This chapter charts the origins of the classical law of civil war. It observes the doctrine’s roots in the old Roman ius gentium and argues that the classical doctrine itself was born in the early modern period alongside the European colonial empires and the Westphalian understanding of the law of nations. The chapter then illustrates this process by examining in detail the impact of insurgent prize jurisdictions and belligerent counter-revolutionary actions on foreign diplomacy during the Dutch Revolt (1566–1648) and the English Civil War (1642–1651).In light of these events, the chapter summarises the key doctrinal developments of the law of civil war in the writings of Grotius, Gentili, and their contemporaries, and the crystallisation of the classical doctrine of civil war in Emer de Vattel’s Droit des gens. The chapter concludes here, having set the scene for the legal debates of the age of revolutions.

The first two chapters of this book explained that the law of torts is an evolving body of rules shaped by principles and policy considerations and animated by two different conceptions of justice. It is held in a constant state of tension by individuals and communities’ shifting allegiance between competing interests, goals and values. This means that the law of torts is more than just a set of rules, principles and policies; it is also an ongoing culture of argument that has been developed to manage this inbuilt tension. So, if you want to be successful as a torts student you need to supplement your knowledge of the law by mastering this culture of argument. The first part of this chapter will help you to understand how to use the basic building blocks of the law (rules, principles and policy) to construct effective legal arguments. The rest of the chapter will show you how to structure your legal arguments and apply the law to solve practical legal problems.

The analysis of context-sensitivity should not be constrained by preconceived ideas about the available mathematical tools to represent it. In that perspective, Chapter 2 (together with the appendices) introduces the mathematical theory of “fibrations” and “descent theory,” so as to show their fundamental concepts to match the ingredients of the philosophical analysis of context-sensitivity carried out in Chapter 1: Contextualization corresponds to a localization; semantic contents, to local data; context-shift, to base-change; transposition, to reindexing; and the collation of contents underlying a linguistic meaning, to the process of gluing local data. Actually, fibrations have been devised in the first place as an abstract version of a family of contexts, emphasizing how contextual data can be moved across contexts and bound together. The further conception of a context as the envelope of a family of specified versions of it is introduced at the end of the chapter, which also establishes the framework of fibrations as a natural enrichment of both dynamic semantics and Tarski’s logical semantics.

Prohibitioning and the Constitution of India

Prohibition was reviewed and re-conceptualised following the achievement of independence, when the foundations of the modern Indian state were formally established. In the long run, the prohibition ideal filtered through new administrative and legal frameworks that nevertheless bore the imprint of both colonialism and the struggle against it. As the independent Indian republic was premised upon the founding principles of secular democracy and federalism, prohibition had to reckon with both debates relating to personal liberties and issues of state autonomy.

Following independence, the national democratic state – having won the mandate of representing national society – sought to intervene in that domain in order to transform it. The processes that had accompanied the birth of the Indian nation had brought forth institutions, structures and practices that enabled policies like prohibition to be operationalised through the workings of the state. However, the problem remained that a national society still had to be fashioned anew from the fluid, overlapping identities that made up the fabric of Indian social life. Amidst such a ‘recalcitrant social’, which, Prathama Banerjee argues, continued to function as ‘a network of multiple nodes of caste, community and regional sovereignties’, postcolonial governmentality appeared from the very outset ‘a compromised project’.

In this, however, postcolonial governmentality did not constitute as radical a rupture from the colonial past as Banerjee's discussion would suggest. The careful balancing act that the nationalist government attempted to strike between ‘mobilising the social and mobilising the political’ had already set the tone for things to come before independence was achieved; prohibition's colonial-era origins are a case in point.

This chapter ties together the arguments of the book and sketches out their broader implications. It addresses, in particular, three issues. The first is what Messianic claims regarding divine indexicality and authority may tell us about political culture and local perceptions of secular government authority in the South Sudan-Ethiopia borderlands. The second is whether the Messianic preoccupation with truth and self-awareness is a distinctively ‘modern’ disposition or an attitude that is historically and culturally informed and therefore also speaks to local notions of spiritual mediation. Finally, the chapter returns to Christian Zionism and Africa’s Messianic frontier and sketches out some of the ways in which the case of Gambella’s Messianic Jews may be indicative of processes and trends evident among African born-again Christians more broadly.

There is no officially recognised ‘Code of Tort Law’. The law of torts has to be distilled from two sources: case law and statutes. It has been formed primarily by the decisions of the common law judges who have developed the law case by case over hundreds of years. To an increasing extent, it has also been shaped by the acts of parliaments, which have responded to the perceived shortcomings of the common law. The role played by each of these two law-making institutions is different, and the range of choices open to them varies. This chapter will explain how these different roles allow different goals to be taken into account when the law is shaped into an integrated system that best serves the needs of the community – and again, remember that this is not an immutable objective standard, but rather one that is dictated by evolving relations of power and influence in our communities and societies.

The field of drug studies is increasingly challenged by the rapid digitalisation of drug markets, raising the importance of reconsidering how drug laws and policies respond to the role of technologies in the drug trade, and their social impact. This chapter considers the famous case of Maximilian Schmidt, who was accused of setting up Germany’s largest digital drug shop under the alias Shiny Flakes and became the subject of media stories and Netflix TV productions. The case offers an opportunity to explore how the move to digitally mediated drug supply has altered the ways in which phenomena such as the ‘dealer’ and ‘dealing’ are constituted in socio-technical and legal contexts.1 Research shows that digital drug markets pose serious challenges to jurisdictional and regulatory frameworks and governments require costly and laborious police operations to adapt to the rapid development of these markets (EU Drugs Strategy 2021–2025, 2021; UNODC, 2022). Following the transition of drug markets and traditional dealer activities to digitally mediated formats, it has become important to consider how drug dealers and dealing are constituted and handled in law, and whether the technological means of dealing are reshaping how questions of responsibility, ‘harm’ and entrepreneurship are being understood.