In this introductory chapter I present the core tension in the study of transitional justice: the frequent failure of transitional justice to bring justice to victims of state violence. I question how governments escape justice in the age of accountability. The strategies through which a government adapts transitional justice to manage potentially risky demands for accountability have implications for who is held responsible for the atrocities of the past, a central factor for political order itself. This chapter engages the literature on norm compliance to situate my theory of strategic adaptation.

Traditional pastoral practices have maintained Alpine grasslands over thousands of years, and Alpine biodiversity now depends on these practices. Grasslands are also central to the identity of pastoral communities: They are biocultural landscapes. Across the Alps, these landscapes are now threatened by high rates of agricultural land abandonment as traditional, labor-intensive agricultural methods become uneconomic, and small-scale development increases. The Autonomous Province of Bozen/Bolzano-South Tyrol, Italy, experiences some of the lowest rates of land abandonment and high rates of grassland retention. The case study explores the functions of regulatory intervention and coordination, two of the regulatory functions advanced by this book’s CIRCle Framework of regulatory functions for addressing cumulative environmental problems. It investigates how a diverse set of regulatory interventions provides for maintaining and restoring grasslands in South Tyrol, and how diverse forms of coordination – links between areas of laws, coordinating institutions, and dispute resolution processes – facilitate implementation in a context of deep multilevel governance.

Chapter 1 sets out the methodology of the work-task approach in more detail before providing an overview of the findings. It introduces the sources used, the challenges they present, and the methods adopted to mitigate those challenges, as well as presenting the overall results of our research.

This chapter is the first of three examinations of dominant copyright reversion traditions (UK, US, EU) throughout this book. It traces how reversion rights were present in the very first copyright statute, the 1710 Statute of Anne. It demonstrates how different iterations of reversion rights were hamstrung by poor design and undermining by rightsholders (e.g. by contracting around the intended effects of these provisions). It then canvasses modern developments in reversion rights across the Commonwealth (like in Canada and South Africa).

Cumulative environmental impacts are a central problem that contemporary environment-related laws must face, from laws that allocate natural resources such as forests and water, to rights-based approaches to nature and human health. This introduction sketches the basic characteristics of a cumulative environmental problem – accumulating, incremental harms at different scales, caused by many and diverse actors, with the added complexity of interacting and uncertain effects addressed by multiple legal regimes. It explains why addressing cumulative environmental problems requires reaching across disciplines, legal contexts, and jurisdictions. The CIRCle Framework is introduced - a Framework of four integrated functions of formal rules for responding to cumulative environmental problems – conceptualization, information, regulatory intervention, and coordination. The chapter also introduces case studies of laws addressing environmental justice concerns related to groundwater in the Central Valley of California, cumulative harms to the biodiversity of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, and cumulative impacts to grasslands as biocultural landscapes in South Tyrol, Italy.

This chapter provides a bird’s eye view of the landscape of laws that can deliver the CIRCle Framework functions of conceptualization, information, regulatory intervention, and coordination to address cumulative environmental problems. Its scope is broad, covering traditional and customary laws; environmental impact assessment and strategic environmental assessment; natural resources, land use planning, conservation, pollution, and other environment-related laws; and broader areas of public law, including constitutional environmental rights. It also discusses the way international treaties and development bank policies deal with cumulative impacts. The chapter provides a simple compass for navigating this landscape: considering whether the dominant focus of the law is a matter of concern that is threatened by cumulative impacts (e.g., environmental justice, national parks), impacts (e.g., environmental impact assessment, water pollution), or activities (e.g., road construction, mining), or whether it instead indirectly influences a cumulative environmental problem (e.g., laws for intergovernmental coordination).

Australia’s World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef experiences cumulative impacts from diverse activities, including regional catchment-sourced water pollution and the impacts of climate change. Regulating these threats engages a wide range of laws for intervention, which have been influenced by a regulatory mechanism for information – a strategic environmental assessment (SEA) undertaken a decade ago at the request of UNESCO. This chapter explores how the strategic assessment and associated interventions influence impacts from two major activities that contribute to water pollution and climate change – cattle grazing and coal mining. It shows that regulatory SEA can provide for entrenching and integrating ongoing information collection, analysis, and sharing. Moreover, SEA can directly influence diverse regulatory interventions to address cumulative impacts. It can link the functions of information and intervention, two of the regulatory functions advanced by this book’s CIRCle Framework. At the same time, opportunities remain to build stronger links between interventions for water quality and climate adaptation, and between climate change mitigation interventions and the Reef context.

The findings of this book offer suggestions for future research as well as new directions for advocacy. The concluding chapter of the book presents a research agenda for understanding the strategic adaptation of international norms. The chapter also suggests policy prescriptions for those committed to advancing the accountability of states and holding government perpetrators of violence accountable for their actions.

This chapter is the last of the statute-focused chapters. It concentrates on how reversion rights have developed across the European Union. It briefly examines historical laws that reflect the incentive and reward concerns of subsequent reversion rights, before providing an overview of prominent types of reversion mechanisms in force in the EU as of 2020. This provides valuable context for an analysis of the most recent reversion development in the EU, the implementation of the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (which required Member States to implement, at minimum, a right to end grants of rights where there was a ‘lack of exploitation’). The chapter demonstrates, however, that this provision, and many of its implementations in the domestic laws of Member States, also suffers from the problems identified in the US and UK chapters – poor design, ineffective triggers and the ability of rightsholders to undermine it, for example by contracting out of the scheme’s intended effect.

Chapter 4 explores time-use and work intensity. The seasonality of work across the year shows that not only agriculture but other types of work had distinct seasonal patterns. Evidence of the working year, weeks, and hours of the day provides new data on much-debated issues and highlights the experiences of women and servants as well as male householders. This suggests that early modern work patterns were remarkably stable and structured, rather than erratic or lax.