This chapter investigates France’s contentious relationship with the development of a constitutional practice in European law. The chapter explores the longstanding struggle between two factions within the political and legal elite that shaped the French reception of European law: the supranationalists, who supported a federal vision of European law, and the souverainistes, who resisted supranational legal authority in favour of national sovereignty. This ideological battle was most visible in the French judiciary, where institutions like the Conseil d’État and Cour de Cassation adopted competing stances on European law. Despite these challenges, the chapter argues that France ultimately had to yield to European legal integration in the 1980s, after an open rebellion by the Conseil d’État and the National Assembly in 1979-1980 failed. This evolution reflected France’s broader struggle with defending national sovereignty and adapting to the realities of European integration.

This chapter examines the European Parliament’s (EP) so-far overlooked role in the development of European law. It argues that the EP and its legal committee contributed to the development of a constitutional practice within the European Community (EC). Despite its weak legislative authority, the EP played an important role in legitimising the constitutional interpretation of European law by positioning itself as Europe’s democratic voice, through rhetorical strategies, performing as a parliament and by providing a public forum, in close conjunction with the other EC/EU institutions. The EP contributed at key moments. In the 1960s, it supported the ECJ constitutional interpretation of European law. In subsequent decades, the EP’s Legal Committee acted as a “norm entrepreneur”, cooperating with the Commission’s Legal Service and advocating for a federalist vision of integration. The chapter concludes that, while the EP lacked legislative power, its discursive strategies helped construct and legitimise the constitutional practice.

This chapter takes up a series of popular folktales about radical inequality (Aesop, Gevia ben Psisa/ben Qosem) to argue that provincial communities become increasingly interested in reframing quotidian interactions as legal interactions. Legal dialogue came to be imagined as a register of discourse capable of controlling powerful people. Interestingly, however, all of these stories feature a protagonist somehow marked as physically deformed or otherwise grotesque: Aesop was the ugliest slave imaginable, Geviah a hunchback. The very bizarreness of these characters offers a standing challenge to normative understandings of power: in each case, it is the most degraded members of society who manage to wield legal logos to control their superiors, society’s notional elites.

Erasure codes find various applications: Each of those puts different constraints on the erasure code, for example, on the blocklength, code rate, decoding complexity, or number of decoding operations. This chapter discusses some of them.

Introduction

Linkages between environmental risks and racial discrimination have long been areas of research and activism in the domestic sphere. The term ‘environmental racism’, coined by Rev. Dr Benjamin F. Chavis Jr and Robert D. Bullard in the 1980s, refers to racial discrimination embedded into the process of environmental decision-making, whether by a conscious design or institutional neglect (Bullard 1993, 17). The results are that communities of colour are disproportionately exposed to environmental issues (Bullard 1990, 1993; Schlosberg and Collins 2014). However, an unresolved theoretical issue in this conversation is applying such framework in the global order, particularly considering Global South countries1 in the realm of international negotiations on climate change. Such an application builds on scientific evidence that communities most at risk have emitted the least greenhouse gases (GHGs) and also have fewer resources to deal with climate change, and that climate change has generated and perpetuated vulnerabilities (IPCC 2022, 9–11). This is deeply intertwined with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR&RC principle), since it acknowledges that Global North countries should bear the higher costs of mitigation and adaptation to climate change, as well as recent discussions on climate justice and human rights – particularly considering the economic, social, and cultural (ESC) rights. However, the current understanding and operationalization of the CBDR&RC principle does not enhance climate justice and human rights, because it does not address the underlying root causes of climate change (see the third section).

This chapter surveys behavioural models across decisions and games that rationalise deviations from money maximisation and shows that, despite variety, they share a single foundation: economic consequentialism. It reviews bounded-rationality accounts (satisficing/aspiration dynamics, quantal response equilibria) and departures from expected utility (prospect theory) and from exponential discounting in intertemporal decisions (hyperbolic discounting), then introduces social-preference formulations (altruism à la Ledyard/Levine, inequity aversion a la Fehr–Schmidt and Bolton–Ockenfels, and models by Andreoni–Miller and Charness–Rabin). Finally, the chapter formalises the ‘economic representation’ of action profiles and defines economic consequentialism – utility as a function only of payoffs, probabilities, and timing for all parties – while noting limits that motivate alternative approaches.

Building on Chapter 1, Chapter 2 presents an in-depth case study of the fourth major organic farming movement in interwar Germany, biodynamic agriculture. With its Demeter and Weleda brands, this was the organic current that was most successful in garnering consistent support from Nazi patrons, and it remains the most high-profile form of organics in Germany today. Early biodynamic proponents particularly emphasized the ecological dimension of their work, framing their approach as the way to “heal the earth” from environmental harm. In part because of pre-existing ties to several groups of Nazi activists, the biodynamic movement flourished for much of the Third Reich until falling prey to intra-party disputes in 1941. Leading biodynamic figures worked closely with life reform officials within the Nazi apparatus, illustrating the active connections linking multiple strands of environmental advocacy across far-flung sectors of the regime. Through a detailed critical account based on previously unused archival sources, the chapter carefully delineates the reasons for the rise and eventual fall of the Reich League for Biodynamic Agriculture, concluding with a differentiated assessment of the space available for grassroots environmental initiatives in Nazi Germany.

This chapter analyses the left periphery of PIE with specific reference to the interaction between pragmatic fronting (topicalisation and focalisation) and clitic placement (Wackernagel’s law). This constitutes a mapping out of the CP layer in PIE, which forms a crucial part of relative clause structure, and lays the groundwork for analysing the precise syntactic behaviour of the relative pronoun, *REL.

Early Christianity, and the Pauline letters specifically, was concerned with questions of legality and its transcendence. In a process analogous to that described in the previous chapter, the flesh of Christ holds out the possibility of transcending the law itself, and remaking oneself and one’s community in the wake of the historical disruptions of the first century BC/AD. Communities throughout the empire, intrigued by the possibility of taking on new and different laws or, by contrast, freeing themselves from all laws, saw in the possibility of Christianity the opportunity for transformation. For Paul, real law is not concerned about materiality, but transcendence. There are important and underexplored commonalities between Paul’s interpretive moves and those of the sophists of the following chapter. The key body, however, is not the body of the orator, but the perfect body of Christ, which deserves to be imitated.

We were both part of the team that conducted the first systematic study about sexual harassment in academic medicine in Germany and this has informed our following practice and our contribution to this book. Coming from a background in clinical medicine and public health, as well as knowledge about organizations, and personal encounters with the topic, we feel that more awareness, prevention and actionable consequences are necessary to improve working conditions in academic medicine in Germany. The anonymized case study we present showcases many of the structural problems survivors encounter and, most importantly, the fact that they often shoulder the consequences of actions they have not called for and did not want. The #metoo movement supported public discussions about sexual harassment and led to some positive change, yet much still needs to be done to structurally change our workplaces and the hierarchical culture that characterizes academic medicine.

This chapter describes and assesses the arguments for transgender girls’ inclusion in girls’ sports that have dominated left-leaning public and political discourse. At core, the arguments focus on the subjective and objective harms of misgendering. The chapter describes and critiques subjective pain arguments as too indeterminate empirically and normatively to provide a basis for inclusion. The chapter next examines objective claims about human flourishing and hierarchies of oppression revealing their underlying assumptions and perhaps unintended consequences.

In Chapter 4, we introduce low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, a class of powerful and efficient channel codes which admit a graphical representation based on sparse bipartite graphs. This chapter introduces fundamental concepts in LDPC coding theory and guides the reader through unstructured and structured LDPC code ensembles, including the important case of protograph-based LDPC code ensembles.

Juana Manso (1819–1875) has been described as “the first woman to be appointed to an official government position and arguably the most radical feminist in nineteenth century Argentina.” Born in Argentina, she left the country with her family in 1840, after her father was exiled by the Rosas regime. When she returned to Buenos Aires in 1853, she was already an experienced educator, author, and editor. In 1859, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, then head of the Elementary Schools Department, appointed her as director of the Escuela de Ambos Sexos, the first co-educational school in Buenos Aires, and editor of the educational journal Anales de la Educación Común. As Argentine president, Sarmiento appointed her to the Board of Public Instruction in 1871. Manso not only advocated for women’s education but also for popular education more widely – her selected passages in our volume, originally published in the Album de Señoritas, serve to illustrate her most passionate interests in these causes.

Introduction

According to estimates made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2019, the global agro-food system's emissions account for about 21 per cent to 37 per cent of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (IPCC 2022a). Almost half of those emissions can be attributed to deforestation and land use changes associated mainly with the growth of the agricultural and livestock borders (Ecologistas en Acción n.d.). In this context, the production of soy for animal feed and biofuel represents a major contributor to the carbon footprint (Ecologistas en Acción n.d.). An estimate of 85 per cent of the worldwide soy production is used to feed animals (Ritchie and Roser 2021; WWF 2007).

The prevalent agribusiness model in the Latin American Southern Cone is characterized by the large-scale cultivation of genetically modified (GM) seeds, mainly of soy, which have been developed to tolerate primarily glyphosate, among other herbicides. Moreover, this model entails high levels of land concentration and monocultures and is one in which few large transnational corporations have high levels of market share for the production and distribution of both GM soy seeds and glyphosate. The other end of the value chain mirrors this scenario, with only a few retail companies dominating the market.

Since its introduction to the market in the 1990s, GM soy seeds and associated pesticide use have become one of the major drivers behind the decline of South America's natural ecosystems, especially in the tropics (Fehlenberg et al. 2017). The use of both products together has increased substantially over the years as weeds have evolved to become resistant to glyphosate (Perry et al. 2016; Tsatsakis et al. 2017).