bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
#1134 Molecular rejection phenotype patterns differentiate between probable AMR, DSA-negative microvascular inflammation, and AMR
Authors: Schmid Nicolas , Baumgartner Annina , Weidmann Lukas , Bortel Nicolà , Korach Raphael , Lopez Kai Castrezana , Harmacek Dusan , Rho Elena , George Britta , Von Moos Seraina , Schachtner Thomas
Published: May 2024

Background and Aims

Biopsy-based transcripts associated with antibody-mediated rejection (AMR) hold promise as substitutes for C4d positivity, according to the latest Banff Meeting Report of 2022. However, patterns and strength of rejection phenotype scores remain inadequately studied within the new subgroups along the AMR continuum.

Method

We analyzed 365 kidney allograft biopsies by histology and the Molecular Microscope Diagnostic System (MMDx) at the University Hospital of Zurich from July 2021 to November 2023. Histologic findings were classified according to Banff 2022 into (1) probable AMR (n = 32), (2) donor-specific antibodies (DSA)-negative C4d-negative microvascular inflammation (MVI, n = 32), and (3) AMR (n = 60). A control group of 118 cases without MVI was used for comparison.

Results

10 out of 32 cases (31%) with probable AMR, 20 of 32 cases (63%) with DSA-negative C4d-negative MVI, and 31 of 60 cases (52%) with AMR showed molecular AMR. Among cases with molecular AMR the sum of the TCMR-related (R2) and late-stage AMR-related (R6) phenotype scores was significantly higher in probable AMR and DSA-negative MVI cases compared to AMR cases (p = 0.029). In contrast, the sum of the mixed rejection (R3), early-stage AMR (R4), fully-developed AMR (R5) phenotype scores was higher in AMR compared to probable AMR (p = 0.063). Among cases without molecular AMR the all AMR phenotype score was significantly higher in AMR and DSA-negative MVI compared to probable AMR and the control group without MVI (p = 0.012, p < 0.001).

Conclusion

Our results identify different molecular rejection phenotype patterns between cases with probable AMR, DSA-negative MVI, and AMR. Sub-threshold findings appear relevant along the AMR continuum.
#2047 Trough-level guided dosing is reliable for mycophenolate mofetil but not for enteric-coated mycophenolic sodium
Authors: Von Moos Seraina , Rho Elena , Lopez Kai Castrezana , Weidmann Lukas , George Britta , Pfister Susan , Schachtner Thomas
Published: May 2024

Background and Aims

While trough level (TL) guided dosing is usus for calcineurin inhibitors, mycophenolic acid (MPA) was marketed as a one-size-fits-all drug. TL has been reported to be a poor surrogate marker of MPA exposure by reason of complex pharmacokinetics. Measurement of area under the curve (AUC) remains the gold-standard for MPA dosing.

Method

We measured MPA TL and AUC in 299 KTRs at the University Hospital of Zurich. KTRs with agreement between TL and AUC target range of 40-60 mg/Lxh were compared to KTRs with missing agreement between TL and AUC for differences regarding baseline characteristics and co-medication.

Results

For mycophenolate mofetil (MMF, n = 218) a high correlation between TL and AUC was observed, p < 0.0001, r = 0.85, while correlation was only low for enteric-coated mycophenolate sodium (EC-MPS, n = 81), p = 0.002, r = 0.34, Fig. 1. However, a high correlation between MPA level 4 hours after EC-MPS intake (C4L) and AUC was found, p < 0.0001, r = 0.94. ROC analysis defined an MMF-TL range of >2.05 mg/l (sensitivity 68%, specificity 89%) and <3.05 mg/l (sensitivity 70%, specificity 81%) correlating with an AUC of 40-60 mg/Lxh. Lack of proton pump inhibitors (PPI) use was significantly associated with incorrect classification (n = 71/218). For EC-MPS C4L a range of >1.25 mg/l (sensitivity 98, specificity 100) and <4.4 mg/l (sensitivity 93, specificity 91) was defined for an AUC of 40-60 mg/Lxh. Here, non-tacrolimus-based immunosuppression was significantly associated with incorrect classification (n = 7/81).

Conclusion

MMF dosing according to TL highly correlates with AUC especially in KTRs treated with PPI. In contrast, EC-MPS dosing according to C4L is preferred especially in context of tacrolimus-based immunosuppression.
Criminal Justice, Artificial Intelligence, and Liberal Democracy
Authors: Miller Seumas , Bossomaier Terry
Published: May 2024

Ethical issues have arisen in the criminal justice context as a result of organized crime making use of high-level encryption, the Dark Web, and other cybertechnologies. However, these new technologies have also resulted in the development of a whole range of new law enforcement tools. This is turn has given rise to ethical problems such as those that have arisen as a result of law enforcement’s use of bulk databases, machine-learning techniques, and so on. Moreover, we need to look at these issues through the lens of the moral rights and principles constitutive of liberal democracy. The ethical issues addressed include ones in predictive policing, machine-learning-based legal adjudications, universal DNA databases, and facial-recognition technology. We conclude with a set of ethical guidelines for resolving some of the main issues.
Cyberconflict
Authors: Miller Seumas , Bossomaier Terry
Published: May 2024

Cyberconflict can take place between nation-states, take various forms (e.g., cognitive warfare), and involve the use of cyberweapons (e.g., autonomous weapons). Cyberconflict is characteristically a species of covert political action and can be conducted with conventional warfare (e.g., Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). Cyberconflict should be conducted in accordance with moral principles, such as discrimination (i.e., avoiding the deliberate harming of innocents), necessity, and proportionality. However, the application of these principles in cyberspace differs from conventional warfare. A principle of reciprocity in the service of the collective good of global cybersecurity has application to cyberconflict. Regarding fully autonomous weapons (i.e., so-called human-out-of-the-loop weapons), they should be prohibited in most, if not all, circumstances.
The Metaphysics of Musical Structure
Authors: Kane Brian
Published: May 2024

Music theorists and philosophers of music often consider a performance of a jazz standard to be based on a preexisting structure. By reproducing a structure’s necessary properties, performances are considered as valid instances of musical works. Stephen Davies’s version of this argument, which thinks of jazz standards as musical works that are “thin” in essential properties, is discussed in some detail. This view depends on a traditional, metaphysical view of structure as permanent and incorrigible. This chapter introduces the idea that structures do not precede performances, but rather emerge from a network of performances that are associated with one another. The chapter analyses a network of performances related to the standard song “In the Mood,” most famously associated with Glenn Miller. By considering structures as emerging from networks of performances, it becomes possible to offer an account of the corrigibility (or changeability) of musical works.
Wicked Problems
Authors: Schofield John
Published: May 2024

Chapter 1 introduces some of the key concepts that will be used and explains how they have been used in the past. For example, what are wicked problems, what makes them wicked, and why is this a suitable framework for addressing the purpose and potential of archaeology? Similarly for small wins: what are small wins and how might this framework translate into archaeology and heritage practice? The chapter will discuss the role and purpose of archaeology in the contemporary world, emphasizing that archaeology is vital for global challenges given the deep-time perspective it brings. The author suggests that archaeologists have superpowers that render the subject essential within these areas of research and discourse. Finally, the chapter introduces the suggestion that archaeology needs policy entrepreneurs to promote the results of archaeological research in ways that will help society to understand and mitigate these wicked problems.
Environmental Pollution
Authors: Schofield John
Published: May 2024

This chapter covers environmental pollution. It focuses on plastics but other topics are also addressed, such as nuclear waste. Here archaeology is presented more in terms of its methods and the opportunities these methods provide for public engagement, creating the possibility of both cleaning up existing pollution while also influencing people’s perceptions and behaviours in order to reduce future impacts. The chapter then presents plastic pollution as a wicked problem, before proceeding to the example of current fieldwork in Galápagos, where plastics are being addressed as material culture in order to better understand its sources. It also describes recent work undertaken on COVID waste and the benefits of undertaking citizen-science work. A section on nuclear waste and environmental ruin in the American Midwest follows. The chapter discusses the benefits of small wins, emphasizing also the advantages of archaeology forming part of multi- and transdisciplinary collaborations.
Social Injustice
Authors: Schofield John
Published: May 2024

Chapter 6 addresses the wicked problem of social injustice. It begins with a definition and an outline of some of the ways social injustice has been researched and managed as a wicked problem. The chapter recognizes specific overlaps with that on health and well-being and also on climate change, a key area of social injustice on a global scale. It refers to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the 2005 Faro Convention, which aligns people’s right to heritage with UDHR. Also relevant here are policy documents from heritage-sector organizations that refer to and stress the need to engage with diversity, inclusion, and equality. The chapter’s final sections describe and critically examine some of the projects where archaeology and heritage practice have directly attempted to engage social injustices. In the examples given, focus is given to projects around homelessness and other hard-to-reach communities.
The World’s Evils Are Logically Compatible with God’s Existence
Authors: Swinburne Richard
Published: May 2024

Our parents and the State have significant rights to curtail many of our rights. God, as the ultimate source of everything good, has a far greater right to curtail our ordinary rights. However, the rights of parents and the State are subject to two restrictions—they must remain on balance our benefactors, and never impose harm on anyone unless it is necessary for their well-being or that of others. God’s rights are subject to the same restrictions. God can always satisfy the first restriction for someone whose life on earth is on balance bad, by giving them a good life after death; but the second restriction severely limits what he can do. Among the great goods of human life are that it is up to us by our choices whether others flourish or suffer, and that we form our own character; some of these choices are open both to those who can cause suffering and to those who suffer. Horrendous evils provide choices of enormous significance for humans.
Response to Sterba’s Response
Authors: Swinburne Richard
Published: May 2024

Although parents or the State ought never to permit certain evils, God may be justified in permitting them, since he has far greater rights over us, and far greater power to compensate us. The difference between ‘horrendous’ and ‘significant’ evils is a matter of degree. Sterba allows that it might be good for God to give us a choice of whether or not to seek to cause great evils, but claims that God should prevent our bad choices from having any effects. But T this would deprive our free will of what is most valuable about it. If the State were to take very serious measures to abolish great social evils, those measures would abolish great goods. Although God could take measures unavailable to the State, those measures would abolish similar goods. Animals probably do not suffer nearly as much as humans; their availability to lesser suffering makes possible lesser benefits, such that God is justified in allowing their suffering.
Dignity, Vulnerability, and the Anti-Torture Norm
Authors: O’Rourke Maeve
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the role of dignity as an interpretive concept in the anti-torture doctrinal framework. It also considers the relationship between dignity and vulnerability. The chapter’s review of legal–philosophical literature highlights the contested nature of the concept of dignity while identifying widespread acceptance of the concept’s fundamental connection with the rule against torture and ill-treatment. The chapter takes on the challenge of conceptualizing a dignity violation sufficient in principle (ie assuming the minimum level of severity of suffering is reached) to breach the prohibition of torture and ill-treatment and to prompt state obligations of protection and response. My proposed conception of a dignity violation is an interference with a core aspect of the personality, which the person is situationally powerless to avoid. This conception is deciphered from dignity-focused decisions of the European Court of Human Rights and Inter-American Court of Human Rights, among other literature.
Deprivation of Liberty for ‘Care’
Authors: O’Rourke Maeve
Published: May 2024

This chapter addresses the problem of deprivation of liberty for ‘care’ purposes. It challenges the failure of several human rights treaty bodies and many National Preventive Mechanisms to unequivocally condemn the legally unauthorized ‘care’-based detention and restraint of older people which they are increasingly observing. Using the book’s conception of a dignity violation sufficient in principle to breach the anti-torture norm, and drawing on Articles 12 and 14 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the chapter argues that the idea of regulating older people’s deprivation of liberty with the aim of ‘safeguarding’ individuals from all but ‘strictly necessary’ non-consensual care is a violation of dignity in principle. It is also an invitation for existing systems of coercion to continue in practice. The chapter contends that the anti-torture norm’s positive obligations should be recognized to include a substantive guarantee of consensual care.
Conclusion
Authors: O’Rourke Maeve
Published: May 2024

This concluding chapter emphasizes the importance of close doctrinal analysis as well as theoretically informed interpretation to realizing the anti-torture norm’s potential to better protect older people from care-related mistreatment. The chapter argues that interpretation and implementation of a new UN Convention on the rights and dignity of older people will require engagement with the existing doctrinal framework making up the rule against torture and ill-treatment in international human rights law.
Group singing and postnatal depression
Authors: Greenwood Lorna , Farquharson Yvonne , Dye Hannah , Perkins Rosie , Fancourt Daisy
Published: May 2024

Chapter 4 describes the aims, delivery methods, and impact of Breathe Melodies for Mums, a group singing programme for new mothers with symptoms of postnatal depression (PND). Launched in 2017, Breathe Melodies for Mums has now expanded across the United Kingdom and is informing international practice via a training partnership with the World Health Organization. The chapter introduces the research that underpins the programme and provides a comprehensive account of the programme design, values, delivery, and evolution. Recent evaluation and research evidence are presented to explain how and why group singing, both online and in-person, can support people experiencing PND. Implications for practitioners are highlighted throughout, including for music leaders and health professionals.
Online songwriting and postnatal loneliness
Authors: Spiro Neta , Waddell George , Adediran Rosie , Osmond Penny , Tredget Emily , Sharma Sunita , Perkins Rosie
Published: May 2024

Chapter 5 reports on the co-construction, testing, and evaluation of an online songwriting intervention—Songs from Home—that aimed to reduce loneliness and symptoms of postnatal depression (PND) and enhance social connectedness. The chapter describes the co-construction process and key characteristics of the musical practice, as well as evaluation and research findings. The chapter illuminates how Songs from Home can facilitate four goals—comfort and safety, feelings of achievement, connection, and adapting to individuals—and address loneliness, social connectedness, and symptoms of PND among women in the perinatal period. The chapter concludes by noting that Songs from Home was highly recommended by those who participated in it, with the potential for refinement and scale-up.
Music While You Wait
Authors: Flower Claire , Sharma Sunita , Brown Louise
Published: May 2024

Chapter 7 describes the introduction of music therapy services into maternity care within a National Health Service (NHS) Trust in the United Kingdom. Two innovative approaches are discussed: Music While You Wait (MWYW), and Tuning In. MWYW is an environmental music therapy approach, offering live, tailored music within maternity clinic and ward spaces. Tuning In, an online group, evolved in response to restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter provides examples of practice that align with current thinking on musical care and exemplifies emerging approaches in this field to both practice and evaluation. The chapter concludes by commenting on the potential for both music therapy and a broader range of musical practices to contribute to high quality hospital-based maternity care.
Music-listening to support the childbirth experience
Authors: McCaffrey Tríona , Cheung Pui-Sze , Tighe Sylvia Murphy
Published: May 2024

Chapter 8 starts with a description of music-listening in childbirth, followed by a summary of related outcomes, evidence, and theories to support its use. The impacts of music-listening are illustrated through presentation of two short vignettes based on two women’s personal accounts of giving birth in a public maternity hospital in Ireland. Together these describe the empowering and positive contribution of music-listening to childbirth in ways that directly respond to the women’s wishes, preferences, and overall maternal wellbeing. The chapter concludes with key considerations and practical implications for people giving birth and for healthcare practitioners on optimal use of music-listening in labour, specifically relating to the design and use of a customised playlist for childbirth. The chapter concludes that music-listening can enhance perinatal mental wellbeing as it supports women and birthing people to harness internal resources to face the challenges of childbirth.
Music and mutuality
Authors: Wolf Dennie Palmer , Anderson Kate , Ortiz Tiffany
Published: May 2024

Chapter 11 uses work with families during Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project to explore the possibility that musical activities can support the development of mutuality as a source for caregivers’ wellbeing. A major purpose is to bring to light some of the mechanisms that may underlie the growing body of evidence for the effectiveness of musical interventions during the early and challenging period of family formation. To do this, the chapter shares an in-depth case study of a mother and her toddler son, detailing changes in three domains: self-efficacy or agency; role satisfaction; and changes in interactions that include new forms of being together such as joint play and a growing understanding of each other’s internal worlds. In closing, the chapter argues that the development of mutuality is fundamental to families’ long-term wellbeing.
Responsible Pleasure
Authors: Rusterholz Caroline
Published: May 2024

This book is a sociocultural history of young people’s sexuality in Britain from the 1960s to the 1990s, using the Brook Advisory Centre (Brook) as a case study. The book examines how and why cultural and social norms about young people’s sexuality changed over a period that has traditionally been associated with growing ‘permissiveness’ and sexual liberation. It does so by focusing on a pioneering sexual health charity operating on the cusp of voluntary and state-financed sectors. From the opening of its first centre in London—followed by other centres including Birmingham (1966), Bristol (1968), and Edinburgh (1968)—to the present day, Brook has been a major provider of contraceptive advice and sexual counselling to unmarried people and teenagers. Brook pioneered an initiative that would form the primary model for the provision of advice on contraception for teenagers in Britain. To this day, the charity remains a key player in sexual health services. Although Brook has provoked fierce opposition and triggered recurrent public debates on teenage sexuality, little is known of its history. As a non-governmental organization, Brook offers a fascinating case study to explore the relationship between changing sexual cultures, sexual politics, and young people’s sexual experiences, intimacy, and subjectivities. Drawing on a wide range of archived and published materials, as well as oral history interviews conducted by the author, this book provides a substantial and original contribution to scholarship on the forging of the modern sexual subject.
Locality and Controversy
Authors: Rusterholz Caroline
Published: May 2024

Chapter 2 describes the conditions under which a selection of centres was implemented. It takes the opening of five Brook branches in Britain and their local centres (London, Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, and Liverpool) as case studies to illuminate the impact of locality on the controversy about young people’s sexuality and shows the intertwining of local and sexual politics. Each case study reveals the discursive and political boundaries of the definition of legitimate sexuality, and sheds light on the key players behind the centres, their motivations, and their opponents. In the face of opposition, this chapter argues that Brook supporters needed to develop strategies that would mitigate criticism and appease, to a certain extent, the fears and anxieties of opponents. These strategies were the resort to the support of medical authorities and to a narrative focused on sexual responsibility.
The Centres
Authors: Rusterholz Caroline
Published: May 2024

Chapter 4 considers the setting up of Brook Advisory Centres from material and sensory angles. It shows the criteria that were taken into consideration when opening a centre, and underlines the importance of the location, its accessibility, and the layout of the centre in enabling the smooth running of the latter. In addition to the materiality of the centre, the sensory element was key to making sure young people felt welcome. Brook recognized that an agreeable atmosphere depended as much on the staff as it did on the centre’s décoration and ambience. Staff were recruited based on their attitude towards young people’s sexuality. Music, biscuits, tea, and coffee were all elements that contributed to creating a relaxed and friendly environment.
Authorship, Authority, and Agonism
Authors: Taylor Helena
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the relationship between knowledge of Latin and Greek culture, authority, and polemic in the work of Marie de Gournay. It first analyses her figuration of the female intellectual in her autobiographical writings. Mingling the individual and the collective, negotiating the tension between the recognition conferred by erudite classical knowledge and her marginalised access, and grounded in an urgent need to solicit favour, she offers herself as a test case for what she identifies as the aporia represented by the female intellectual. Then the chapter turns to her translations, first of prose (Tacitus, Sallust, Cicero), examining her appropriation of the polemical voice, her reflections on good governance and merit, and her (contested) theories of language and poetics, which are, it is then shown, defended in her translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, and her poetry. Finally, the chapter explores her reception to query the periodisation implicit in her frequent relegation from the seventeenth century.
‘Classics’ as Commodity
Authors: Taylor Helena
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the relationship between the literary market, reception of antiquity, and an author’s career by focusing on Madame de Villedieu, who published seven works of ancient historical fiction. By examining Villedieu’s relationship with her chief publisher, Claude Barbin, the querelle involving her play, Manlius, the authorial posture she constructed through her prefaces, the privilèges d’auteur she solicited, and her self-conscious authorial naming, the chapter shows that Villedieu did not follow or aspire to the paradigmatic posture of aristocratic detachment towards the book trade. Instead, it argues that she positioned her authorial identity and her ‘galant’ ancient historical fiction in such a way as to celebrate commercial success and to exploit the opposition between savant and galant culture, thus remodelling literary value, troubling the dichotomy between commercial and intellectual prestige. The chapter then explores the influence of Villedieu’s distinct approach by looking at Catherine Bernard and Anne de La Roche-Guilhen.
Ancients and Moderns
Authors: Taylor Helena
Published: May 2024

The fairy tale, which came to prominence in the 1690s, was an explicitly ‘modern’ genre, cultivated by Charles Perrault and a group of women, the conteuses. This chapter studies the fairy tales and a wide range of texts (periodicals, journals, lettres, Parnassus fictions) by some of these conteuses: Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Charlotte-Rose de La Force, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, and Henriette-Julie de Murat. It shows how they distinguished their modernity from that of Perrault: they emphasised more ‘prestigious sources’ (medieval troubadours, medieval romance, the fable, and, significantly, classical intertext) and championed women and female lineages. It draws on work that has seen the fairy tale as metadiscursive, or as literary criticism, to show how across all their diverse works, these writers trouble hierarchisations of genre, reflect on the values and parameters of belles-lettres or literature, and articulate a feminine savoir that promoted erudition alongside entertainment through the vaunted figure of the ‘savante moderne’.
On the Gods and the World
Authors: Hladký Vojtěch
Published: May 2024

This book offers a new and thorough interpretation of the entire text of the Derveni papyrus, a multilayered and intricate philosophical and religious treatise written in Greek, probably around 400 BCE. Since its discovery in 1962, the papyrus has been attracting the attention of scholars in several areas of Classical studies, mostly ancient philosophy and religion but also literary criticism. The anonymous author of the text quotes a previously unknown Orphic poem and comments on it using philosophical motifs and notions borrowed from various Presocratic thinkers, especially Heraclitus and Anaxagoras and his followers. The study offers an ‘all-embracing’ interpretation of various aspects of this complex text and tries to situate concepts and ideas which appear in the text within their original contexts. The material is divided in chapters dedicated to different aspects of the Derveni papyrus: the opening columns describing a peculiar ritual, the Orphic theogony and its explanation with the help of Presocratic allegorical, theological, and physical conceptual devices. In general, the study argues that rather than being the work of a philosophising Orphic initiate, the Derveni treatise contains text written by a late Presocratic philosopher. An analysis of sources upon which the Derveni papyrus is based thus ultimately indicates that the author of the text was probably active in Athens in late 5th century BCE and may have been a person close to the Presocratic thinker Archelaus.
Commentary on the Poem
Authors: Hladký Vojtěch
Published: May 2024

The chapter examines the formal and conceptual approaches of the Derveni commentator to the Orphic poem. It opens with a short overview of his linguistic tools, but is mostly devoted to explaining the features of the Derveni poem as cosmic principles. In the interpretation here, the physical account follows closely the succession of divine generations. In the primeval mixture, the most prominent principle, fire, is entangled with the Night, the principle of cold. The cosmic Mind intervenes and creates the Sun. They are then surrounded and permeated by the intelligent Air. The chapter situates the concepts of the Derveni cosmogony within the various doctrines of the late Presocratics. It discusses the influences of Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and his followers; the thinker closest to the Derveni author seems to be Archelaus. Although the definitive attribution to a particular philosopher will perhaps remain unanswered, it may confidently be located to late fifth-century Athens.
Blackstone's Guide to the Human Rights Act 1998
Authors: Wadham John , Mountfield KC Helen , Desai Raj , Hannett KC Sarah , Jones Jessica , Mitchell Eleanor , Wills Aidan
Published: May 2024

The Blackstone’s Guide to the Human Rights Act 1998 provides clear, concise coverage of the operation and application of the Human Rights Act 1998, discussing the successes and criticisms of the Act and its possible amendment or its replacement. It also sets out the recent erosion of the universal applicability of the remedies in the Human Rights Act by the Illegal Migration Act 2023 and other current proposals. The Guide considers the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and the impact of Convention rights in landmark domestic judgments across a wide range of areas, including terrorism, privacy, discrimination, and criminal law. It explains the interpretive techniques employed by the courts to read legislation compatibly with Convention rights and the jurisdiction to declare legislation incompatible with Convention rights. Finally, the last chapter sets out how to make an application to the Strasbourg Court and sets out in detail how that Court works. The new edition of this popular Guide considers the key developments since the publication of the previous edition nine years ago. The book contains an up-to-date copy of the Human Rights Act 1998, and the text of the rights in the European Convention on Human Rights which are now a central part of UK law.
The Framework of the European Convention on Human Rights
Authors: Wadham John , Mountfield Helen , Desai Raj , Hannett Sarah , Jones Jessica , Mitchell Eleanor , Wills Aidan
Published: May 2024

This chapter sets out the basic principles of the European Convention on Human Rights as interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights, focusing on the purpose of the Convention and the effectiveness in practice of Convention rights. The chapter assesses how the Court takes account of other human rights treaties, the issue of state responsibility for protecting rights, and the limits on its jurisdiction. It also considers how different rights are categorized into absolute, limited, and qualified rights. A summary of the concept of a state’s positive obligations, particularly in relation to the right to life and the prevention of ill-treatment, is also provided. Where the Court has accepted that restrictions on rights are necessary the tests that the Court applies are set out. A note is provided on the other restrictions on rights by a particular state’s reservations and derogations, and the meaning and impact of the ‘Margin of Appreciation’ on policy is outlined.
Enforcing the Human Rights Act
Authors: Wadham John , Mountfield Helen , Desai Raj , Hannett Sarah , Jones Jessica , Mitchell Eleanor , Wills Aidan
Published: May 2024

This chapter describes how the Human Rights Act is enforced in domestic courts, and addresses the appropriate forum for an argument under the Human Rights Act. The chapter addresses standing; limitation periods; retrospectivity; interventions in Human Rights Act cases by public interest groups and by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, as well as other means of enforcement by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The chapter considers remedies in Human Rights Act cases, namely damages, declarations of incompatibility under section 4 of the Human Rights Act and the section 10 ‘fast track’ procedure. Finally, key Convention concepts in the domestic courts—territoriality, positive obligations, legality, and proportionality—are discussed.
The Convention Rights: Absolute Rights
Authors: Wadham John , Mountfield Helen , Desai Raj , Hannett Sarah , Jones Jessica , Mitchell Eleanor , Wills Aidan
Published: May 2024

This chapter summarizes the so-called absolute rights in Articles 1–4 of the European Convention on Human Rights, namely the right to life (art 2), the prohibition on torture and inhuman or degrading punishment or treatment (art 3), and the prohibition on slavery and forced labour (art 4). For each article, an overview is given of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and any remaining important cases from the European Commission on Human Rights. The approach of the domestic courts under the Human Rights Act is discussed alongside the European case law, and any divergences are noted. In the case of each article, consideration is given to the positive, negative, and procedural aspects of these Convention rights.
The Convention Rights: Limited and Qualified Rights
Authors: Wadham John , Mountfield Helen , Desai Raj , Hannett Sarah , Jones Jessica , Mitchell Eleanor , Wills Aidan
Published: May 2024

This chapter summarizes the content of the limited and qualified rights under Articles 5–14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, covering the right to liberty and security; the right to a fair trial; the prohibition on punishment without law; the right to respect for private and family life; freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; freedom of expression; freedom of assembly and association; the right to marry; and the prohibition on discrimination. The chapter also addresses the general restrictions on rights found in Articles 15–18, namely derogations from certain rights; restrictions on political activity of aliens; prohibition on abuse of rights; and limitation on use of restrictions on rights. For each article, an overview is given of European Court of Human Rights case law and important cases from the European Commission on Human Rights. The approach of the domestic courts under the Human Rights Act is also discussed.
Reasons and Explanation
Authors: Robert Howard Nathan , Schroeder Mark
Published: May 2024

This chapter continues our task in Part 2 to explore the connections between reasons and closely associated concepts by considering the relationship between reasons and explanation. The explanatory role of reasons establishes that reasons have some connection to explanation but underspecifies what that role is. This chapter begins with the idea that this connection comes from the nature of reasons, because what it is to be a reason is to be an explanation of something. Problems for the idea that reasons are explanations of what you ought to do are introduced and addressed. The fallback views that reasons are explanations of other things—value, desire-promotion, or mass noun reason—are introduced and compared. And the alternative idea that the explanatory role of reasons comes not from the nature of reasons, but from the nature of ought, is introduced and motivated.
Selection in Variable Environments
Authors: Kassen Rees
Published: May 2024

Natural populations occupy environments that are more spatially, temporally, and biologically complex than the simple models of adaptation discussed in previous chapters can accommodate. This chapter considers how three additional factors—dispersal causing gene flow, how much the conditions of growth vary in space or in time, and the impact of the biotic community—on the outcome of selection and adaptive evolution. Special attention is paid to the evolution of niche breadth and the maintenance of genetic variation, as niche specialization is a necessary condition for the long-term maintenance of diversity.
Genomics of Adaptation
Authors: Kassen Rees
Published: May 2024

The search for the genetic changes responsible for adaptation has been the “holy grail” of adaptation research. As the costs of next-generation sequencing technologies have come down over the years, the grail is now easily within reach of most labs. This chapter synthesizes the results of “evolve-and-resequence” studies that identify the sequence changes in an evolved strain or population. These kinds of studies provide insight into the dynamics of molecular evolution and the connection between genotype and phenotype. Topics of particular interest include rates of substitution, the spectrum of adaptive and nonadaptive substitutions, the genetic targets of adaptation, and the genetic architecture underlying adaptation.
Novelty and Innovation
Authors: Kassen Rees
Published: May 2024

Natural selection can only work with the materials it has at hand. How, then, can a truly novel trait ever evolve? A compelling answer has been elusive because researchers have focused either on genetics or ecology, but rarely both, in their explanations. Microbial evolution offers the unique opportunity to study both genetics and ecology in detail. This chapter considers what we have learned about the evolution of novelty from microbial selection experiments. This work reveals that the genetic routes to novelty can be more variable than standard models have led us to believe and underscores the importance of considering both genetics and ecology in this process.
Decolonizing Freedom
Authors: Weir Allison
Published: May 2024

This book draws on Indigenous political theories and practices of decolonization grounded in conceptions of relationality and resurgence, in dialogue with Western philosophies, to re-encounter and reconstruct a tradition of relational freedom as a distinctive political conception of freedom: a radically democratic mode of engagement and participation in social and political relations with an infinite range of strange and diverse beings perceived as free agents in interdependent relations in a shared world. This conception of freedom involves meeting strangeness, danger, and conflict with a philoxenic ethic oriented toward relations of reciprocity. This is a performative mode of freedom as world-creation, rooted in land as a system of relationships among interdependent beings in an animate universe. Drawing on work by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, John Borrows, Glen Coulthard, Audra Simpson, Rauna Kuokkanen, Joanne Barker, Jodi Byrd, James Tully, Robert Nichols, and many others, this book traces a tradition of colonial unknowing in Western conceptions of freedom from Hobbes through republican and critical theories, and explores a countertradition of relations between freedom and love, exemplified in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s love of land and Hannah Arendt’s love of the world. This book calls for a coalitional politics guided by queer and feminist Indigenous models of transformative resurgence, and it proposes an approach to critical theory as a practice of self-transformation through openness to the other, oriented toward relational freedom.
For Love of the World
Authors: Weir Allison
Published: May 2024

For Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Indigenous freedom is a practice of engagement in relations with land, where land is the web of relations that connect all beings. This chapter considers the connections between Simpson’s formulation of freedom through love of land and the concept of amor mundi—love of the world—as the spirit of political freedom in the work of Hannah Arendt. To mediate between the two, this chapter takes up Ella Myers’s linking of democratic politics to an ethic of care for the world. The chapter argues that political contestations between Indigenous people and colonizing states over the meanings of land challenge divisions between human and nonhuman agency, and between public and private care. The chapter suggests that transformative reconciliation requires an ethics of philoxenic solidarity among heterogeneous beings, a risky politics of care for the wellbeing of diverse others and for the web of relations that connect us.
Conclusion
Authors: Weir Allison
Published: May 2024

If the aim of critical theory is freedom, a critical theory of freedom from relations of colonization would involve a method of critique as a practice of encounter with the other, oriented toward the transformation of ourselves and our relations, guided by an ethos of freedom in relations of reciprocity. This method informs a practice of freedom from colonial unknowing through reparative encounters between Euro-American and Indigenous critical theories, and among a constellation of critical theories of resistance to multiple forms of domination. This is a method of critical theory as a practice both of and for freedom: a practice of critique that is both engaged in resistance and oriented toward an ideal of relational freedom emergent from our intersecting histories. This method draws on Black and Indigenous theories and politics of transformative justice and transformative resurgence, including Patrisse Cullors, Ruby Sales, and Dian Million, with Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot, Eve Sedgwick, and Saba Mahmood.
Federalism
Authors: Francis Leslie P. , Francis John G.
Published: May 2024

Federalist political institutions have been justified for respecting cultural differences, bringing government closer to the people, permitting experimentation, achieving important policy goals, and tempering the impact of factions. This chapter argues that all of these justifications require possibilities of movement to areas of the country that are more protective of individual rights. It also explores how in the “compound republic” that is the United States, respective roles of the national and state governments are fluid and changing. U.S. federalism today is very different from federalism as imagined 250 years ago. There are many more states, extreme differences among state populations and wealth, easy transportation and communication across state boundaries, stronger roles for the federal courts, and increasingly entrenched political polarization. Negotiating today’s federalism raises difficult ethical issues for providers and their patients.
Differences among States
Authors: Francis Leslie P. , Francis John G.
Published: May 2024

U.S. states vary greatly on measures of health and the social determinants of health. This chapter explores the correlation of these stark differences with demographic factors such as race and ethnicity and with cultural factors such as religious identification. It demonstrates that states with the most vehement opposition to federal programs such as Medicaid receive the greatest federal subsidies. These differences are regional: people in the South are more likely to die young, less likely to have access to health insurance, and more likely to be opposed to abortion than their counterparts in the Northeast and the West Coast. These differences have implications for bioethics, such as whether medical aid in dying should be supported in a state where many residents lack access to minimally decent health care. They also have implications for the ethics of federalism such as whether better-off states should be expected to subsidize states that lack policies to improve access to care.
Family Mediation
Authors: Salem Peter , Mayer Bernard
Published: May 2024

Family mediation emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in response to widespread dissatisfaction with traditional adversarial legal process. The hope was that mediation would transform separation and divorce from an acrimonious and draining experience to a collaborative, problem-solving endeavor resulting in better outcomes for divorcing parties and especially their children. While an initial surge of enthusiasm drew many mental health professionals, lawyers, and others to seek training and to establish a mediation practice which emphasized collaborative approaches to negotiations, the realities of the divorce process and the legal system often made it difficult to put these goals into practice. This chapter explores the barriers that arose to achieving the early vision of family mediation, the successes and failures experienced in embedding mediation into the divorce process, and how these have influenced modern-day family dispute resolution practice.
A Mediation Model for Self-Represented Parties
Authors: Hansen Susan , Holtz Casey A. , Dwyer Michael
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides a summary of a successfully implemented family law mediation model designed for self-represented parties. The chapter discusses the need for developing divorce mediation services for self-represented parties as well as information regarding the benefits of interdisciplinary mediation for this population. The chapter outlines the mediation process with details of each interdisciplinary professional’s role in the process, including the lawyer-mediator, the child specialist, and the financial neutral. The chapter concludes with a summary of the benefits of the process for families, professionals, and the courts alongside the potential barriers that may need to be addressed for proper implementation.
Parenting Coordination
Authors: Fidler Barbara , Burns Annette T.
Published: May 2024

Between 20% and 25% of separating/divorcing parents remain engaged in chronic conflict several years after separation. This high-conflict co-parenting is characterized by high degrees of mistrust, escalated anger, poor communication, low cooperation, ineffective or failed decision-making, high relitigation rates, multiple agency involvement, and complaints to professional governing bodies. Parenting coordination is a dispute resolution process to assist parents engaged in high-conflict co-parenting implement their parenting plan. This chapter summarizes the legal framework, practice variation, and guidelines and provides an overview of the process including screening and intake, contracting, consensus-building (parent education, implementing a parenting plan, conflict management, negotiation), and decision-making. The risks and benefits of the process are discussed.
Arbitrating Family Law Disputes
Authors: Atwood Barbara Ann
Published: May 2024

This chapter is a guide to family law arbitration laws and practice. Its focus is on voluntary contractual arbitration, not the court-annexed, non-binding arbitration that exists to encourage settlement of cases. The chapter highlights the advantages and limitations of arbitration as compared to other forms of dispute resolution and gives an overview of state law on family law arbitration and the process itself. The elements of an arbitration agreement are discussed as well as special considerations relating to child-related disputes and the potential impact of intimate partner violence. The blend of arbitration in combination with other alternative dispute resolution methods, in particular the “med-arb” hybrid, is also explored. Where relevant, the discussion emphasizes variations in state law. The chapter concludes with a brief description of religious arbitration.
Substance Use Disorders
Authors: Tabashneck Stephanie , Drozd Leslie , Soilson Jeffrey A.
Published: May 2024

Substance use disorder (SUD) is best viewed through a medical lens instead of as evidence of a moral failure or deep-seated character flaw. Evidence-based treatment, research-supported psychotherapy, and medically assisted treatment in family dispute resolution processes are preferred as opposed to adversarial interventions. Given that SUD is found in 1 in 8 families, screening is mandatory in all family law matters. SUD affects both individuals and families. Non-use during parenting time may be the goal as opposed to total abstinence. Given that relapse is a predictable part of addiction, relapse prevention is part of treatment. Parenting plans best consider both the safety of the child and the child’s need to sustain a connection with their parent(s). The guiding principles for SUD treatment for the family involve safety, connection, accountability, and compassion.