This chapter examines the role of foreign judges in the international mission to support the fight against corruption and impunity in Honduras ('MACCIH'), as conceived on paper and implemented in practice. It identifies two elements, aside from adjudication, of the role of the foreign judge in the international mission – as a diplomatic interlocutor to promote a new vision of the judiciary, and as an accountability mechanism for the international mission itself. The Honduran mission against corruption, and the use of foreign judges within it, can be understood in light of the receptiveness, in the wider Central American region, to international intervention in order to strengthen democracy, constitutionalism and human rights. However, the recent history of such international interventions raises questions about how the reputation and expertise of foreign judges and other foreign personnel can lend legitimacy to domestic institutions where corruption is rampant and where they face backlash from powerful domestic actors in the name of sovereignty.

This chapter discusses three common criticisms of using foreign judges on domestic courts. First, that the foreign judge, ignorant of local laws, customs and circumstances, will reach decisions that are legally wrong, assertive of colonial values and principles, or simply unacceptable to members of the local community. Second, the foreign judge, not being a citizen or resident of the local jurisdiction, has divided patriotic ties rendering him or her ill-suited to consider questions of constitutional significance, national security or foreign affairs. Third, the expertise of the foreign judge is no longer needed as there is already abundant domestic legal expertise. The chapter responds and reflects upon these criticisms in the context of the evolving system of overseas non-permanent judges of Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal since 1997.

Travel is a defining feature of foreign judging. This chapter uses the lens of mobility to examine the phenomenon of foreign judging in eight Pacific states: Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. It adopts a methodology that centres on the movement of judges by combining quantitative analysis with qualitative description of the personal experiences of individual judges. The focus on mobility highlights three aspects of foreign judging in the Pacific: first, the modalities of travel, that is, the ways and means by which foreigners come to sit as judges on Pacific courts and their experiences of arrival, stay and return; second, who travels to sit as a judge and the meanings that are attached to movement to, from and within the Pacific; and third, potential impediments to judges’ travel. The analysis shows how mobility complicates presumptions about foreignness by blurring the boundaries between binary concepts such as foreign and local, as well as presumptions about judging by testing some of the qualities of judicial office that support judicial independence.

The judges who served as members of the Colonial Legal Service, established in 1933, were part of a community that was built and sustained by the imaginations of officials in the Colonial Office and those who served in the colonies. The judges of the Colonial Legal Service were shaped by the uniformity of formalised recruitment and promotion policies that rewarded professional legal experience at the Bar rather than local knowledge. A colonial legal career was not necessarily limited to one colony or region and legal officers were frequently transferred. The high number of transfers partly explains judges’ attitudes towards the administration of justice, in particular the fact that they often remained wedded to English law. Colonial judges were defined by their backgrounds – personal, educational and professional – and by the roles they performed. This chapter discusses how these factors helped create a unique sense of identity within the Colonial Legal Service.

1 Introduction

2 Voice-Powered AI: Many Names, a New Digital Experience

3 The Growing Market of Voice Technology

 3.1 Voice-Controlled Virtual Assistant Adoption and Use

 3.2 The Voice War: A Zoom into the Current Offering of Virtual Assistants

4 The Impact of Voice Assistants on Consumer Behavior

 4.1 How Voice Is Changing the Customer Journey

 4.2 Voice Search: Consumer Concerns and Current Limits of Intelligent Voice Assistants

5 A (R)Evolution across All Industries

6 Marketing at the Age of Voice-Powered AI: Implications for Organizations

7 A Look Ahead

8 Conclusions

9 Future Directions

The European Union has introduced two different financial institutions for helping Member States to adjust to two crises with similar systemic implications. The European Stability Mechanism (ESM) for adjusting to the sovereign debt crisis of the early 2010s and the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) for recovering from the pandemic crisis’s economic consequences of early 2020s. In less than a decade, in facing two crises with similar economic implications, the EU moved from an approach of ‘unconstrained intergovernmentalism’ (ESM) to an approach of ‘constrained supranationalism’ (RRF), although the ESM is a permanent institution while RRF is a pro tempore one (lasting until December 2026). In moving from one to the other approach, policy learning is considered to have been a crucial factor. While the European Central Bank has been instrumental in managing both crises, the chapter’s focus is on post-crisis economic (and not monetary) adjustment. It thus examines the role of national governments and supranational actors in the establishment and governance of different financial instruments for helping Member States to recover from economic crises.

This chapter focuses on abbreviations, elements that were almost a byword for a written document from the Antiquity through the Middle Ages right until the early modern period: notwithstanding the language, text type and genre, script type, purpose and audience, these ideographic elements were nearly always to be found in a written document. For the medieval litteratus, abbreviations embodied the inextricable link between logos and imago; for the contemporary reader, they may well have a familiar feel of the multimodality we have grown accustomed to that informs digital textuality. The author outlines the origins, typology and visuality of Latin abbreviations used in medieval and early modern Europe, adding a postscript on the transition from script to print, which ultimately spelled the end of such ideograms in the modern era. This chapter, however, should not be read as a note on ‘the days of yore’ in the history of orthography in the Latin West: abbreviations do have a longue durée in Latin-based textuality and remain a feature of modern writing, if sometimes in a different guise.

This chapter is intended to offer assistance for the linguistic description of writing systems throughout the history of one or, especially, several languages and provide a comparative description of the different units of writing systems. The first section establishes the definitions of the concepts of grapheme, graph, allograph and suprasegmental grapheme. The application of these concepts to English and Romance languages is exemplified by three models and methods of diachronic and comparative description of writing systems: Romance scriptology, cultural history of European orthographies, and comparative graphematics of punctuation. The second section discusses biscriptality, the phenomenon of employing two or more writing systems for the same language, not rare in the history of languages from different families, and related to different aspects of society and language users. With examples mainly from Russian and other Slavic languages, biscriptality is shown to be present on several levels of written language, and various applications of biscriptality are characterized with the help of dichotomies such as synchronic vs. diachronic biscriptality, monocentric vs. pluricentric biscriptality, and societal vs. individual biscriptality.

Do the euro area reforms over the long decade since 2008 add up to a system of risk-pooling among Member States that share a common currency? Most political economists see the macroeconomic policy architecture as incomplete. The standard for completeness is a fiscal federation in which central and state budgets form a co-insurance scheme for citizens. However, the argument here is that we can see an alternative emerging in the EU: a macroeconomic system of reinsurance. The euro area increasingly has the capacity to insure the ultimate insurers of citizens, the Member States, against catastrophic risks and systemic instability that would overwhelm national capacities. It does so in a variety of ways, not confined to budgetary transfers. In contrast to a fiscal federation, this evolution is a viable macroeconomic alternative on which Member State representatives with very different fiscal traditions can agree. It is less clear whether reinsurance has the same loyalty-generating effects among citizens as co-insurance in a federal polity.

The aim of this volume is to provide a reference guide to the contemporary challenges faced by the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). With the goal of providing a holistic picture, the editors have brought together a multidisciplinary team of scholars specialized in economic history, economics, political sciences, and law. This combination of multidisciplinary approaches makes the book unique, as most publications on EMU take a monodisciplinary approach, while the challenges faced by EMU are arguably multifaceted and therefore require a multidisciplinary approach. The authors of the contributions in the volume have been invited to judge the state of integration in EMU, thereby in particular taking into account the decade of experiences following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the European sovereign debt crisis, and the responses to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This chapter discusses from three perspectives the stages of the hybridity of writing systems in the period of the formation of various alphabets as well as their adaptations to the requirements of specific languages. Firstly, the chapter draws attention to the role of borrowings and intersystemic influences at the early stage of the formation of the ‘grand’ alphabets, including the Greek, Latin Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets. These are forms of writing of a long tradition, which later became the basis for numerous national alphabets. Adaptations which adjust a certain alphabetic system (the base alphabet) to the needs of writing the phones of a different language constitute the second – narrower – perspective on contacts between alphabets and the transformations within them. The reflections in this part are exemplified by references to the Latin alphabet in its Polish edition. The chapter then focuses on the narrowest perspective, drawing readers’ attention to alphabet adaptations that did not achieve the status of national writing. This is exemplified by two – entirely different – models of adaptation, comprising the Polish graždanka (Polish Cyrillic alphabet) and the Polish and Belarusian Arabic-graphic writing (aljamiado). Additionally, the author briefly discusses Polish texts written in the Armenian alphabet.

This chapter discusses selected studies of orthography that focus on the spelling practices by mere users of the language (in crucial opposition to actors from the literate elite – norm makers), concentrating on what they reveal about processes of language change as exemplified by spelling variation. The chapter supports the idea that, within the field of historical sociolinguistics, orthographic variables are now considered a type of linguistic variables. The author shows, on the basis of specific historical sociolinguistic studies, that writers’ variable choices of orthography can inform us about broader mechanisms of language change, but always alongside other types of variation or linguistic information. This chapter examines almost exclusively material from the French language, with the studies under consideration addressing either regional French in France or different varieties of French in Canada. The author situates French orthographic variables within the broader language evolution context, explicating what information spelling variation discloses about the writer’s attitudes toward the (written or spoken) norm, toward the written form, and toward the writer’s linguistic community as a whole. The author also considers how spelling variation compares to other types of language variation in order to contribute to a greater understanding of language change.