeria
Authors: Titus Olusegun Stephen
Published: October 2022

This chapter provides a musical analysis of the benefits of COVID-19 on the climate and environmental sustainability in southern Nigeria. This chapter seeks to contribute to the discourse on climate change, environmental degradation, and the need for sustainability with reference to the global coronavirus pandemic and isolationism. This chapter employs phone interviews and WhatsApp calls and messages as methods for gathering musical, textual, and video data for analysis of selected musicians. Drawing on the concept of slow violence and environmentalism of the poor and informed by ecomusicological theory, the author argues that music has potential to explain current environmental issues as well as the restoration of environmental sustainability through global isolationism and reduced air travel and industrial pollution.
The Whole and the Parts, 1789–1790
Authors: Covo Manuel
Published: October 2022

This chapter shows how the cracks in the political economic system reached a crisis. The political divisions in Saint-Domingue moved to Paris where they met the French Revolution and exploded. A multiplicity of colonial lobbies debated over the new definition of the French Empire after July 1789. The chapter ends by moving back to the colonies where the planter assemblies had become radicalized. The compromise between planters and merchants brokered in France immediately collapsed in the face of intransigent colonial whites, and violence broke out. Divided into cliques, economic interests, and diverging political options, the white society of Saint-Domingue fragmented to a point that no unity was ever feasible. The exclusif may have been the first bone of contention, but the issue of race was even more divisive.
The Atlantic Politics of Commercial Republicanism, 1793–1794
Authors: Covo Manuel
Published: October 2022

How would revolutionary France square its friendship with an independent United States with its need to preserve the colonial system? The solution was “commercial republicanism.” Formulated after war broke out between France and Britain in 1793, this conciliation of economic power and republicanism would place Saint-Domingue on a legal parity with France, secure the freedom of the seas for Saint-Domingue colonists and U.S. allies, and regenerate the French nation. That project failed because the United States moved away, in political terms, from its French alliance toward neutrality, and embraced, in commercial terms, its older and stronger relationship with Britain in the Jay Treaty of 1794–1795. While debate on the “liberty of commerce” mostly preoccupied a small minority of experts in Paris and London, it provoked a major democratic crisis in the United States and contributed to the embryonic bipolarization of party politics.
The Unfree Trade of an Abolitionist Colony, 1793–1796
Authors: Covo Manuel
Published: October 2022

This chapter discusses how the breakdown of the colonial system almost entirely isolated Saint-Domingue from the French metropole. The French authorities in San Domingue adapted and sometimes ignored directions from the metropole, which were regarded as out of step with the current situation. In fact, the exceptional powers of the civil commission were a response to the disintegrating French imperial state, which was far from a well-oiled machine. The colony was increasingly dependent on the United States for provisions. American traders, however, were turning the failure of their commercial transactions into a diplomatic crisis, while the colonial administration was explicitly defining itself as a “large landowner” and “merchant house.” The imbalance of this commercial and political partnership laid the foundations for a new crisis.
A Neopolitical Turn
Authors: Wallace Jeremy L.
Published: October 2022

China’s leaders are reshaping the country’s politics and economy through massive efforts on anticorruption, centralization, repression, and rhetoric focused on narratives of the Party as the champion of a strong Chinese nation. Major debates about regime identity dominated discussions of the failures of limited, quantified vision. Xi Jinping’s early days demonstrate the incremental and tentative nature of such changes and interpretations of them. The turn takes the Chinese regime beyond its limited, quantified vision in two ways. First, rather than simply technical issues, the regime under Xi presents a messy, conflictual picture with failures and enemies, but also depicts itself as guided by a strong leader who can helm the ship of state amid the turbulence. Second, the regime is massively expanding the information that it collects and monitors about its own agents as well as society, notably through its social credit system.
Poland and Hungary
Authors: Uslaner Eric M.
Published: October 2022

Hungary and Poland were formerly ruled by Communist governments imposed by the Soviet Union. Both had long histories of their own culture, based upon ethnic heritage and religion. Once Communism was overthrown, both had brief periods of liberal democracy. The countries did not have a long history of democratic values and viewed immigrants as threats to their lineage. The ruling parties now favor exclusivist national identities but generous support for people of their own blood lines. They worry that people who are not of their ethnicity or religion threaten their historic cultures and have taken actions to restrict the rights of Muslims, Jews, and gays and lesbians.
Introduction
Authors: Kaimal Girija
Published: October 2022

Using the metaphor of a journey, in this introductory chapter I offer an overview and guide map for the book including the content of the main four sections. In addition, I share my personal motivations and journey in the writing this book.
Tracking creative self-expression through imaging tools
Authors: Kaimal Girija
Published: October 2022

This chapter discusses ways in which art-making is associated with creative self-expression, health, and well-being, as measured using imaging techniques that assess physiological changes in the brain. There is emerging evidence on how creative expression changes the structure and function of the brain, derived by studies mapping its activation. Most imaging studies tend to involve receptive experiences of viewing visual art, but there is a small body of literature on the impacts of creative self-expression. This chapter focuses on what we know from brain imaging studies on the impact of visual self-expression, including emerging evidence on how it promotes health and well-being.
Beyond Debt
Authors: Pirngruber Reinhard
Published: October 2022

This contribution attempts to elucidate the potential implications of David Graeber’s influential oeuvre for the study of the ancient Near Eastern economy. In particular, it investigates how Graeber’s reconceptualization of social interaction into the three categories of baseline communism, hierarchy, and exchange can help with questions of social norms and actual as well as expected behavior. These informal rules decisively shape the institutional framework underlying any economy; yet, in spite of their relevance, they have not been adequately studied. By means of a historicizing reading of ancient Babylonian texts belonging to various literary genres—fables, proverbs, wisdom literature—the author hopes to provide insight into ethical considerations on the normative level. These results will then be contrasted with actual economic practice according to letters and archival texts from the mid-first millennium bce.
Qualitative Interviewing
Authors: Brinkmann Svend
Published: October 2022

Qualitative interviewing has today become one of the most common research methods across the human and social sciences, if not the most prevalent approach, but it is an approach that comes in a huge amount of different guises. Qualitative Interviewing will help its readers conduct, write, represent, understand, and critique qualitative interview research in its many forms as currently practiced. This book does not simply tell its reader how to employ a method, but educates by showing and discussing excellent exemplars of qualitative interview research. The book begins with a theoretically informed introduction to qualitative interviewing by presenting a variegated landscape of how conversations have been used for knowledge producing purposes. Particular attention is given to the complementary positions of experience focused interviewing (phenomenological positions) and language-focused interviewing (discourse-oriented positions), which focus on interview talk as reports (of the experiences of interviewees) and accounts (occasioned by the situation of interviewing), respectively. The following chapters address different ways of designing and conducting qualitative interview studies and how to write up the methodological procedures of an interview study and also the research findings. The book finally discusses a number of the most common errors in interview reports and offers a range of solutions and also strategies for evaluating research findings based on qualitative interviews.
Discussion of Qualitative Interviewing
Authors: Brinkmann Svend
Published: October 2022

In the concluding Chapter 6, a number of the most common errors in interview reports are discussed, as are criticisms that have been raised against interview findings in recent years. A range of solutions is suggested to improve the quality of communication of research findings. The chapter also describes and discusses different strategies for evaluating research findings based on qualitative interviews. Recently, the question of quality criteria in qualitative inquiry has been much discussed, and some influential approaches are introduced and discussed. Again, the book distinguishes between traditional and more experimental perspectives on qualitative interviewing. Traditional perspectives will put emphasis on transparency, reliability, and generalizability, whereas more experimental perspectives typically underline the aesthetic and moral implications of the research findings. The chapter ends with a discussion of the future of qualitative interviewing.
Our Hearts Are Restless
Authors: Lischer Richard
Published: October 2022

The personal narrative, be it autobiography or memoir, tells what it is to live and die in the world. Spiritual memoir adds two further dimensions. First, belief or unbelief in God is not incidental to the narrative, but crucial. The narrator and other characters must determine how the judgment or grace of God will influence the conduct of their lives. Some memoirs tell how the narrator came to faith; others examine what Augustine calls “the life of faith.” Second, spiritual memoir entails the (usually) implied offer: “What happened to me, reader, can also happen to you, but in a different way, of course.” This is the gospel of memoir. Our Hearts Are Restless explores the nature of spiritual memoir via a close reading of twenty-one memoirs or memoir-like works. The author engages in personal reflection with the memoirists. The work displays the diversity of spiritual memoir by following seven paths: conversion (e.g., Augustine, Merton), mystical vision (Julian of Norwich, Emily Dickinson), excruciating doubt (Bunyan), devastation (Abelard, C. S. Lewis), life-long pilgrimage (Harriet Jacobs, Dorothy Day), daily adventures and challenges (Lamott), and nomadic, sometimes angry expressions of faith (Baldwin, Rodriquez). These names are meant as samples of the book’s diversity. If there is a theological argument in this study, it is this: there is no argument and no authoritative theology apart from the lives of God’s people and the circumstances in which they live. “The glory of God,” said St. Irenaeus, “is a human being fully alive.”
Adventures with Jesus
Authors: Lischer Richard
Published: October 2022

Readers warm to Anne Lamott because she gives them permission to fail at their Christianity. She accomplishes this by providing lovable vignettes of her spiritual weaknesses and failures, as well as her surprising, grace-inspired successes. She is loved for her honesty and humor. She is not into a Big Picture portrait of the church or the world. Only the everyday. Conservatives love her for her Jesus-fixation but do not care for her liberal politics. Liberals love her for her politics but are uneasy with her casual access to Jesus. She has written many memoirs, but they all rest upon the brief account of her conversion in Traveling Mercies. There she tells of her alcoholism and promiscuity, her fraught relationships, her insecurities, and the deaths of her best friend and her adored father. Without this backstory, her funny and inspiring short stories of faith would seem to be so much feel-good spirituality. She is the most gifted writer of spiritual memoirs around—and the funniest and most likable.
Conclusion
Authors: Gallagher Janice K.
Published: October 2022

The concluding chapter reflects on the challenges of studying violence and the reasons the author chose to write a book spanning many levels of analysis, and focused on family members of victims of disappearances. It then summarizes the methodological and conceptual contributions of this book, as well as the implications of its findings. It draws out the implications of these findings for policymakers and funders, and calls for a recognition of the central place of victims of violence in challenging impunity and proposing a series of measures to support, legitimate, and protect their work. It closes by returning to the stories and reflections of Nancy, Juan Carlos, Lucia, and Alfonso.
Partisan Mobilization and Policy Alignment
Authors: Wagner Regina L. , Shafer Byron E.
Published: October 2022

An omnipresent challenger as an organizing principle for policy preferences was religious denomination, that is, attachment to one of the four great religious families in American society. When the postwar period began, denominational attachments were unaligned in partisan terms. Denomination began to show signs of life among party activists in the successor period, then exploded to prominence among their rank and files in the modern world. For all four religious families, the process of partisan mobilization was central to this, whereby key aspects of social change are picked up by party activists and converted into policy preferences that lead to a partisan division.
The Synoptics and the Son of God
Authors: Bryan Christopher
Published: October 2022

At the very center of the synoptic narrative, Jesus is confessed as Messiah and Son of God by Peter. The subsequent dialogue spells out what it means to confess Jesus as Messiah and Son of God, pointing to the need for Jesu to suffer and die and subsequently to be raised. One cannot truly confess Jesus unless one also confesses his cross. On the Mount of Transfiguration, one week later, Jesus is seen in company with Moses and Elijah, and named by God as God’s Son, the one to whom the disciples are to listen. The disciples are enabled for a moment to see him transfigured—which is to say, not changed from the Jesus they know, but as he truly is.
Introduction
Authors: Wuthnow Robert
Published: October 2022

This introductory chapter argues against particularistic notions of religion’s power that attribute it to features unique to religion. It suggests instead that much of what makes religion powerful such as the discourse, organizations, and the status relations of which it is composed is similar to features of other institutions. The chapter defines power in terms of asymmetric resources and capacities. The book’s discussion is located in approaches that emphasize practice theory and the social mechanisms through which power is exercised. This chapter previews the five mechanisms of power to be discussed in subsequent chapters: ritual power, discursive power, institutional power, identity power, and political power.
Religion’s Discursive Power
Authors: Wuthnow Robert
Published: October 2022

Much of how religion is practiced is through discourse such as sermons, prayers, and testimonials. We assume that discourse is powerful when we say we have been persuaded by hearing something or argue that trigger words should not be used. This chapter identifies the concept of discursive power and locates it within social science theories of agency and practice. The main sections of the chapter focus on narratives, sincerity, and resistance. Examples in the chapter that show how discursive power works include a testimonial given by abolitionist Frederick Douglass, studies of contemporary conversion narratives, a prayer and sharing group, a study of veiled Muslim women, public leaders’ apologies, and ideas about “weapons of the weak.”
Religion and Identity Power
Authors: Wuthnow Robert
Published: October 2022

Religion exercises identity power when it affirms or challenges group identities based on gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and national origin. Practice theory emphasizes that identities are actively constructed, maintained, and contested. Identities are mental categories, but they also exert power in how rewards, status, and opportunities are distributed. Relational concepts of power are helpful in understanding how “us” and “them” distinctions are enacted in practice. This chapter briefly brings together what has been learned in recent years from studies examining religion’s role in perpetuating asymmetric power relations based on gender and sexuality and through systemic racism. Examples are drawn from studies of church leadership, visual culture, multiracial congregations, interfaith advocacy organizations, and border wall policies.
Constitutional Essentials: A Singularity of Reason, or a Space of Reasonability?
Authors: Michelman Frank I.
Published: October 2022

If the rights-regarding essential guarantees in a country’s body of constitutional law are to serve procedurally, as a platform of justification to all for controversial exercises of political power, the terms of those constitutional essentials will have to be at all times not so thin as to leave too little settled in advance, but also not so thick as to foreclose from ongoing democratic resolution issues on which the country is not of one mind. Chapter 3 presents this “Goldilocks” challenge to the political-liberal project of justification-by-constitution. The chapter then describes a likely Rawlsian response employing ideas of the rights-regarding essentials as composing a single “scheme of liberties” (with a widely agreed “central range of application” for each component liberty); of “burdens of judgment” and a recognition thereof among citizens responding reasonably; of a resulting tolerance among citizens for spaces of reasonable disagreement about applications of constitutional essentials; and of a public trusted arbiter of the bounds of reasonability in those applications (about whose locations citizens also may have their reasonable disagreements).
Justice
Authors: Kekes John
Published: October 2022

According to moderate conservatives, the American political system is just if citizens get what they deserve and not what they do not deserve. What is deserved is established by the generally accepted formal and informal terms of cooperation. They concern the rights and responsibilities of personal and institutional relationships. The formal and informal agreements between individuals and institutions. And the terms of cooperation that specify the requirements of the security of individuals. Terms of cooperation are conventional and justified if those who cooperate get what they deserve, conform to practical reason, and pass the test of time as indicated by the general and voluntary conformity to them. Terms of cooperation change, can be reformed if needed, but only slowly and gradually. Injustice is the violation of terms of cooperation. Justice is the bond that unites citizens and guarantees that individuals in the society get what they deserve.
Legal and Political Equality
Authors: Kekes John
Published: October 2022

This chapter is a moderate conservative account of political and legal equality in the American political system. According to it, political and legal equality is one, but only one, of the basic political values. It often conflicts with other political values. The resolution of conflicts between the primary political values depends on the context, conditions, and the available alternatives. Coping with the conflicts should be guided by the overriding importance of balancing the claims of all the primary political values. Maintaining that balance is the art of politics. The danger of all forms of extremism is that by giving priority to one of the political values over the others, it jeopardizes no less important political values and destroys their balance. The moderate conservative account is critical of various extremist attempts to claim priority for equality both in American society and worldwide beyond the limits of American society.
Last Words
Authors: Kekes John
Published: October 2022

This short chapter is an account of the conceptions of moderation and balance that are central to moderate conservatism. They lead to the denial that there is universal, theoretical, context-independent, unconditional ideal that takes precedence over the primary political values. It makes clear that moderate conservatism is a practical, particular, historically conditioned, conventional defense of the American political system. It rejects the possibility of there being an ideal theory that all political systems should accept and aim to follow. It aims at a historically conditioned and forever changing modus vivendi.
Structure
Authors: Weinrib Ernest J.
Published: October 2022

This chapter sets out the nexus between the structure of the private law relationship and reasoning that is appropriate to determinations of liability. It draws out the implications of corrective justice as a structural idea that highlights the correlative normative positions of the plaintiff and defendant as the doer and the sufferer of the same injustice. This structural idea is inconsistent both with the pluralism and with the instrumentalism that have formed the prevailing orthodoxy of private law scholarship in the common law world over the last century or so. Structure signifies the most abstract representation of the parties’ situations relative to each other; the various doctrinal and institutional features of private law are the specific determinations of this abstract structure. When seen as a structural idea, corrective justice has its distinctive and interrelated conceptions of fairness and coherence that emerge out of the correlativity of the parties’ relationship. The character of these conceptions as internal to the parties’ relationship, in turn, leads to a stark contrast with instrumental approaches concerning the treatment of legal concepts, the function of legal norms, the role of law and the source of indeterminacy. The internal understanding offered by corrective justice exhibits intertwined interpretive and normative dimensions.
Rights
Authors: Weinrib Ernest J.
Published: October 2022

Corrective justice requires a content that matches its correlative structure; this content is found in the Kantian conception of rights. Such rights serve as the juridical conduits through which persons interact on terms of their equal reciprocal freedom. The point of a system of such rights is not to promote particular ends that favour one or the other of the parties to a private law relationship, but to provide the conditions for the rightful interplay of whatever ends a person might choose to have. The Kantian system of rights operates at three levels of specificity: most generally as a totality of conditions of equal reciprocal freedom, more specifically, as a set of subjective rights of particular persons, and yet more specifically as entitlements that specify what it means to enjoy the right and what the right-holder can do by virtue of having the right. After setting out these three levels, this chapter considers the relationship between the Kantian conception of rights and the two dominant issues of rights theory in contemporary scholarship: the significance of Hohfeld’s typology of rights, and the controversy between the interest theory of rights and the will theory of rights. On the former issue, Kant provides for the normative unity of the various Hohfeldian categories within a single relationship. On the latter issue, Kant is neither an interest theorist nor a will theorist; rather, his concern is with the moral power presupposed in the idea of reciprocal freedom.
Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking
Authors: Freeden Michael
Published: October 2022

This book investigates silence as a normal, ubiquitous, and indispensable element of political thinking, theory, and language. It explores the diverse dimensions in which silences mould the different core features of the political—by summoning up finality, by contributing to rendering support for communities or withholding it, by processing consent or dissent, by the manner in which it secures continuities or generates ruptures, and by its role in shaping national time, public memory, and collective identity. Not least, silence is a highly flexible power resource, both enabling and constraining major social practices, traditions, and currents. The emphasis of this study is primarily on the concealed, unintentional, and unrecognized ways through which silence pervades socio-political life, departing from the typical focus on intentional silencing and the dominance of logos. Instead, silence adopts the guises of the unspeakable, the ineffable, the inarticulable, and the unconceptualizable. En route, silence is juxtaposed with stillness, absence contrasted with lack, agency set against undetected conventions, and the veiled paired with the wondrous. Drawing extensively from historical, philosophical, anthropological, psychoanalytical, theological, linguistic, and literary viewpoints, the book demonstrates the common threads that connect silences to those different disciplines, alongside the features that pull them asunder. In extracting and decoding their political implications, it explores both academic literature and colloquial, everyday discourse. Selected case studies elaborating the overall analysis include topics such as Buddhist non-dualism, Locke’s tacit consent, the submerging of historical narratives, state neutrality, Pinter’s miscommunications and menace, and the separate ways ideologies integrate silence into their beliefs.
Courts, Regulators, and the Scrutiny of Economic Evidence
Authors: Mantzari Despoina
Published: October 2022

This book explores the interaction of courts and regulators with economic evidence in the realm of utilities regulation in two common law jurisdictions: the US and the UK. Adopting the error-correction function of judicial review as a starting point, it unveils how the increasing reliance of regulators on economic inputs affects the legal outputs of regulation and transforms administrative discretion and judicial review. After delineating how positive law has responded to the challenges posed by economic evidence, the book engages in a normative debate on the appropriate scope of judicial review of discretionary economic assessments and the optimal institutional response to the pervasiveness of economic evidence in economic regulation. Building on comparative institutional analysis, the book rejects single-factor explanations, such as that judges do not understand economics, in favour of a richer set of macro-level and micro-level factors that shape the relationship between courts and regulators in the regulatory enterprise. Mantzari argues that the ‘recipe’ for adjudicating economic evidence requires a balance to be struck, in which deference is accorded to regulatory agencies on institutional competencies grounds and a degree of epistemic diversity is introduced in courts. The book combines theoretical, doctrinal, comparative, and empirical analysis and it is written to be accessible to lawyers, economists, judges, regulators, policymakers, and political scientists.
Introduction
Authors: Mantzari Despoina
Published: October 2022

This introductory chapter discusses the aims and objectives of the book, the methodology employed, and provides a summary of its main argument. It introduces the idea that the manifestation of economic evidence in regulatory disputes challenges the error-correction function of judicial review, because of the profound epistemic asymmetry between the expert regulatory agency and the generalist judge. After briefly explaining the role of economic evidence in the regulatory decision-making process, it introduces the main questions that are the focus of the analysis. First, how positive law has responded so far to the challenges posed by economic evidence in economic regulation and judicial review; and second, how it ought to address such challenges. The chapter concludes with an overview of the argument as the latter is developed in the subsequent chapters.
Transforming Discretion
Authors: Mantzari Despoina
Published: October 2022

Relying on semi-structured interviews with UK sectoral regulators, this chapter opens the ‘black box’ of the regulatory decision-making process and explores the influence of economic evidence and analysis on the regulators’ discretionary economic assessments. The chapter challenges the widely held belief that economic regulation is a technocratic enterprise. Values, both substantive (eg legality) and procedural (due process requirements), constrain the flexibility of the economic approach in advancing regulatory objectives. It shows that while the role of economic evidence and analysis has increased in the workings of regulators, as it is used to inform both economic efficiency and equity considerations, economists are in fact constrained. The chapter first offers a taxonomy of discretion, (ie interpretive, operational, and enforcement discretion) and explains how economic evidence and analysis informs and shapes the exercise of these three dimensions of discretion. Drawing on Craig Parsons’ typology of political action, it then seeks to explore the relative influence of ‘structural’, ‘institutional’, and ‘ideational’ constraints in rich and diverse areas of regulatory action where economists are called upon to exercise discretionary assessments.
From ‘Hard Look’ Review to ‘Thin Rationality’ Review
Authors: Mantzari Despoina
Published: October 2022

This chapter examines the US federal courts’ reaction to the regulatory agencies’ increased recourse to expert economic evidence and analysis. It argues that an evolutionary transformation of the scope and nature of judicial review has taken place: from an intrusive ‘hard look’ review epitomised in the 1980s by the Supreme Court’s State Farm decision, to what is an undemanding version of rationality, referred to as ‘thin rationality’ review. ‘Thin rationality’ review emphasises institutional competence and historical considerations and is more attentive to the interplay of the various values that inform agencies’ actions. The chapter shows that institutional competence and historical considerations are mostly pronounced in polycentric disputes, such as those involving rate-setting, whereas in cases concerning access to bottleneck facilities and universal service obligations judicial scrutiny is determined by the emphasis given to the underlying values of efficiency and equity. Taken together, they yield a picture of deference to agencies’ economic expertise in regulatory matters.
A (Relatively) Brief Outline of the Galenic Medical Art
Authors: Zecher Jonathan L.
Published: October 2022

This chapter analyses Galenic medicine using two modern theories: the “biopsychosocial model” of health and illness, coined by George Engel and updated by Derek Bolton and Grant Gillett; and Urie Bronfenbrenner’s “bioecology” of human development. Using these and a broad base of Galenic and other medical texts, it is first shown that Galen provides the best access to medical thought in late antiquity. Then, late ancient medicine is interrogated as an art organized by its end goal of attaining health. As an art it has three interlocking parts. First, medicine is a way of knowing humans as biopsychosocial beings embedded in complex ecosystems involving other humans, the natural environment, and nonhuman beings. Second, medicine directs its attention to diagnostic strategies, which, first, relate the phenomena of health and illness to underlying dispositions, especially humoral ones. Likewise, Galen understands disease as process requiring attention to details that change with time. These strategies of nosology and pathology are matched with therapeutic tactics arranged according to a hierarchy moving from mildest to most extreme. Together, end-directedness, biopsychosocial knowing, diagnostic strategies, and therapeutic tactics together define a logic of practice (Pierre Bourdieu) that may be called a “medical art.”
Choice, Mutual Advantage in Exchange, and Freedom of Contract
Authors: Campbell David
Published: October 2022

This chapter identifies autonomy as the moral basis of the Pareto optimality of economic exchange and of freedom of contract. The legitimate form of autonomous action in the economic sphere is pursuit of self-interest. But reproducing autonomy through the social practices of economic choice and agreeing a contract requires the parties to mutually recognise the legitimate self-interest of each other. The law of contract is a private regulatory framework facilitating this. Because it does not recognise this social relational foundation of exchange, solipsistic self-interest is a markedly inadequate conception of the mutual advantage which is the basis of Pareto optimality, and is a misleading basis for the legal doctrine of agreement. The form of an adequate conception of self-interest based on the morality of mutual recognition and the politics of liberal socialism is anticipated. These general theoretical arguments are related to a specific doctrinal issue. The doctrine of agreement mistake leads to unmanageable doctrinal contradictions, for what is at issue is, not the mistake of one party, but the morality of the contractual relation between the parties.
Exchange, Relational Contract, and Mutual Recognition
Authors: Campbell David
Published: October 2022

The relational theory of contract after Ian Macneil has generally been interpreted as identifying a ‘specie’ of contracts, the relational contract, distinct from standard, or discrete, contracts. Stewart Macaulay’s pathbreaking empirical analyses of contractual action have generally been interpreted as demonstrating the ‘non-use’ of contract or the use of ‘non-contractual relations’. These interpretations are very partial, for neither Macaulay nor Macneil sought what Gilmore famously called ‘the death of contract’, and both were fundamentally concerned with the reform of a positive law of contract which they saw as inadequate to its regulatory task, the inadequacy being particularly clear in the case of, but not limited to, those complex contracts which are now called relational. The main point of the relational theory, however, is not that some contracts are relational, but that all contracts are relational in the sense that they rest on, and take their form from the attempt to legally institutionalise a moral relationship between the parties, whose pursuit of self-interest in welfare enhancing ways is facilitated by this relationship. This relationship is best described as one of mutual recognition, the term being derived from Karl Marx’s analysis of exchange. Some perception of this moral relationship underlies the always present but always denied concept of good faith in the positive law of contract. Walford v Miles, the main authority for the claim that the English law does not recognise good faith, is itself shown to require good faith to give effect to the requirements of voluntary agreement.
The Relational Constitution of Bargain (1)
Authors: Campbell David
Published: October 2022

The doctrine of consideration presents a remarkable contrast between outstanding regulatory success and dismal doctrinal confusion. As the legal institutionalisation of the moral belief that the normal way to acquire the benefit of an economic good is to make a bargain to pay for it, consideration had made this belief, essential to the operation of the market economy, simply normal. But as doctrine, consideration, and in particular insufficiency, is so incoherent that Pollock’s ‘strange paradox’ about the enforcement of executory contracts has never begun to be resolved. The two main sources of the incoherence are a failure to recognise that consideration analytically involves a good faith promise of performance, and an inarticulate belief that the benefit of certain economic goods should not be paid for. The former has led to unresolved problems of enforceability which are largely dealt with just by being ignored. The latter has led to the provision of certain important economic goods, notably insurance for personal injury, pure economic loss, and product liability, in ways which drastically reduce welfare because that provision is not regulated by exchange and contract.
The Relational Constitution of Remedy (2)
Authors: Campbell David
Published: October 2022

It is settled law that a claimant’s ‘consumer interest’ can justify the award of specific performance and other forms of literal enforcement by rendering damages ‘inadequate’. But the principal significance of literal enforcement is its attempted use by commercial parties which, ex hypothesi, have no such interest. Claims for literal enforcement by claimants which do not stand on the settled ground for its award have generated a very unclear law, even including oxymoronic concepts such as commercial uniqueness. The fundamental issue is that, in situations in which they face an idiosyncratic loss, commercial claimants seek to avoid the operation of the rules for the quantification of compensatory damages. Though welcomed by the thinking behind the performance interest, a wider ex post availability of literal enforcement runs against the ex ante intentions of the parties about the remedies to be available upon breach, which are that the default remedy is compensatory damages, and that the quantification of those damages should be based on mitigation. The difficulty of identifying mitigation to the concept of the legitimate interest used to justify literal enforcement follows from considering only the solipsistic self-interest of the claimant, rather than requiring the mutual recognition of the claimant’s and the defendant’s interests.
The Presumption of Innocence
Authors: Picinali Federico
Published: October 2022

This chapter is dedicated to the argument against intermediate criminal verdicts that has played the most prominent role in the Italian and in the Scottish debates. This is the argument according to which such verdicts are incompatible with the presumption of innocence. In order to address this argument, the chapter advances a novel theory of the meaning and of the justification of the presumption. The upshot of this theory is that the presumption is the vehicle through which the principle of inertia in argumentation is implemented in the criminal process, and it includes a rule imposing on the criminal justice authorities the burden of giving sufficient reasons for any infringement of the defendant’s enjoyment of the rights to which all members of the polity are prima facie entitled, and a rule making impermissible all infringements for which sufficient reasons have not been given. The chapter argues that there is no incompatibility between the presumption of innocence, so construed, and intermediate criminal verdicts.
Procedural Requirements for Administrative Limits to Property Rights in Germany
Authors: Shirvani Foroud
Published: October 2022

According to German constituational law expropriation (Enteignung) is the sovereign access to the property of the individual, which is aimed at the deprivation of property rights and involves the acquisition of goods for the benefit of the public authorities. Expropriation may only be ordered by or pursuant to a law that determines the nature and extent of compensation. Expropriation in the constitutional sense is to be distinguished from two other legal institutions: There is no expropriation if the legislature determines the content and limits of property in a general and abstract manner (Inhalts- und Schrankenbestimmung). There is also no expropriation if the legislature transfers land, natural resources or means of production to public ownership for the purpose of socialisation (Sozialisierung). The German Bundesländer have enacted expropriation laws that regulate general matters of expropriation, such as the expropriation procedure, the competent expropriation authority and the compensation for expropriation. If an expropriation measure is unlawful on grounds of substance or procedure, the owners affected must take legal action against the measure. If the expropriation becomes incontestable, a later claim for compensation will be dismissed.
Procedural Requirements for Administrative Limits to Property Rights in Poland
Authors: Kawka Inga , Kozera Łukasz
Published: October 2022

The Polish Constitution contains a general principle related to the protection of the right of property. As it is not an absolute rule, the Constitution also provides for some exceptions to it, one of them being the institution of expropriation, ie carrying out an administrative dispossession of ownership of movable and immovable property. Pursuant to the Constitution, expropriation shall be possible only when the following preconditions are met: expropriation is related to a public purpose; expropriation is performed under a highest-rank statute ('Act' of law or ustawa) and by means of a procedure specified therein; the expropriated party is awarded just compensation. Detailed material and procedural provisions on land expropriation are contained in the Immovable Property Management Act of 21 August 1997. The competent authority for immovable property expropriation and compensation is the starost (county-level local government authority) performing administrative tasks on behalf of the government. Expropriation decisions may be contested in proceedings before administrative courts. In the Polish legal order, the institution of expropriation is distinguished from that of nationalisation. Currently, the latter is only of historical importance.
Introduction, Case Selection, and Organization
Authors: Meili Stephen
Published: October 2022

The Introduction sets out the overall organization of the book, which begins with an explanation of the three areas of socio-legal scholarship to which it adds knowledge: human rights treaty effectiveness, refugee law, and cause lawyering. It sets out the organization of the entire book and also explains that the five countries featured were chosen because they share a number of characteristics relevant to the central theme of the book as well as important differences that allow for the development of a theory about how lawyers can most effectively utilize constitutionalized human rights provisions on behalf of refugees. The Introduction also explains the qualitative methodology of the book, which includes interviews with refugee lawyers and other advocates in each of the featured countries.