This chapter focuses on the expressive functions of tears, the face and the body on the early modern stage, to probe the deep relation between drama and the law, including their entwined but distinct investments in natural self-evidence and the rhetoric of presence. Through an interdiscursive approach, it shows how drama mines the complexities of hypokrisis through an engagement with the radical performativity at the core of law, and offers the provocation that law’s disknowledges are turned into a poetic condition of theatrical knowledge, and a forging of subjecthood and inwardness that complicates the distinction between the fiction of theatre and the reality of the law court. It ends with the suggestion that the theatre looks at, as well as beyond, the vivid invisibilities of judicial encounters to unpack the epistemic, affective and ethical impulses structuring the ‘scene’ of law.

This chapter provides a succinct overview of pre-1945 developments. Examining developments since antiquity, it stresses that the idea of ‘Europe’ did not acquire any meaningful place in ordinary people’s lives until the twentieth century. Only after the devastation of the First World War did the concept of Europe and European integration become relevant to broader sections of the population, with the emergence of ideas of political and economic cooperation. As well as liberals, the far right also talked about building Europe. It took the Second World War to move European integration from the sphere of the thinkable to the realm of the politically doable. Still, the road ahead remained rocky, and conflicting ideas and projects emerged. The earliest predecessor of today’s European Union – the ECSC – was a latecomer and built on the experience of a whole host of international organisations created between 1945 and 1950.

Legal foundations of Islamic maritime principles and regulations were and remain largely rooted in customary practices. Whereas the legal principles of Islamic merchant law were laid down by merchants and their proxies, the regulations governing the carriage of goods by water, employment of crews, personal behavior during maritime ventures, and other nautical issues were generally derived from the legal traditions and customary practices of experienced shipowners, shipmasters, captains, seamen, merchants, and sea travellers.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the book and elaborates on the significance of racial doubt as a category of analysis beyond nineteenth-century Cuba. Given that racism has deep cultural and affective roots, the skeptical analyses that humanistic research centers will remain vital, even as the institutions supporting such research are destroyed by oligarchic, race-baiting forces. Skepticism is a power that the Humanities share with racial doubt. It implies, counterintuitively, a hope – to question in order to get things right – and a pledge to knowledge – to avoid denial, ignorance, and false explanations. No matter how indispensable one’s convictions about race might be, clinging to them would mean forsaking this hope, this pledge, and the broad political alliances required to imagine a world better than our own.

Chapter 6 analyses how legal procedures were included in the Paris Peace Treaties in order to solve one of the most sensitive and politically controversial questions of the post-war order: the payment of reparations from former Central Power governments or individuals to Allied individuals. In accordance with the peace treaties, 39 Mixed Arbitral Tribunals were established after 1920 to decide on private Allied claims for damages that had occurred during the war due to acts by former Central Power governments or individuals. The fact that an international court system permitted private individuals to raise claims against foreign governments was seen as a radical novelty; and even more so since tens of thousands of claimants throughout Europe and beyond attempted to receive compensation for claimed losses. From an Allied point of view, these new tribunals served justice, deemed to be at the core of the Paris Peace Treaties system. Yet, for the former Central Power governments, their legal advisers, and scholars, the Mixed Arbitral Tribunals were nothing but elaborate examples of victor’s justice characterized by unclear competences and applicable law.

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.