Chapter 2 addresses the simplest potential explanation for America’s hostility to the ICC: The US might oppose international justice in general. I show that is not the case. The US has been an ardent supporter of international justice institutions both before and after the ICC’s creation. In the period immediately following World War II, the US played an indispensable role in creating the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals that prosecuted political and military elites in Germany and Japan. After the end of the Cold War, the US once again led the way in establishing tribunals to address genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Even after the ICC’s creation, American support for international justice has remained steadfast. The US has aided several new venues of international justice, devoted significant resources to tracking down wanted war criminals, and elevated international justice issues in its diplomacy. This chapter’s key lesson is that there is something about the ICC – and the ICC alone – that piques the ire of American politicians and policymakers.

This chapter explores the early life of the unique Jewish-Arab, Hebrew-Arabic journal Mifgash-Liqa’, meaning “Encounter” or “Meeting” in both languages. Originally founded in 1964 by Sephardi writer Yehuda Burla, Yemenite Jewish writer Mordechai Tabib, and Palestinian Israeli scholar Mahmud Abbasi, it was revived by Palestinian Israeli poet and translator Muhammad Hamza Ghanayim fourteen years after its first discontinuation in 1970. In the 1980s, Mifgash-Liqa’ witnessed more profound literary, cultural, and artistic encounters between Israel’s Hebrew and Arabic speakers and with the Arab World, in an era when Mizrahi and Palestinian Israelis were finding their voices.

The chapter argues that, beyond providing publication opportunities for marginalized writers in Israel, Mifgash-Liqa’ aimed to create Israeli literature through translation and by blurring the boundary between Hebrew and Arabic literature. Examples include The Israeli Monologue by Salman Natour and A Locked Room by Shimon Ballas. Borrowing Juelietta Singh’s notion of “entanglement,” the chapter highlights an inclusiveness that abandons the desire for mastery over oneself or others. The journal’s editorials and texts embody the call for a radically different imagination, for coexistence in a yet unforeseeable future, for possibilities beyond identity politics, for what it means to be Israeli.

This chapter defines the different terms “miscarriage of justice,” “wrongful convictions” and “proven innocence.” Although these terms are often used interchangeably with differences ascribed to customs and semantics, there are critical differences between them. Miscarriages of justice is the broadest term. In some definitions, it can include any violation of rights. In the criminal context, miscarriages of justice can include unfair trials and unwarranted pre-trial detentions. A wrongful conviction is a narrower term that requires a conviction that is subsequently overturned. As measured in recently developed registries, wrongful convictions are convictions overturned on the basis of new evidence relevant to guilt or innocence. Finally, the narrowest term is proven innocence. This approach is most popular in the United States, where it is also called factual or actual innocence. It was pioneered by Edwin Borchard and used by innocence projects. Formalistic arguments that proven innocence does not violate the presumption of innocence are critiqued. Consistent with Guido Calabresi’s and Phillip Bobbitt’s tragic choice theory, the use of the different terms differs over time and place, and they are used to ration justice.

The case of Ms. Sykes demonstrates some of the ethical challenges that arise in determining whether a patient should be eligible for an advanced therapy, specifically a ventricular assist device (VAD). Ms. Sykes was in advanced heart failure and denied the VAD by the eligibility committee. The denial was out of concern that she lacked the requisite social support at home, as she had told the team her husband was medically abusive and neglectful. While some members of the team did not believe her reports, others were concerned she was being "doubly victimized" by the husband and then by not receiving the only advanced therapy available to her. Ethics was called to assist the team based on this tension. The haunting aspects of the case are relayed by a clinical ethicist who was early in her career and a senior clinical ethicist who was acting as her mentor at the time. The fairness of the eligibility decision, as well as the appropriate role boundaries of clinical ethicists, are central to what they find haunting.

The rise of remote work and work-from-home, accelerated by the COVID pandemic, is reshaping and disrupting the social dimension of work—that is, the incidence of cooperation, sociability, and solidarity (as well as conflict) among co-workers. Most discussion of the trend toward remote work centers naturally on its impact on firms (especially in terms of productivity) or workers (especially in terms of work-life balance). This essay focuses instead on how remote work and work-from-home might affect the social underpinnings of political life outside the workplace. The quotidian experience of working together—traditionally, face-to-face, and often across salient lines of social division—generates weak and strong interpersonal bonds that can strengthen the foundations of a democratic society. The cumulative societal benefits of co-worker interactions are at risk if remote work thins out and weakens workplace ties. That is especially likely because those societal benefits are “public goods” and spillover benefits of workplace interactions. Those social benefits may thus be neglected by analysts and observers. This essay develops that thesis and then reflects briefly on whether and how the conventional institutional arsenal of labor and employment law might be deployed to increase the production of such public goods.

The new nationalism of the Xi Jinping era, which has brought together political nationalism and cultural nationalism – two largely opposing streams between 1919 and 1989 – has redefined the CPC and the PRC. On paper, the party is a class organization while the PRC is a class dictatorship that sanctions class sovereignty rather than popular sovereignty. Since 2001, the party has been represented as a national party as well as a class organization. Representing the nation entails the promotion of national culture, and a major component of the Chinese Dream is cultural revival. Consequently, the CPC and the PRC are nationalized in a shift from Marxist classism to synthesized Chinese nationalism. Their class identities appear to be at odds with their national identities, but the tension is minimized as the party turns Marxism into an empty signifier and sinicizes it out of existence.