Chapter 1 provides the contextual and conceptual frameworks shaping the book. It explains the sociolegal context in which the book is situated – in particular, India’s Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA) of 1956, the US-led anti-trafficking regime, and the role of anti-trafficking NGOs. Conceptually, Chapter 1 lays out how the book places postcolonial law in a broader field of neoliberal government including state agencies and foreign-funded NGOs acting upon prostitution. It explains how the book pursues new directions in legal anthropology with an attentiveness to multiple scales of governance and law’s implementation by state and nonstate actors, while remaining deeply rooted in the minutiae of legal practices and spaces. Finally, Chapter 1 shows how the book is in dialogue with interdisciplinary feminist scholars who have critiqued anti-trafficking campaigns and provided nuanced ethnographic insights on the complexities of sex workers’ lives. It explains how, unlike these studies, this book is not an ethnography of sex work, sex trafficking, or even of anti-trafficking interventions alone. Instead, it explores how India’s anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns converge and act upon sex workers, and how sex workers navigate and resist them.

This chapter introduces the vanishing trial phenomenon – the emphasis on settlement and plea bargains and the decline of the judicial verdict. This phenomenon began in common law systems and coincided with the rise of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). ADR has been promulgated through a variety of legal constructs, including national laws and transnational directives. However, to date, it is often the case that neither the normative values of adjudication nor the fundamental values of ADR (such as dialogue and relation building) prevail. In their stead, especially in common law countries, there is a drive for efficiency in both courts and mediation sessions. Efficiency has, to a large extent, become synonymous with settlement and the means by which settlement is reached receive little to no notice. Judges, in this setting, are expected to manage cases until they settle – though, as our research shows, some judges have more ambitious horizons for their role, lending new insights to the possible new trajectories. As methods to replace the judicial role are under experimentation, the value and place of the judicial role have reached a critical crossroads.

Parenthood is a political office grounded in demands of liberal-egalitarian justice, rather than some natural or personal relationship between the child and adult. For a community to respect children as equal members throughout their lives, it must ensure each child is in the custody of an adult with the duty to provide care and guidance. Children cannot judge or pursue their own conception of the good, so each child needs some adult authority to judge how they use their primary goods to flourish during childhood and develop into a thriving adult. That authority must be created and structured by law. The authority must be cabined to ensure parents satisfy children’s entitlements, which only the community can legitimately define through its collective judgment. Law must also structure the parental office appropriately. Adults can make substitute judgments to guide the child’s life only if a few caregivers are responsible for a few children. In other words, all children have a political right to a parent.

This chapter offers an overview of the essentials of the cognitive-functional view adopted in the book, and situates the approach in the wider field of language studies, notably relative to the cognitive linguistic and functional linguistic traditions. It also introduces the general theoretical issues of concern in the book: it highlights the importance in language research of an active concern with conceptualization, and of assuming a dynamic relationship between conceptual and linguistic structures and processes (i.e. between meaning and form), and it points out the different practices in this regards in the strands of cognitive and functional linguistics. Finally, it presents the rudiments of a model called Functional Procedural Grammar, which serves as guide and blackboard throughout the book, and which is elaborated further in the course of it.

Chapter 1 explores the development of modern semiotics, while referring to decodification semiotics, interpretation semiotics and notably to Saussure, Peirce and Rossi-Landi. It offers a definition of legal semiotics and introduces the work of Kevelson and Tiefenbrun. It presents Welby’s Significs theory and The Meaning Triad, allowing for an analysis of the sense, meaning and significance of legal terminology. In this context, it examines the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969) general rules of treaty interpretation under a legal semiotics lens. It thereafter presents semioethics, which explores avenues to modify problematic signs. The chapter explains how significs and semioethics are applied as methodologies to ‘decode’ the content of international treaties to analyze whether they sufficiently protect the girl child, in light of the intersectional discrimination she encounters. It also discusses the challenges of conducting a semiotic analysis in English, one of the authentic languages of the treaties examined.

Introducing the rural lawyer shortage through its impact on rural America, the introduction makes the case that rural areas matter and policy responses are justified to help rural America.

This chapter discusses the centrality of deterrence to criminological theory and to policy, and then highlights critical shortcomings in classical deterrence theory. It points to critical problems that these shortcomings create, including incomplete or inaccurate understanding of deterrence and ineffective policy. The chapter then describes the motivation for the book, which is to advance theory and policy, the structure of the book, each of the chapters, and recommendations for sequences of chapters readers can follow to pursue their particular interests.

Against the backdrop of rising interest in if not alarm about Chinese overseas direct investment (ODI), A Casebook on Chinese Outbound Investment: Law, Policy, and Business (hereinafter, the Casebook) is designed to provide fact-based and neutral case studies to help inform teaching in professional schools, including law, policy, and business schools. Comprised of fifteen cases, based on primary source materials, and written by experts, many of whom are either from or have extensive experience in the host state in question, the Casebook provides teaching material for educators and other concerned parties. The case studies are written with specific overarching objectives in mind: to shed light on the decision-making, policies, and practices of Chinese firms; to understand how Chinese firms adapt to challenging regulatory environments; and to assess what kind of effects Chinese projects have overseas, particularly in developing states where China’s footprint may be most pronounced. This Introduction lays the groundwork to address overarching questions, including, what are Chinese companies, what are China’s international investment strategies, what are the trends in Chinese ODI, what is the relationship between Chinese ODI and the Party-State, and what are the effects of Chinese capital in host states?

The auction of Bored Ape #8817 for $3.4 million in October 2021 marked a watershed moment in the escalating trend of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). This chapter ventures into the core of the tokenization phenomenon, scrutinizing the legal implications of creating digital representations (tokens) of diverse assets. Amid the burgeoning NFT market, a pivotal question emerges: What precisely are the property rights conferred upon those acquiring these tokens? Beyond the staggering sales figures, the chapter dissects the tokenization process, emphasizing the NFT minting process and blockchain technology. It explores claims that NFTs herald the future of digital property, challenging traditional governmental powers. Anticipating legal challenges, the chapter navigates critical inquiries about token holders’ rights, the tethering (or not) of tokens to underlying assets, and the impact of the 2022 Uniform Commercial Code revisions. This chapter seeks to provide a nuanced perspective, unraveling legal realities from the fervor surrounding tokenization’s transformative potential in the digital era.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book’s subject matter and an initial sense of its ‘worldly’ orientation and themes. Some common spheres in which dignity is important are surveyed (end-of-life arrangements and funerals, access to sanitation and hygiene products, practices of health and social care, relations in the workplace, etc.), leading to the postulation of three general points: dignity is performative, embodied and ineliminably relational; dignity is emergent – a process, and not simply a quality, attribute or state of being; dignity is political, in that it is enmeshed with the wider conditions affecting economy, society and culture.

Explores relationship of law to communal agriculture in three contexts; Indigenous communal grazing; Spanish and Mexican land grants; and Colorado state law of property rights.

This chapter sets up our main research question, which is what effect, if any, did the arrival and proliferation of Fox News have on US politicians? It summarizes the history of Fox News and describes the natural experiment created by the haphazard rollout of Fox News. It goes on to summarize the scholarly literature on media effects and, specifically, how little of it focuses on the behavior of politicians. In turn, it summarizes the scholarly literature on members of Congress and how little of it focuses on the media. It then explains our open science approach.

“Syntax lies at the very heart of what it means to be human” (Bickerton & Szathmary 2009: xviii). It has been argued that no other species has been able to acquire a rudimentary syntax, thus reinforcing the view that acquiring syntax is a unique ability of humans (Bickerton & Szathmary 2009). The present volume describes the current state of the discussion on syntax with a special focus on Creole languages. It sheds light on the relevance of syntax in Language by bringing together scholars from the fields of language evolution, language acquisition and development of young languages, that is, Creoles.

Citing contemporary issues, this introduction situates horizontal application as one potential response to political-legal questions involving private actors. It makes the case for renewed scholarly attention to horizontal application as an increasingly common practice in constitutional politics. More specifically, examining horizontal application through the lens of republican political theory uncovers new significance in the discourses surrounding this constitutional practice. This theoretical perspective also elucidates how horizontal application is different from traditional constitutional understandings. After introducing the book’s republican framework, Chapter 1 explains the rationale underlying the choice of contexts examined in subsequent chapters. It concludes with an explanation of the stakes, as well as the potential benefits and drawbacks of horizontal application considered in the following chapters. Finally, it previews the concluding chapter’s argument that horizontal application may be further supported with certain political and institutional adjustments to make this practice even more republican.

The 2024 presidential election in the USA demonstrates, with unmistakable clarity, that disinformation (intentionally false information) and misinformation (unintentionally false information disseminated in good faith) pose a real and growing existential threat to democratic self-government in the United States – and elsewhere too. Powered by social media outlets like Facebook (Meta) and Twitter (X), it is now possible to propagate empirically false information to a vast potential audience at virtually no cost. Coupled with the use of highly sophisticated algorithms that carefully target the recipients of disinformation and misinformation, voter manipulation is easier to accomplish than ever before – and frighteningly effective to boot.

While statelessness remains a global phenomenon, it is a global issue with an Asian epicentre. This chapter situates the book within the context and multi-disciplinary scholarship on statelessness in Asia by reviewing the causes, conditions and/or challenges of statelessness. It recognizes statelessness in this region as a phenomenon beyond forced migration and highlights the arbitrary and discriminatory use of state power in producing and sustaining statelessness. The chapter reviews the ‘state of statelessness’ in Asia, including applicable international, regional and national legal frameworks. It also maps some of the core themes that emerge from the contributors’ examination of the causes and conditions of statelessness in Asia. These include: the relationship between ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic diversity and statelessness; the legacies of colonialism; contemporary politics surrounding nation-building, border regimes and mobilities; as well as intersecting vulnerabilities. The chapter concludes with some preliminary thoughts on frameworks of analysis and future research agendas, including challenges and prospects for reform.

The UN’s human trafficking protocol is the linchpin of the global antislavery governance network. It drew on a series of early twentieth-century international treaties directed at the problem of ‘white slavery’ – European women being procured to work as prostitutes. Designed to accommodate disagreements over the relationship between prostitution and human trafficking, the protocol’s definition of human trafficking produced legal instability. The chapter traces the expansion of human trafficking policy from a state-centred focus on using the criminal law to target international sex traffickers to include an ensemble of private and public actors who advocate supply chain transparency legislation and bans on the importation goods made with forced labour. Concentrating on UN-related organisations and the US government, it investigates this shift and its implications for how unfree labour is governed. The chapter demonstrates how the legal assemblage of jurisdiction kept highly gendered governance strategies from clashing.

This book synthesises a decade of engagement with Sierra Leone, exploring the myriad manifestations of violence in relationships and its negotiation, mediation, and punishment. Employing ethnographic methods, participant observation, multi-perspective interviews and focus group discussions, the study also incorporates ‘love’ and life histories, complemented by primary and secondary sources. Research collaborators played a crucial role in challenging and shaping interpretations. The study emphasises deep ethnography, embodied methodologies, relationship cultivation, respectful collaboration, and a nuanced approach in addressing these sensitive social, political, and legal topics. The chapter introduces pivotal research sites, highlights the significance of ethical considerations, and underscores the transformative impact of sexual violence during the early stages of the researcher’s work and her community’s response. Furthermore, all research participants were fully informed of the research’s objectives and provided oral consent. To ensure anonymity, identifying details of some research collaborators were omitted, pseudonyms used, and details altered to safeguard collaborators.

In a period of rising threats to constitutional government within countries and among them, it is a crucial time to study the rule of law in transnational context. This framework chapter defines core concepts, analyzes the relation between national and international law and institutions from a rule-of-law perspective, and assesses the extent to which rule-of-law practices are shifting at the domestic and international levels in parallel. Part I explains our conceptualization of the rule of law, necessary for the orientation of empirical study and policy responses. Following Martin Krygier, we formulate a teleological conception of the rule of law in terms of goals and practices, which, in turn, calls for an assessment of institutional mechanisms to advance these goals, given varying social conditions and contexts. Part II sets forth the ways in which international law and institutions are important for rule-of-law ends, as well as their pathologies, since power is also exercised beyond the state in an interconnected world. Part III examines empirical indicators of the decline of the rule of law at the national and international levels. It notes factors that could explain such decline, and why such factors appear to be transnationally linked. Part IV discusses what might be done given these shifts in rule-of-law protections. In conclusion, we note the implications of viewing the rule of law in transnational context for conceptual theory, empirical study, and policy response.

This chapter introduces and unpacks the standard model of judging, which imagines a system in which independent judges apply pre-existing legal rules to determine the winner following an adversarial proceeding. It thus explores the concept of judicial independence and the ideal of the rule of law, revealing both to be more complex and contingent than first meets the eye. Judicial independence exists in relation to the actors and forces we want judges to be independent from and is necessarily tied to judicial accountability. The rule of law is necessarily an incompletely realizable ideal because lawmakers cannot perfectly anticipate the future and because the law is often motivated by conflicting values. Indeterminacy is the result. The idealized adversarial process is likewise only imperfectly realized, often by design.