Reforming Politics and Reform as Politics

The commissioner of excise asked his subordinates to gather information about the liquor Indians preferred most in the Presidency of Fort St George in 1905. He also wrote to laboratories to clarify whether toddy was indeed ‘a completely innocuous liquor containing a large proportion of food material’. Major Charles H. Bedford's report concluded that most of the toddy being consumed in the province was at an advanced fermentation stage. Samples sent for laboratory testing had revealed a high proportion of fusel oil – a known cause of indigestion, dysentery and rheumatism. With the hydrometer's use in testing the proof strength of alcoholic drinks in mid-eighteenth-century England, utilising technology to regulate alcohol had become an exercise in building public trust. The hydrometer's subsequent use to test and establish the proof strengths of different country liquors in India was comparable but much more significant in its impact. It demonstrates the colonial state's determination to penetrate an indigenous industry in order to bring it into alignment with Western scientific technologies, processes and practices. Remarkably, the Congress leadership would similarly show interest in ascertaining toddy's nutritional properties. As the president of the Prohibition League of India (PLI), Rajaji wrote to the heads of the Tropical School of Medicine in Calcutta and the Pasteur Institute in Coonoor in 1931. He sought to verify that ‘to drink beer in order to ensure efficient enzyme action in the body (was) as unnecessary as to drink toddy in order to ensure a sufficient supply of Vitamin B’.

This chapter argues how Ignatius Sancho’s oeuvre, his reception in the literary world, and his enduring legacy in the arts generate an important set of counter-representations to imperial representations of Black life. While providing an overview of the volume’s essays and its organization, this chapter argues how Sancho’s epistolary writing speaks to Black life-worlds beyond the British political terms of debates on equality and abolition. Although Sancho’s writings and presence in the public sphere have been absorbed into broader narratives of imperial power and prestige, his oeuvre and documentations of his influence (past and present) exhibit rare representations of Black life across a variety of social spaces, beyond the terms of servitude and enslavement. While many early public representations of Black life in England were translated for the racializing gaze of a predominantly white readership, Sancho’s self-representation through the arts (alongside subsequent critical and creative reception of his work) reveal complex patterns and particularities in African diasporic experiences in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

How did the songs of Pindar solicit the language of Greek polytheism? How could their words generate ritual knowledge and provoke experience? Pindar was long recognised as a master of piety and an authority on divine matters, and his poems remained privileged points of reference for thinking ritual occasions like festivals, the sanctuaries where they were held, and ritual types like sacrifice. Focusing on sacrifice, this chapter looks at the ritual language produced by Pindaric poetry, rather than the one it reflects, and its inscription in the ritual archive of Greek culture. It is concerned with the poet’s enduring role as an agent in the dynamic system of Greek polytheism. After a brief survey of the prominence of sacrifice in the Pindaric biographical tradition, different aspects of the sacrifices found in the poems of Pindar are reviewed and illustrated through case studies, most notably passages from Pythian 5, Isthmian 4, and Olympian 10.

Failure to deliver a fair trial within a reasonable time is the most common violation found by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) as almost half of all its judgments include a violation of Article 6. If the ECtHR were subject to its own jurisdiction, however, it, too, would be in violation of Article 6 in a sizable portion of its judgments. Therefore, both reports by the Court itself and academic literature have urged the Court to increase digitalisation and employ new technologies, including AI, in its procedures. Historically, the Court has employed an ambivalent approach to new technology, incorporating it in its caseload management, but insisting on the use of fax and physical mail in its communications with applicants. There are indicators, such as allowing electronic applications from Ukraine due to the suspension of physical mail during the war with Russia, that the Court may be abandoning this ambivalence. This chapter accounts for the current and potential use of AI at the ECtHR in each of the steps in its adjudication, evaluating the potential of existing AI technologies and the risks involved, considering the procedures and divisions of labour at the ECtHR.

By 2024, collaboration between Japan’s government and the private sector had deepened to promote IT integration into the judiciary. In civil litigation, legal reforms have driven progress, and AI-supported legal tech is streamlining time-consuming tasks. Academia is also developing AI-based legal reasoning tools. However, criminal trials remain largely untouched by AI, due to Japan’s conservative legal culture and the judges’ reliance on precedent. Public expectations for fairness coexist with concerns over AI’s lack of empathy. The issue is especially sensitive in the context of Japan’s death penalty system. Japan now faces a critical juncture in balancing innovation and tradition in its judicial use of AI.

This volume sets out to provide a concise and accessible overview of the history of today’s European Union. A brief account of such a sprawling topic obviously cannot be comprehensive. Instead, I hope to lay out the broad sweep of developments, without getting bogged down in the details. These days all the EU’s significant moves are documented online, including all its treaties, major decisions, national positions, specific policies, and other technicalities. The institutions themselves provide deep insights into their ongoing work, often also supplying snapshots of historical developments. Even more importantly, there are entire libraries of books on specific policies and the roles of institutional actors such as the European Commission, the Parliament, the Council, and the various member states. Amidst such a wealth of information, it is all too easy to get tangled up in the details. In response, this book seeks to provide a coherent survey of the EU’s history for the general reader.

A nonbacktracking random walk, that is, where the random walker is not allowed to travel an edge back and forth, leads to a new Laplace type operator with novel properties. It encodes structural features of the underlying graph in a manner different from other Laplace operators.

The challenges courts face in dealing with the demand for justice in the digital age have increased considerably in the last thirty years. These actors have always been under the spotlight as the traditional institutional mechanism to protect rights and ensure the rule of law, but have been increasingly confronted with limited resources and expertise, and an overwhelming amount of judicial workload. Digitalisation and automation have been seen as a possibility for political decision-makers to sort out new strategies and tools that ease judicial activity. This chapter argues that the increasing digitalisation of justice has resulted in two constitutional trends, respectively towards an increasing internalisation of AI and digital technologies into the judicial field, and externalisation of judicial functions to private actors and administrative authorities which also implement AI technologies. Both internalisation and externalisation raise constitutional challenges for judicial activities, touching the core of digital constitutionalism, primarily the protection of rights and the limits of power in the digital age.

This chapter offers an overview of contemporary pro-oil mobilization in Canada and the United States. Through analysis of ninety-five organizations, the chapter looks at patterns in the scale, issues, and levels of transparency common among pro-oil advocacy groups. These data show that contestation today often happens at the state or provincial level and typically emphasizes multi-issue, long-term campaigns. Furthermore, many of these organizations demonstrate at least nominal financial transparency, with more than half naming sponsors on their websites. This level of revelation is largely absent on social media, however, with very few campaigns mentioning their sponsors on X or Facebook. Groups that are nominally finically transparent also employ misrepresentative coalitions, buried attribution, passive voice, and reputational laundering to make their funding sources harder to track in practice.

What emerges from a study of the Pindaric odes is a fascinating, and possibly surprising, panorama of creative responses by translators, ranging from freestyle ‘pindarizing’ to deeply philological modes of translation that are at the same time rigorous and adventurous. The rewards of translating this challenging author are therefore considerable. The chapter concludes by outlining some perspectives for future Pindar translations: as an integral part of philology and commentary; a landmark case study within a ‘topography of translation’ in the field of classics more generally; a ‘play space’ for creative exploration (including in the classroom); and an opportunity to reach beyond mere textual translation towards broader forms of (performative) re-mediation.