bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Quantified Governance
Authors: Wallace Jeremy L.
Published: October 2022

The fifth chapter turns to the ways that the Reform Era’s political economy model of limited, quantified vision worked to generate development through the 1990s and early 2000s, focusing on its core institution: cadre evaluation, with its quantitative performance targets. Inequalities deepened despite growth, and while some efforts were made to aid left-behind regions and the poor, the chief rhetorical switch was to embrace “advanced” forces of capitalism and capitalists. The Hu-Wen leadership team rhetorically made alleviating poverty a priority and tinkered at its edges through different programs, but, in the main, the Chinese ship of state continued sailing in the same direction of seeking aggregate economic growth. When the 2008 global financial crisis shook the world, the regime reverted to massive Keynesian stimulus to calm the waters.
Deployments and Minority Populations
Authors: Allen Michael A. , Flynn Michael E. , Machain Carla Martinez , Stravers Andrew
Published: October 2022

Ethnic and racial minority populations in countries that host US troops have complex attitudes toward US actors. Conventional accounts hold that minority communities often bear the brunt of the negative externalities of US military basing and deployments. Others suggest that US military bases can provide social and economic mobility opportunities that may not otherwise be present for some groups. This chapter finds that minority self-identification alone correlates with a higher likelihood of expressing a positive view of US actors. However, once other demographic and attitudinal variables that correlate with minority status, like income and education, are taken into account, this relationship disappears, and minority self-identification correlates with less favorable views of all three groups. These results indicate that minority attitudes may reflect individuals' economic and educational position within society more than their status as a minority population.
Deployments and Protests
Authors: Allen Michael A. , Flynn Michael E. , Machain Carla Martinez , Stravers Andrew
Published: October 2022

This chapter explores how US military deployments lead to protests against the US and against the US military in particular. US military deployments and bases have long been cited as causing negative externalities in host countries. These negative events may help to mobilize opposition to the US presence. Our analyses yield several important findings, drawing on both individual-level survey data and new country-level protest data. First, our models of individual behavior correctly classify more than 90% of survey respondents’ involvement in anti-US protest activities. These models show that individuals’ attitudes and experiences—not simple demographic traits—offer the strongest predictive power in determining who participates in anti-US protest events. Second, crime victimization, in particular, is a strong predictor of protest involvement. Finally, larger US troop deployments cause more frequent anti-US protest events.
Grounding Ideas and a Short Overview
Authors: Congleton Roger D.
Published: October 2022

Chapter 1 briefly reviews the grounding ideas for the book. It discusses the use of analytical narratives for historical analysis. It also discusses and develops a rule-bound, but not rule-determined, model of human learning and decision-making that the author calls homo-constitutionalus, which can account for the effects of internalized rules of conduct on human behavior. It also discusses the nature of social dilemmas. Human choices are context specific and highly conditional. In many choice settings, outcomes generated are jointly determined by the choices of several individuals or groups. In an important subset of such settings, the jointly determined outcomes are among the worst possible when judged by the individuals themselves. These are social dilemmas—many of which must be solved in order that humanity can progress.
Ethics and Democratic Governance
Authors: Congleton Roger D.
Published: October 2022

After the problems associated with customary law enforcement are solved, a community might wish to extend the authority of its rule-enforcing organization to tasks beyond the encouragement of customary rules of conduct. They may, for example, task such organizations with enforcing new laws or providing new public services. To do so, a community may attempt to use majority rule to make decisions about new policies either at village meetings or among village leaders. Unfortunately, democratic proceedings have their own dilemmas that must be solved for such more powerful government to be productive rather than extractive or ineffective. They must, for example, avoid the problems of majority indecision and excessive redistribution, while continuing to hold open and fair referenda and elections. Normative dispositions are likely to play critical roles in avoiding these and other political dilemmas.
A Beginning
Authors: Congleton Roger D.
Published: October 2022

Part III of the book provides evidence that Western ethical ideas and behavior came to be more supportive of markets in the centuries leading up to the great acceleration of commerce in the nineteenth century. Chapter 9 provides an overview of Aristotle’s views on the good life and good society. His work was widely read in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and both inspired new ethical research and provided a useful benchmark for judging the merits of innovations. Utilitarians, for example, returned to Aristotle’s idea of happiness as the ultimate aim. His ideas about virtue were also well known and influential.
From Renaissance to Early Enlightenment
Authors: Congleton Roger D.
Published: October 2022

Chapter 10 uses two well-known Catholic authors of the early sixteenth century, Erasmus and Thomas More, to characterize skeptical medieval attitudes toward markets, and then reviews ethical analyses that suggest that societies in the Netherlands and England were becoming more favorably inclined toward commerce during the seventeenth century. Two Dutchmen, Grotius and La Court, are reviewed, followed by two English theologians, Baxter and Barkley, and a well-known philosopher, John Locke. By 1700, it is clear that reservations about markets and hard work have been greatly diminished and that prosperity itself was increasingly regarded to be a blessing rather than a distraction or curse.
Utilitarianism: Commerce and the Good Society
Authors: Congleton Roger D.
Published: October 2022

Chapter 12 reviews the contributions of Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, Spencer, and Pigou. All are interested in rules that tend to advance general interests, where general interests are defined to be ones that increase the sum of human happiness in the territories of interest. The first three utilitarians are very broadly supportive of commerce. Market transactions tend to make all parties better off, because there are mutual gains from exchange. Similarly, product and production innovations tend to benefit more persons than they harm and thereby also increase aggregate utility. Spencer suggests that ethics, communities, and humanity coevolve. Pigou suggests that although market transactions are generally consistent with increasing human welfare, there are many reforms can potentially increase welfare (aggregate utility).
The Arguments Revisited and Summarized
Authors: Congleton Roger D.
Published: October 2022

The concluding chapter revisits the main line of argument and provides some additional evidence in support of its explanation of the great acceleration. The main theme of the book is that internalized rules of conduct that are often classified as ethical dispositions or virtues are often the most plausible solutions to the many social dilemmas associated with life in communities, transactions in markets, and political systems that would otherwise block human progress. Such rules have both genetic and social evolutionary support, which explains both why internalizations are possible and why the rules internalized tend to improve through time. Humanity’s great escape from the Malthusian trap began in the seventeenth century in Western Europe and accelerated in the nineteenth. It is associated with changes in ethical dispositions that tended to support more rapid commercial development. In addition to reviewing the main line of argument developed in this text, two appendices are also included. The first discusses the book’s place in the contemporary literature. The second provides a short history of the writing of the book and thanks to colleagues, friends, and students for helpful comments and suggestions.
What We Know and Don’t Know about Climate Change
Authors: Pindyck Robert S.
Published: October 2022

There is a lot we know about climate change, but there is also a lot we don’t know. Even if we knew how much CO2 will be emitted over the coming decades, we wouldn’t know how much temperatures will rise as a result. And even if we could predict the extent of warming that will occur, we can say very little about its impact on the economy and on society more generally. The chapter explains that we face considerable uncertainty over climate change and its impact, and why there is so much uncertainty. The chapter also explains that the uncertainty we face (particularly the possibility of a catastrophic climate outcome) does not mean that we should do nothing now to reduce emissions. On the contrary, it creates insurance value that can lead to early action.
The Role of Uncertainty in Climate Policy
Authors: Pindyck Robert S.
Published: October 2022

This chapter explains the policy implications of climate change uncertainty. First, the uncertainty (particularly over the possibility of a catastrophic climate outcome) creates insurance value, which pushes us to earlier and stronger actions to reduce CO2 emissions. Second, uncertainty interacts with two kinds of irreversibilities: CO2 remains in the atmosphere for centuries, making the environmental damage from CO2 emissions irreversible, pushing us to earlier and stronger actions. But reducing CO2 emissions requires sunk costs, that is, irreversible expenditures on such things as wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars, and charging stations. This pushes us away from earlier actions. Both irreversibilities are inherent in climate policy. The net effect is ambiguous, but there is evidence that environmental irreversibility dominates. This, together with insurance value, means that climate change uncertainty should lead us to earlier action.
What to Do: Adaptation
Authors: Pindyck Robert S.
Published: October 2022

This book has argued that reducing emissions is critical but not sufficient, so the question is what do to beyond reducing emissions. That brings us to the role of adaptation, the subject of Chapter 7. The chapter reviews different forms of private and public adaptation, and discusses several examples in detail. The chapter explains how agriculture, which is| highly vulnerable to extremes in temperature and rainfall, has already been adapted to climate change, and is likely to see further adaptation. The chapter also discusses the potential for adaptation to rising sea levels and more frequent and powerful hurricanes. And then the chapter turns to what may be the most important—and most controversial—form of adaptation, which is geoengineering.
The Rise and Decline of a Liberal International Order
Authors: Steinberg Richard H.
Published: October 2022

The international order favored by Western powers since the Second World War has been primarily rules-based, organized around the principles of open markets, liberal democracy, and human rights, and defended by a web of military alliances and security guarantees—but it has not been static in form, depth, or geographic breadth. It has evolved as postwar geopolitical structure has shifted. During the Cold War, embedded liberalism characterized an international order limited largely to the West. In the unipolar moment at the end of the Cold War, the rules-based order globalized and became hyperliberal. In today’s multipolar world, the global liberal order is in decline: power has dispersed, revisionist states disfavor liberalism, and Western governments face political blowback from the distributive consequences of the freer movement of goods, services, and people that was a product of hyperliberalism. While reviving the global liberal order of the recent past is impossible, it would be possible to reconstitute a fundamentally liberal rules-based order, subject to an updated social contract, covering much of the world.
Cyber Conflict and the Thresholds of War
Authors: Kilovaty Ido
Published: October 2022

Cyberspace has revolutionized the way in which states engage in conflict with one another. While it is widely accepted that international law applies to cyberspace, there remains the question of whether cyberspace is truly novel and distinctive in its effects to the extent that our existing legal thresholds for war have become outdated. This chapter defines the “thresholds of war” as use of force, armed attack, and armed conflict. Through an analysis of the novelty of cyber conflict, this chapter seeks to make two contributions. First, to demonstrate that cyber conflict can be understood not only through its kinetic consequences but also through a variety of mass-scale and devastating effects that lie below the thresholds of war as articulated through the decades. Second, that these thresholds of war are outdated and in need of recalibration to properly capture actions that are legitimate and illegitimate in cyberspace. This chapter argues that the current international legal order is in danger of creating a lawless cyberspace, where states engage in offensive cyberspace behavior based on an assumption that any effects below the thresholds of war are permissible. Redrawing the line between the permissible and impermissible in cyberspace is of utmost importance to tackle this concern.
Introduction to Public Law and Economics
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Gilbert Michael D.
Published: October 2022

This chapter presents a brief introduction to law and economics and its intellectual history, and then it describes three modes of analysis: positive, normative, and interpretive. Much law-and-economics scholarship emphasizes the first two modes, but this book emphasizes the third, which is new to many economists and of paramount interest to lawyers. Next, the chapter explains the organization of the book. Every public law grows from six fundamental processes of government: bargaining, voting, entrenching, delegating, adjudicating, and enforcing. The chapter describes these processes and explains their centrality to public law. It concludes with a road map. The book devotes two chapters to each process mentioned here, with the first chapter in each pair presenting economic theory divided into three parts: positive, normative, and interpretive. The second chapter in each pair applies the theory to topics in public law.
Theory of Bargaining
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Gilbert Michael D.
Published: October 2022

This chapter presents the economic theory of bargaining. It begins with the positive theory, explaining concepts like efficiency and distribution. It develops the Private Coase Theorem, which is familiar from private law, and the Public Coase Theorem, which applies to actors like legislators, administrators, and judges. Turning to normative theory, the chapter explains when bargaining by public law actors is likely to benefit or harm the public. In the interpretive analysis, the chapter applies economics to questions about the “intentions” of lawmakers. The chapter addresses topics such as vote trading, minority rights, public goods, and the use of legislative history by judges.
Theory of Entrenchment
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Gilbert Michael D.
Published: October 2022

This chapter presents the economic theory of entrenchment. Many laws are “entrenched,” meaning they are especially difficult to change. The chapter shows how entrenchment creates an “equilibrium set” within which law remains fixed. Next, it explores the conditions under which entrenched law can change and how small or large such changes are likely to be. The chapter studies various forms of entrenchment, including supermajority rules, bicameralism, and presentment. Turning to normative analysis, the chapter reviews the conventional justifications for entrenchment, which involve minority rights and stability, and relates them to the economic concepts of efficiency and social welfare. The chapter concludes with interpretive analysis, relating the economic theory of entrenchment to precedent and the doctrine of stare decisis.
Theory of Delegation
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Gilbert Michael D.
Published: October 2022

This chapter presents the economic theory of delegation. The delegation of power—from the President to administrators, from citizens to legislators, and so on—is central to public law. This chapter begins with the positive theory of delegation. It analyzes the trade-offs principals face when deciding whether to delegate authority, and it considers whether principals should guide their agents using “rules” or “standards.” Turning to normative theory, the chapter studies the conditions under which delegation benefits principals, agents, and the general public. Finally, the chapter addresses interpretation by courts. Lawyers and judges routinely ask whether a statute grants an agency the power to take a particular action. The chapter develops the “delegation canon” to help answer that question.
Next Generation Compliance
Authors: Giles Cynthia
Published: October 2022

Nearly everyone accepts as gospel two assumptions: compliance with environmental rules is good, and enforcement is responsible for making compliance happen. Both are wrong. In fact, serious violations of environmental regulations are widespread, and by far the most important driver of compliance results is not enforcement but the structure of the rule itself. In Next Generation Compliance: Environmental Regulation for the Modern Era, Cynthia Giles shows that well-designed regulations deploying creative strategies to make compliance the default can achieve excellent implementation outcomes. Poorly designed rules that create many opportunities to evade, obfuscate, or ignore will have dismal performance that no amount of enforcement will ever fix. Rampant violations have real consequences: unhealthy air, polluted water, contaminated drinking water, exposure to dangerous chemicals, and unrestrained climate-forcing pollution. They also land hardest on already overburdened communities—that’s why Next Gen and environmental justice are tightly linked. The good news is there are tools to build much better compliance into regulations, including many tested strategies that can be the building blocks of programs that withstand the inevitable pressures of real life. Next Generation Compliance shows how regulators can avoid the compliance calamities that plague far too many environmental rules today, a lesson that is particularly urgent for regulations tackling climate change. It has an optimistic message: there are ways to ensure reliable results, if regulators jettison incorrect assumptions and design rules that are resilient to the mess and complexity of the real world.
Noncompliance with Environmental Rules Is Worse Than You Think
Authors: Giles Cynthia
Published: October 2022

This chapter presents the most complete accounting anywhere of compliance with the nation’s environmental laws, which shows that serious violations are widespread. It describes the poor record in industries where the compliance picture is fairly complete, like point sources of water pollution (NPDES), air-polluting sectors like coal-fired power, petroleum refining, and cement manufacturing, and hazardous waste creators like mineral processors. It explores the many sectors in which the compliance picture is spotty, but indications of major problems are everywhere, including oil and gas wells, animal agriculture, hazardous waste generators, storm water, and pesticide protections for farmworkers. And it looks at two instances where the official compliance data is wrong: drinking water and stationary sources of air pollution. This chapter proves that pervasive serious violations aren’t unusual; they are the norm. That’s why a new approach is needed, which is the subject of the rest of the book.
Rules about Rules
Authors: Giles Cynthia
Published: October 2022

This chapter is a very brief introduction to the laws and practice that govern writing of regulations: the rules about rules. It is a basic outline of the authority under which agencies write rules, and what standards govern how they do it. Some of those are set by Congress in laws, some are directives from the president or from courts, and some are practices that the agencies themselves adopt. The purpose of this chapter’s brief overview is to provide context about the constraints agencies face in writing regulations. The good news is that nothing in the rules about rules necessarily blocks the innovation argued for in this book: every rule can include Next Gen strategies, although some will have more latitude than others.
Innovative Strategies Are the Only Way to Cut Methane from Oil and Gas
Authors: Giles Cynthia
Published: October 2022

Oil and gas companies know how to slash methane from oil and gas production. They just aren’t doing it. Leaks, venting, and flaring all contribute to large and growing methane emissions, with their many-times-carbon climate impacts. Super-emitters contribute a wildly disproportionate share of the methane and are tough to spot because they are intermittent and unpredictable, and only visible with specialized equipment. While we wait for at-scale deployment of new methane monitoring strategies, innovation is a necessity to bolster reliable implementation of new standards. Incentivizing more continuous monitoring, burden-shifting, and crowdsourcing compliance scrutiny are among the many creative tools regulators can deploy. This chapter recommends an array of Next Gen compliance-driving strategies, including some that block oil and gas companies from dumping compliance responsibilities for abandoned wells on the taxpayer.
Updating Federalism
Authors: Giles Cynthia
Published: October 2022

The dynamic tension of cooperative federalism—federal laws set the floor, states implement considering local circumstances—has fueled many environmental advances since it started in the 1970s but is not working for us now, to the detriment of compliance. States have a chokehold on environmental compliance information, obscuring violations, reducing protection, and preventing regulators from understanding how well environmental laws are working. At the same time, federal oversight resists states’ vital role as innovators and laboratories for new approaches. Next Gen strategies, like requiring regulated industries to report electronically to data systems shared by states and feds, can help us shift away from increasingly polarized disputes and toward innovation and mutual problem-solving. This chapter outlines how an updated federalism can strengthen protection while avoiding the ideological wars that interfere with the common goal of better public health.
White Consciousness from Colonization to the Civil War
Authors: Eyerman Ron
Published: October 2022

The chapter traces the making of white identity from the colonial period to the Civil War. While it is present, trauma narrative plays only a marginal role in early American history, as settlers struggle to survive in a hostile environment. As a basis for collective identification and collective action, whiteness is more of a thin form, more a potential than an actual collective consciousness, while thick individual and group identification centers on religion, region, and country of origin. It was the Civil War that fully activated white consciousness and in its aftermath, the myth of a Lost Cause articulated a mythical form that could be materialized and transmitted in various forms over generations.
Racializing the Nation
Authors: Eyerman Ron
Published: October 2022

This chapter traces how the tragic narrative of white identity became a resource for collective mobilization in the decades following the Civil War and upto the present. An emergent theme here was the idea of the United States as a “white nation.” In the westward expansion, the tragic narrative combined with a triumphant narrative of conquest. Bolstering this process was a supportive and ever-developing popular culture, where literature, theater, film, and music served as banal carriers of white superiority and a color-coded “racial” hierarchy.
White Consciousness in the Digital Age
Authors: Eyerman Ron
Published: October 2022

This chapter traces the development of new means of mass communication in transmitting the ideology of white supremacy. This occurs in a context of political turmoil, where the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam have mobilized the populace and the public sphere. White identity-based subcultures form and grow, as carriers of thick white identification, aided by new digital forms of mass media. This new means of communication adds another dimension to the articulation and distribution of the ideology of white supremacy, creating a scene where participation and recruitment can operate in a more anonymous fashion.
Austria 1867–1955
Authors: Boyer John W.
Published: October 2022

This book connects the political history of German-speaking provinces of the Habsburg Empire before 1914 (Vienna and the Alpine Lands) with the history of the Austrian Republic that emerged in 1918. It presents the case of modern Austria as a fascinating example of democratic nation-building. The construction of an Austrian political nation began in 1867 under Habsburg Imperial auspices, with the German-speaking bourgeois Liberals defining the concept of a political people (Volk) and giving that Volk a constitution and a liberal legal and parliamentary order to protect their rights against the Crown. The decades that followed saw the administrative and judicial institutions of the Liberal state solidified, but in the 1880s and 1890s the membership of the Volk exploded to include new social and economic strata from the lower bourgeoisie and the working classes. The war crisis of 1914/1918 exploded the Empire and also accelerated the emergence of new structures of democratic self-governance in the Austrian lands, enshrined in the republican Constitution of 1920. The catastrophe of 1938 resulting in the Nazi occupation closed off the temptation to view Austria as having a vague attachment to a larger German nation. After 1945 the surviving legatees of the Revolution of 1918 reassembled under the four-power Allied occupation. They then fashioned a shared political culture which proved sufficiently flexible to accommodate intense partisanship, but a partisanship in which each side claimed resources within the given democratic legal order, rather than seeking to dominate the general political system solely for their own purposes.
The Genesis of the New French Law of Contract
Authors: Rowan Solène
Published: October 2022

This chapter introduces the new French law of contract. It highlights how the French Civil Code remained to be the principal private law legislative instrument in France as of today despite being revised to keep up with the changing time. Prior to the reforms, the Code on contract law remained unchanged and was only progressively interpreted differently. The chapter also acknowledges the realisation that the Civil Code’s international influence and appeal to international business had been falling. Moreover, the drafters addressed the 2016 reforms on contractual liability and compensatory, and agreed damages. The chapter then clarifies that the analysis is limited to the original articles in the 1804 Civil Code.
The Place of Contract Law in the Law of Obligations and the Sources of Contract Law
Authors: Rowan Solène
Published: October 2022

This chapter notes the key principles of contract law. In France, contract law forms are included as part of the law of obligation. Juridical acts mostly focus on contractual obligations, while juridical facts are the source of extra-contractual obligations and quasi-contracts. On the other hand, the no-option rule avoids undermining either extra-contractual liability or the allocations of contract risks. Codified legislation, decided cases, and legal writings are also noted as the primary and most influential sources in the development of French contract law. The chapter also tackles how the Catala proposals and Terré project served as foundations for the later development of the Civil Code.
Seven Modalities of Silence
Authors: Freeden Michael
Published: October 2022

Silence is analysed in seven concealed modalities: the unthinkable, the unspeakable/unsayable, the ineffable, the inarticulable, the unnoticeable, the unknowable, and the unconceptualizable. The unthinkable mainly refers to unacceptable or highly unlikely occurences. The unspeakable is considered too repulsive or outrageous to voice. It both overlaps with and differs from the unsayable inasmuch as the latter can signify something that cannot be said because there is no possibility of either saying or naming it. The ineffable often relates to sacred or divine qualities, or approached through Derrida’s notion of différance. The inarticulable can follow from a deficiency of linguistic expression or be identified in psychoanalysis as repression, blockage, or trauma. The first four modalities concern the ways in which silence intervenes in and manages human expressiveness. The sixth and seventh relate to silences at the very limits of epistemological or ontological reach. The unknowable pertains to a fundamental lack of information, while the unconceptualizable refers to the unavailability of an intellectual and cultural apparatus through which certain kinds of knowledge can be processed. The fifth—the unnoticeable—is an outlier both to the first four and to the last two. It shares with the former the presence of epistemological constraints on conveying knowledge. It shares with the latter the presence of circumstances that sever the accessibility of human agency to evidence or knowledge. They are reflected in Bourdieu’s phrase ‘it goes without saying because it comes without saying’.
Silence in Language and Communication
Authors: Freeden Michael
Published: October 2022

Silence is a form of communication, with its rhythms and patterns. Linguists record that although silence is crucially assimilated into discourse, smaller silences invariably intersperse speech and bisect it, extensively as well as minutely. Silences mark rhetorical emphases or disjunctive hiatuses and pauses making up segments of speech. Their written occurrences can be registered mechanically as punctuation, dashes, ellipses, or paragraphs, and gaps in the printed page, downgrading silence as a source of mystique or power. Social interaction is normally a flow of language disrupted by silences. Politically, silences are a way of exercising power, deliberate or unintentional, on the co-conversant. They can control time in a conversation, delineate human separation or integration, or curtail interaction. And they can defuse and adjust the tensions posed by spontaneity and indeterminacy. In some linguistic theories speech is prioritized over silence—the latter ranked as exceptional or ‘abnormal’. But the semantic properties of communication, as displayed in the theatre of the absurd, accord silence equal pegging with speech, being inextricably intermeshed with it. In Pinter’s oeuvre silences are miscommunications, often isolating and menacing; in Beckett’s works, words are frequently bereft of semantic import, ostensibly signifying nothing, while paradoxically conveying a nihilistic message.
State and Government Silences
Authors: Freeden Michael
Published: October 2022

State silences can be self-assumed when a decision is taken—in its basic constitutional arrangements, or through its agents—to abstain from publicizing a view, or from entering into a performative act, that could be listened to, read, or understood by a relevant grouping. Typical areas may concern issues of abortion, the subscription to religious beliefs, sexual practices, or juridical procedures. A state’s silence can also be the result of governmental ignorance or the opacity of certain individual and social practices. Constitutions supply permanent absences, abeyances, and gaps, obscure and unwritten, through which the potential build-up of political pressure can be averted. Governmental silence as quietude can be perceived as a political expectation. Silence often emerges under the guise of neutrality as removing the state from certain classes of debate and contestation. It may have an ethical underpinning or be a way of dealing with intractable contestations. Rules regulating parliamentary or electoral procedures, such as catching the Speaker’s eye and majoritarian ‘winner takes all’ systems, inevitably serve as silencing devices. National commemoration involves a distribution of significance in ranking and acting out silences and in covering up other memories. Some centrally endorsed silences reinforce the singularity of authority. And recently, the right to erase one’s digital history is developing as a claim towards the state.
Creative Destruction
Authors: Marchi Simone
Published: October 2022

This chapter looks into the theories on the formation of the Solar System. It includes short summaries of ancient myths about how the world was formed. This chapter regards collisions as responsible for the growth of terrestrial planets and the Solar System. Collisions are also a means of bringing together different components and creating new possibilities. In addition, it also cites the possibility of collisions forming another Earth-like planet. NASA’s Kepler satellite, commissioned in order to measure planet dimensions and to look for more exoplanets, is considered as a game changer. It is hoped that as technologies like the telescope continue to become more powerful, more exploration of life on other planets can be conducted and studies of celestial bodies will become more accurate.
Theocratic linguistics
Authors: Machan Tim William
Published: October 2022

Beginning with the biblical account of the Tower of Babel, social narratives of language history have relied on two crucial declaratives. The first regards the nature of language itself—specifically, that as a means of communal interaction as well as semantic communication, language is, ontologically, social as well as structural. The second regards the import of how languages and sociolinguistic contexts relate to one other. Their relations may be understood to be causative, resultative, or mimetic, but, given the first declarative, they cannot be merely coincidental, since that would mean that they are not (as the narrative requires) fundamental to a language’s ontology. Put another way, from the perspective of language as a social semiotic, explanations of language change are as socially encoded and motivated as are the changes themselves.
The Institutional Response
Authors: Mantzari Despoina
Published: October 2022

This chapter examines the determinants of judicial scrutiny of economic evidence at the specialist UK Competition Appeal Tribunal. These range from the Tribunal’s membership and composition, its subject-matter expertise, its own self perception of its role, the standard of review applied, the Tribunal’s rules of procedure, and the polycentric nature of the decisions under review. The chapter discusses the interplay of two different situations: the ‘specialist/specialist’ situation, which concerns the Tribunal’s scrutiny of economic evidence enshrined in regulatory agencies’ decisions, and the ‘generalist/specialist’ situation, which concerns the Court of Appeal’s review of the CAT’s determinations. This tripartite relationship between the expert regulators, the specialist CAT, and the generalist Court of Appeal gives rise to a varying intensity of review. The chapter shows that the status of the reviewing court and its access to epistemic competence is an important factor, but not a dispositive one, in determining the degree of judicial scrutiny of economic evidence, due to the polycentricity of regulatory disputes.
Trust Me, I’m a Doctor
Authors: Zecher Jonathan L.
Published: October 2022

This chapter examines some of the conditions of medicine as cultural production in the late antique Mediterranean. Hippocratic, or Galenic, medicine was one of a number of arts and activities that pertained to healing bodies and souls in late antiquity. This variety contributed both to cooperation among different groups and competition between them, in what Vivian Nutton called “the medical marketplace.” The rise of Christianity led to some changes in market conditions, like the turn from Asclepian temples to holy peoples’ shrines for healing. Nevertheless, to a great extent, competition for patients still meant a competition for trust and perception as an expert in relevant domains of knowledge. Physicians articulated their expertise through ethical considerations, which aimed especially at maintaining relationships of trust while safeguarding reputations as effective healers and honest dealers. Intertwined with ethical considerations, healers engaged regularly in rhetorical persuasion and self-presentation, in both public and more private settings. Ethical, rhetorical, and even mannerly considerations together create images of expertise and reliability on which other professions—and spiritual directors—traded.
The Relational Constitution of Agreement (1)
Authors: Campbell David
Published: October 2022

An essential element of the market economy’s claim to legitimacy is that it is a system of consumer sovereignty. This claim is fundamentally challenged by various forms of the argument that it is business organisations, rather than consumers, which ultimately determine the pattern of production and consumption in the market economies. A principal regulatory function of the law of contract is to ensure that when a consumer reveals her or his preferences by making a choice to exchange, the exchange is a product of her or his agreement. This cannot be a question of supplying ever increasing information, but must be a question of bracketing off many potential issues in order to make choice possible. The law of contract principally does this through the implication of terms in fact. Focusing on the principal terms implied in sales of goods, it is shown that these impose moral obligations on seller’s to satisfy the reasonable demands of consumers. Far from being a market of caveat emptor in which the business seller can pursue profit in a solipsistically self-interested manner, satisfaction of the conditions of welfare enhancing exchange means that the general market economy is an economy of caveat venditor.
The Relational Constitution of Bargain (2)
Authors: Campbell David
Published: October 2022

The principle that no inquiry will be made into the adequacy of consideration is so obvious an implication of a law of contract that seeks to actualise autonomy of choice that there seems to be no case law challenge to the basic idea. But common law and statutory challenges which, approaching from the principle’s periphery, call the principle into question, have been mounted on numerous grounds, clustered around the idea of inequality of bargaining power. But what is described as inequality of bargaining power must, of course, be a characteristic property of any empirical economy of imperfect or monopoly competition, and it is not inequality of bargaining power as such that is a mischief but its exploitation in pursuit of solipsistic self-interest. A law of contract which was not seen to be fair would lack moral and political force, but the law clustered around inequality of bargaining power very badly confuses substantive unfairness, which is inimical to contract, with procedural fairness, which is essential. A law of contract based on procedural fairness must leave overt questions about the egalitarian distribution of income aside in order to institutionalise contractual justice, which requires active steps be taken to make give effect to distribution by desert. The laws clustered around inequality of bargaining power do display some recognition of this.
Reasons and Fittingness
Authors: Naar Hichem
Published: October 2022

Asking whether there are reasons to love others, or whether love can be appropriate or fitting, is pointless if we are completely in the dark about the nature of normative reasons and fittingness. Informed by the philosophy of normativity, this chapter provides some apparatus essential for the discussion over reasons for love to go forward. The chapter motivates a link between normative reasons and fittingness, elucidates the notion of reason at play in the debate, and provides a discussion of the various background conditions on reasons. The latter task will turn out to be particularly crucial in the context of a defense of the rationality of love.
The Political Economy of Investment Arbitration
Authors: Phillips Williams Zoe
Published: October 2022

The Political Economy of Investment Arbitration asks how political institutions and actors in the host state of an investment contribute to the emergence of investor–state disputes. Combining insights from international relations and political economy, it considers two opposing explanations for investor–state disputes: shifting state preferences towards foreign direct investment (FDI) and the lack of state capacity to maintain an investment-friendly environment. This book’s central conclusion is that democratic institutions in host states contribute to the emergence of investor–state disputes that end in international arbitration. Indeed, the book argues that at the heart of many investor–state disputes are highly politicized distributional conflicts involving a range of domestic interest groups. It is often pressure from these groups, whether through voting, protests, or lobbying, which motivates states to take the policy decisions that are subsequently subject to investors’ legal challenges. Thus, this book demonstrates that in the face of the potentially high costs posed by investment arbitration, governments continue to take measures which may harm investors in order to pursue specific policy goals. More importantly, these disputes are not only the result of corruption or weak rule of law but also of measures which are taken at the behest of broader interest groups and relate to clear public policy concerns. This has important implications for our normative assessment of the regime and is highly relevant to current debates in both international law and international political economy about the relationship between investment treaties and domestic politics.
The Constitutionalization of Human Rights Law
Authors: Meili Stephen
Published: October 2022

The Constitutionalization of Human Rights Law analyzes how lawyers representing refugees use human rights provisions in national constitutions to close the gap between law on the books and how that law is implemented by focusing on five countries (Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, Uganda, the United States) and how lawyers adapt creatively to social, political, and legal contexts. Many refugee-receiving states openly reject or passively ignore their obligation under international law to protect refugees. Given that law’s growing irrelevance, cause lawyers have turned to constitutionalized human rights law. While many countries are likely to have included such provisions in their Constitutions without intending to fulfill their commitments, cause lawyers have seized on them as a more enforceable means of rights protection. This book proposes a theory of a continuum of ever-more ambitious methods through which cause lawyers use constitutionalized human rights law to benefit refugees. Lawyers use different tools as they move along this continuum, including strategic litigation, training governmental officials in the applicable law, and various forms of informal advocacy. As to the effectiveness of human rights treaties, this book provides qualitative evidence of how such treaties achieve greater significance when incorporated into national constitutions. As to refugee law, it analyzes how international protections for refugees become stronger when domestic lawyers enforce them through national constitutions. And as to cause lawyering, it shows how refugee lawyers use constitutionalized human rights law to protect their clients.
Theory
Authors: Meili Stephen
Published: October 2022

The theoretical framework, discussed in this chapter, for this book lies at the intersection of three subgenres in socio-legal research: human rights treaty effectiveness, refugee law, and cause lawyering. It is at that intersection where we can analyze how refugee lawyers attempt to bridge the gap between human rights violations suffered by refugees and the constitutional provisions that, in theory at least, prohibit them. With regard to the effectiveness of human rights treaties, it provides important qualitative evidence of the ways that such treaties achieve greater significance when they are incorporated into national constitutions. With regard to refugee law, it suggests how international protections for refugees become stronger in the hands of domestic lawyers seeking to enforce them through national constitutions. And with regard to cause lawyering, it shows how refugee lawyers put constitutionalized human rights law into action. In addition to its contributions to scholarship, this book also contributes to effective cause lawyering on behalf of refugees. Given the recent retreat from refugee protection in many parts of the world, effective legal representation of this most marginalized group has become more important than ever. Constitutional rights are more difficult for state actors to ignore and easier for lawyers to utilize in domestic courts. This book analyzes the opportunities—and the obstacles—that present themselves when lawyers attempt to apply constitutionalized human rights to refugees.
Colombia
Authors: Meili Stephen
Published: October 2022

Unlike the other countries analyzed in this book, Colombia had little experience with refugees and asylum-seekers until very recently. For most of its history, Colombia has been a country of emigration rather than immigration. As a result, it was ill-prepared for the unprecedented number of Venezuelan migrants and asylum-seekers who have entered the country in the last few years. This has rendered its response to the current crisis ad hoc and reactive. On the other hand, Colombia features some of the characteristics typically associated with effective utilization of constitutionalized human rights law on behalf of refugees and asylum-seekers: a rights-based Constitution, a strong Constitutional Court, and a small but determined subset of civil society devoted to the protection of non-citizens. This chapter explores how refugee lawyers operating within this context have attempted to utilize the Constitution—and other legal avenues—to extend human rights protection to the recent influx of Venezuelans crossing the border into Colombia. In this way, Colombia serves as something of an emerging test case to demonstrate how constitutionalized human rights law might be most effectively utilized at the earliest stages of a nation’s experience with a large-scale influx of refugees. For Colombia to emerge as a model, however, its refugee lawyers will need to consider the process strategically through which the constitutionalized human rights of refugees and asylum-seekers receive protection.
Introduction: Science and the Pursuit of Knowledge
Authors: Bird Alexander
Published: October 2022

This chapter introduce the two central themes of this book: the importance of knowledge in science and philosophy of science, and the thoroughgoing rejection of empiricism. These themes are illustrated with some brief remarks on the history of science and then through three more detailed examples of modern science from palaeontology, meteorology, and particle physics. The chapter concludes with a synopsis of the remainder of the book.