For many U.S. military leaders, the Vietnam War was the first time they confronted the limits of American power overseas. More and more, the word “stalemate” crept into their wartime evaluations, raising important questions for war and society historians. How do uniformed leaders deal with frustration, even failure, in times of war? In Vietnam, how did military officers managing the war effort react when their expectations came up short? What perspectives might we gain from their disappointments? This essay evaluates how the American armed forces in Vietnam handled their frustrations when confronted with disappointment and failure. Exasperation over the limits of their power shaped Americans’ wartime experiences. Dissatisfaction contributed to increased civil-military tensions and to military leaders obscuring the truth from an increasingly war-weary public. Soldiers’ frustrations led them sometimes to elevate personal interests and instigate violence against the local South Vietnamese population when their efforts failed to support larger strategic objectives. Frustration and failure became emblematic of America’s participation in a long and bloody Southeast Asian civil war.

This chapter uncovers the role of business in coproducing European standards during the 1992 Program. Building on the argument of Chapter 1 that the Commission strove to create a regional business environment in which firms would regionalize, it finds that the interests of European business and European policymakers converged around the issue of standards. The Commission promoted common norms as a means of market integration. While some European companies, executives, and BIAs were skeptical of the potential for standardization to function as a form of regulation, they also understood that standards were determinants of market access. Consequently, many worked to shape new regional norms to their advantage.

Two questions – and a pair of surprises – present themselves throughout the whole history of Japan’s encounter with the West: How could the belief persist in cultures as sophisticated as those of the European countries in a radical separation between mind and matter? More than this, how could idealism paradoxically possess a genuinely practical dimension so efficacious as to be capable of lastingly transforming the world? Some, like Kanokogi Kazunobu (1884–1949), felt that idealism, though plainly it had to be reexamined, nonetheless constituted a way forward that Japan needed to embrace if it were to shake off its torpor. Others, like Fukada Yasukazu (or Kōsan [1878–1924]), saw it as a menace. One of the key points at issue in this fundamental debate was the proper appreciation of Plato in relation to Aristotle.

In the past decade there has been a surge of interest in applying corpus linguistics to questions of legal interpretation. This chapter focuses on the use of corpus linguistics to aid in the interpretation of statutes and the US Constitution. This chapter begins with an overview of the debate over the usefulness and appropriate uses of corpus linguistics as a means of addressing these types of legal questions. It critically evaluates the methods found in several illustrative publications, concluding with a summary of the current state of the art for research in law and corpus linguistics. It provides a detailed overview of four key studies and a discussion of their methodological contributions to corpus-based legal interpretation. It then presents a case study focused on the question of whether ‘income’ includes ‘unrealized gains’ from the Supreme Court case Moore v. United States. The chapter concludes with an outlook on the future of the intersection between law and corpus linguistics.

This chapter introduces key ideas about probability, likelihood, and Bayesian inference. The likelihood of a hypothesis is the conditional probability of the data given the hypothesis. One way of using data to choose a hypothesis from a hypothesis space is to pick the hypothesis with the greatest likelihood; this is known as maximum likelihood inference. When used to choose between hypotheses that differ greatly in intrinsic plausibility, maximum likelihood inference is unreliable. Bayesian inference takes likelihoods into account but is also sensitive to the intrinsic plausibility of hypotheses.

This chapter examines the role of international law and institutions in El Salvador’s UN Truth Commission (1992-1993). This was the first Truth Commission to be established by the UN after the Cold War. It argues that the Truth Commission drew on the identity and status of the UN as an international institution to authorize its account about the unlawfulness of the violence of the civil war. In turn, the UN-Truth Commission’s account displaced ‘other’ accounts (of peasant and Indigenous communities) which were seen to rival international law’s understanding of the violence. In particular, by excluding an account of the socio-economic circumstances of the civil war, which remained a source of conflict in the country, the UN was able to claim that it had contributed to making El Salvador a ‘model’ post-conflict state. To show this, the chapter juxtaposes the Truth Commission’s account with a rival account embroidered in a tapestry, hand-made by a Salvadoran woman living in a refugee camp in the 1980s, which represents the Sumpul River Massacre. The chapter shows how the tapestry exposes the socio-economic roots of the civil war – a truth that the Truth Commission displaces and renders irrelevant for post-conflict state-society relations.

Human genetic information is best understood as a non-rivalrous and non-excludable social resource, making it well suited to commons-based governance as a complement to state- and market-led models. Using the case of deCODE Genetics in Iceland, the chapter shows the practical viability of such an approach, underscoring the importance of public cooperation, ethical safeguards, and consent. Yet the model faces a central dilemma: the need for broad data sharing to advance research versus the individual participant’s right to privacy. The chapter reframes this tension by conceptualizing privacy not as the negation of sharing but as one of its dimensions. It then resolves the dilemma by proposing a participatory, procedurally legitimate system in which stakeholders (including data contributors, researchers, and clinicians) collectively determine rules of access, use, and privacy through democratic deliberation. This approach moves beyond top-down declarations and instead establishes a self-governing genomic commons. A mutual benefit, procedurally democratic framework offers a promising path to realize the genome’s potential for public health while safeguarding individual rights.

Chapter 6 uses the insights gleaned from the interviews in Chapter 5 to frame intra-left legal debates over the determinacy of legal reasoning, the significance of legal consciousness and discourse, and the utility of reasoning from the designation “capitalist.”

The climate catastrophe and the Covid-19 pandemic have exposed racism as a global public health emergency and determinant of health. The long shadow of colonialism, structural violence and over-policing in settler colonies like Aotearoa New Zealand has accompanied a moral imperative to transform hegemonic and colonial Pākehā institutions. For Māori, this has meant the reassertion of self-determination and decolonisation, and for cultural minorities, a focus on racial justice. This urgent institutional transformation requires the re-examination of health care and its professional and ethical frameworks. Two criticisms of ethics have been articulated in this contemporary context: the first is that hegemonic frameworks centre whiteness and reinscribe it, and the second is that the frameworks fail to take into account or dismantle racism and maintain it through silence around racial justice