Interpreting for defendants who are not conversant with the language of the court is a standard service in jurisdictions that have ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This ensures defendants’ linguistic presence and meaningful participation in the judicial process, thereby protecting their right to a fair trial. Yet, interpreting for jurors is rare, despite their crucial role in determining defendants’ guilt or innocence in criminal jury trials. This qualitative study compares two Hong Kong appellate courts’ divergent decisions and arguments presented in the appeal case which contested jurors’ access to the chuchotage interpretation, which is usually audible only to the defendant. The chapter reflects on the practice of court interpreting in the bilingual legal system of Hong Kong and argues for extending interpreting services to jurors to better safeguard defendants’ right to a fair trial. Given that English is a dominant language in jury trials and the majority of the population is Cantonese-speaking, the discussion links interpreting for jurors to upholding the fundamental principle of trial by peers drawn from a cross-section of the community.

Research concerning the variety of close relationships adults maintain, initiate, cease, and lose during middle and later adulthood has been fast growing in recent decades. Much of the theoretical and empirical work in this field has aimed to overcome views of older age as a time of loss and decline, both individually and socially. Moreover, recent trends have focused on the increasingly diverse experiences of the aging population. This includes not only extended life expectancy – and, importantly, extended healthy life expectancy – but also demographic changes, including larger proportions of racial/ethnic minorities attaining older age; new cohorts of openly LGBTQ adults entering mid and later life, many of whom represent the first generation of same-sex married couples; and the phenomenon of “gray divorce” and romantic repartnering in the years beyond age 50. This chapter will cover both the history and foundations of research on close relationships in middle and later life, as well as these recent trends in the field, finishing with an eye toward future directions as both the aging population and our perceptions of it continue to change.

By opening the ‘black box’ of what is said and done in the trial hearings of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the chapter shows that the syllogistic reasoning found in the ICC’s case law and judicial decisions is not a straightforward application of ‘rules’ to ‘facts’, but a contingent discursive achievement that reflects a particular socio-political environment. The discussion of court transcripts from the cases of a Ugandan rebel commander and a Malian jihadist combines a long tradition of sociolinguistic and linguistic-anthropological work on text trajectories and the ‘instability’ of travelling texts with Koskenniemi’s anti-foundationalist re-specification of legal discourse as a ‘language game’. The chapter shows that, first, the recontextualisation of the everyday lives of perpetrators and victims of international crimes with the abstract legal framework of the Rome Statute relies heavily on commonsense understandings of the relevant legal concepts, and, second, that such judicial ‘fact-finding’ and its attendant discursive transformations in turn inscribe international criminal proceedings in a range of broader (geo)political contexts.

People form different types of relationships with others. One common, valued, type is a communal relationship. In communal relationships, people assume responsibility for one another’s welfare and give and seek responsiveness non-contingently. Here we review ways in which communal relational contexts shape people’s emotional lives. In communal relationships, giving and receiving non-contingent responsiveness is linked to positive emotion, whereas failure to do so or behavior indicative of following inappropriate norms (e.g., norms governing transactional relationships) leads to negative emotion. In addition, the presence of communal partners often reduces threat and enhances the intensity of positive and negative reactions to environmental stimuli. Communal contexts are associated with greater expression of emotions signaling one’s own needs (which partners sometimes socially reference as signs of their own needs) and with expressing more indicative of empathy and care for the partner. All these effects can feed back and strengthen communal relationships.

We examine family systems and family relationships. Using family systems theory (Cox & Paley, 1997, 2003; Minuchin, 1985), we focus on how families are viewed as a hierarchically organized system, comprised of smaller relationships (i.e., subsystems) such as parent–child relationships, embedded within larger systems such as extended families and their broader social ties. We organized the discussion of subsystems as follows: (a) Core subsystems, including relationships of romantic partners, coparenting alliance, parent–children, and siblings; and (b) Subsystems with broader social ties, in the form of extended family and/or intergenerational ties, including coparenting alliances in post-divorce or foster families as well as parents and parents-in-law relationships. We also consider these various subsystems within and across diverse families and family contexts, attending to aspects of gender, family structures, income, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, cultures, and national origins. We end with suggestions for future research (e.g., combining the lenses of family systems with intersectionality).

John Cumming Macdona created the St Bernard breed, importing Alpine Mastiffs and reimagining them as the famous rescue dogs from the Hospice on the St Bernard Pass in Switzerland. He ended his career as a Member of Parliament, before which he had been a Church of England vicar and Queen's Council. The family was wealthy, allowing him to travel the world and indulge in canine and other sporting interests. A founding member of the Kennel Club, his standing saw him invited to judge at the first big dog show in New York, staged in 1877. He had a friend and soulmate in the equally colourful Charles Cruft, and he served as chairman of Cruft’s Dog Show for over twenty years. He was enough of a celebrity to be featured in Spy’s portraits in Vanity Fair with the title ‘St Bernards’.

Bill George was a cult figure in Victorian London and his ‘Canine Castle’ was a superstore for dogs of every variety. He styled himself a 'dealer in dogs’, an occupation associated with the dog stealing or napping. George was known as the Father of the Fancy, the term for aficionados of bare-knuckle boxing and working-class animal sports, such as cockfights, dogfights, ratting and canine beauty shows. He cultivated respectability, selling to the upper classes and shipping dogs to overseas buyers. He was an expert on two breeds, the noblest, the Mastiff, and the roughest and toughest, the Bulldog. These were dogs associated with the British nation, and George was credited for preserving the old-style types with aggression, when dog shows encouraged breeding for beauty and companionship.

This chapter explores the communicative processes involved in producing witness statements in immigration visa applications and appeals settings, focusing attention on the co-constructed nature of the statement. Drawing on a single-case study from two connected advice sessions with a lawyer, refugee client and interpreter, the chapter illustrates how participants work together to prepare a witness statement to counter the immigration authorities’ assertion that the client’s family relationships have been falsified. Analysis focusing on the rhetorical strategies employed in the writing of the statement reveals the fallacy of viewing it as a single-authored text for which the client bears sole responsibility. Rather, the chapter shows how each participant’s authorial voice shapes the co-construction of the witness statement, uncovering how the specialist knowledge and expertise (legal, linguistic, and contextual) of each co-author is necessary to building a successful evidential argument. It also illustrates how the discursive mediation work taking place during the interpreted lawyer–client interaction enhances the credibility and persuasiveness of the client’s statement.

Relationship maintenance scholars have long attempted to understand the processes by which partners foster relationship growth. They have done so by focusing on defining and explaining key maintenance strategies that serve to initiate and preserve romantic relationships. In this chapter, we provide a brief history of the relationship maintenance literature. Then we identify the key theoretical contributions to the current understanding of relationship maintenance and discuss recent theoretical developments and known correlates. We conclude the chapter by highlighting the need to diversify and expand the maintenance literature by identifying possible avenues for future inquiry and proposing ways to integrate work across disciplines.

Social relationships are a fundamental component of the human experience, and decades of relationships research supports their central role in health and well-being. This chapter offers a broad look at research on social support in the context of close relationships, with particular emphasis on the role of social support in health. We first give an overview of the foundational theories of the field and discuss how social support has historically been conceptualized. We then discuss contemporary extensions of this work, including theories of invisible support, perceived responsiveness, thriving, dyadic perspectives of coping, and the implications of technology for support processes. We highlight important research on social support in diverse gender and cultural contexts, emphasizing the need for intersectional perspectives in this space. The chapter concludes with a discussion of key considerations for future research and intervention.

John Henry Salter was influential in two Victorian rural sports: hare coursing with Greyhounds and field trials, where gamebirds were stalked by Pointers and Setters. He was a general practitioner in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D'Arcy for sixty-five years. On a typical day, when not away competing, he would shoot wildfowl at dawn, minister to his patients in the morning, tend his dogs and garden in the afternoon, serve on committees in the evening and then complete his diary. He took up coursing after joining events with local farmers, rising to a place on the committee of the National Coursing Club. A founder member of the Kennel Club, he improved its rule for field trials with gundogs.

Delabere Blaine and William Youatt were partners in London’s leading canine veterinary practice in the early nineteenth century. Neither qualified as a veterinary surgeon: Blaine trained in medicine and Youatt for the clergy. They were an unlikely partnership. Blaine was a flamboyant character who had been an army surgeon before he turned to veterinary medicine and acquired the wealth to retire to the life of a country squire. Youatt was a tragic figure, pious and melancholic, who, shamed by debt, committed suicide. Just off Oxford Street, their veterinary practice was unusual in treating dogs. They built a business serving the new fashion for keeping dogs as family pets, as well as looking after sporting dogs kept in the capital. Both published ground-breaking books. Blaine and Youatt were more expert than any qualified veterinary surgeon to be ‘dog doctors’, the derogatory term used for their ‘profession’.