I discuss a certain kind of emotionally charged negative reaction to defences of non-monogamous love, which I call collective-identity reactions. Expanding on work by Audrey Yap and Jonathan Ichikawa, who consider defensive reactions grounded in individual identity, I argue that collective-identity reactions are characteristically associated with claims about who we are, and motivated by a sense that the relevant we is in some way under threat. Looking into which we might be threatened by defences of non-monogamy, and why, reveals that this apparently personal subject matter is in fact entangled with global political issues like capitalism and American cultural imperialism. I conclude with some thoughts about ameliorative strategies for situations structurally similar to this one.

In light of a recent surge of interest in time across a range of disciplines, a case has been made that New Testament studies has experienced a “temporal turn.” This claim raises an important question about how one understands the relation of recent developments to earlier, long-held debates about time among New Testament scholars. This question is answered here by revisiting the “salvation history” debate between Oscar Cullmann and Rudolf Bultmann, with the help of Paul Ricoeur’s analysis in Time and Narrative and in the context of recent trends in work on “temporalities.” This article argues that, although in many respects recent work on time offers fresh language to describe the kinds of time at stake for New Testament scholarship, it is also true that attending to the earlier debates shows how parts of the temporal turn are in fact a return to questions long considered.

Currently, the Affordable Care Act helps to provide inexpensive preventive care services to adolescents (10–19 years old) by preventing insurance companies from implementing cost-sharing measures. Some of these services can fall under the realm of mental health preventive care such as anxiety and depression testing. The lack of cost to a patient and their family encourages doctors to offer these services to their young patients. Furthermore, this Affordable Care Act provision - fosters doctor-patient communication because it normalizes mental health services as part of well-being. However, Braidwood Management Inc. v. Becerra threatens to have far reaching implications for preventive care policy and to disrupt health communication efforts to promote positive mental health. This Article uses structuration theory and a conceptual framework of adolescent development to examine the potential ramifications of cost-sharing on adolescent health. The implications of this change in cost-sharing include constraining doctors’ communication behavior in primary care settings and stunting healthy adolescent development. Ultimately, if the Braidwood decision is upheld, it may pose a challenge to a doctor’s ability to communicate with their young patient about mental health.

Transhumanists claim that futuristic technologies will permit you to live indefinitely as a nonbiological ‘posthuman’ with a radically improved quality of life. Philosophers have pointed out that whether some radically enhanced posthuman is really you depends on perplexing issues about the nature of personal identity. In this paper, I present an especially pressing version of the personal-identity challenge to transhumanism, based on the ideas of Derek Parfit. Parfit distinguishes two main views of personal identity, an intuitive, nonreductive view and a revisionary, reductive view. I argue that the standard rationale for wanting to become a posthuman makes sense only if the intuitive view is correct, but that the standard rationale for thinking that it is possible to become a posthuman makes sense only if the revisionary view is correct. Following this, I explain why the obvious responses are unsatisfactory or imply the need to rethink transhumanism in ways that make it much less radical and less appealing.

The relationship between scholarship and adjudication has attracted considerable attention in recent years, especially in those areas where significant academic expertise has been developed and academic scrutiny of decisions is common. Yet the role of scholars and scholarship in the context of the adjudicatory practices of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has remained palpably under-investigated. This article begins to fill this gap in the literature by carrying out the first large-scale empirical study of the use of scholarship by the ECtHR. The authors rely on a purpose-built dataset comprising all the citations made by the Grand Chamber of the Court in judgments and separate opinions appended to it. The study finds that the Court's majority uses scholarship for the purposes of reviewing facts and interpreting international and domestic law but does so rarely. The majority of the ECtHR does not use scholarship to interpret the European Convention on Human Rights or for persuasive purposes, unlike the individual Judges in their separate opinions. Indeed, individual Judges refer to scholarship more often, for more varied and arguably different purposes. This use, however, is inconsistent in terms of both frequency and the types of sources referred to.

Constitutional courts operate under a framework of formal and informal rules. While formal rules have been extensively studied, our understanding of informal rules remains limited. Courts often rely on internal practices, traditions and unwritten customs developed over time, posing a significant challenge due to their hidden nature. Numerous constitutional courts lack detailed voting protocols in their statutes and internal regulations, leaving essential aspects to the court's discretion, such as, inter alia, the voting order, deliberation style, outcome versus issue voting and tie-breaking protocols. By employing a case study of strategic breaching of informal voting protocols in the Mexican Supreme Court, this article highlights the complexity of enforcing informal voting rules given that external actors may be unaware of them, along with other factors. Even when informal rules are broadly known, certain circumstances may diminish the efficacy of informal sanctions addressing their breach. Thus, key judicial players, such as chief justices or judge-rapporteurs, may take advantage of the informal rules of voting protocols to advance their policy preferences.

Canada's endangered Deep-Snow Mountain Caribou (DSC) are endemic to mountainous southern inland British Columbia, where they subsist in winter on an almost exclusive diet of epiphytic hair lichens, especially Bryoria fremontii and B. pseudofuscescens (the high-biomass Bryoria spp.) and Alectoria sarmentosa. Importantly, stand-level hair lichen loadings adequate for the dietary needs of DSC rarely occur in forests younger than c. 120–150 years, an unusual form of old-growth dependence hypothetically linked to certain structural features of old forest ecosystems. Not only does this hypothesis accord well with recent insights into hair lichen ecophysiology, it also allows the formulation of a conceptual ‘hyperabundance’ model for the high-biomass Bryoria spp. and lays the foundation for a similar model for A. sarmentosa. In both cases the models point to a massive standing crop of hair lichens in the overstories of old-growth forests; it is this reservoir that, partly by releasing a constant manna-like rain of thallus fragments into the lower canopy, sustains DSC during the winter half year. The outcome is a sustained-yield system resistant to degradation from overbrowsing, yet vulnerable to fragmentation of old-growth forests by industrial forestry, a process of progressive forage reduction that must ultimately place DSC at risk of winter malnutrition. We conclude that stand-level hair lichen hyperabundance is necessarily an attribute of advanced forest age and, at least in the case of Bryoria, cannot be silviculturally induced in stands younger than c. 120–150 years.

In this essay, I examine the intersection between the concepts of freedom, the self, God, and creativity in the works of one of the most prominent twentieth-century Jewish thinkers, Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook (1865–1935), exploring his use of these concepts through the lens of the Lebensphilosophie of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). I first draw a historical and thematic parallel between Bergson’s and Kook’s philosophies that to date has not been considered extensively. I then argue that five different interpretative puzzles related to the topic of freedom in Kook’s teachings can be explained against the background of Bergson’s thought. This Bergsonian interpretation enables the reader to appreciate in what way different aspects of Kook’s thought—the metaphysical, ethical, epistemological, and theological—are interconnected and can be understood as an organic whole. I thereby show that the Bergsonian philosophical and systematic models are an important, and yet unexplored, interpretative tool for the study of Kook’s theological and philosophical thought.

Markus nimmt seine Gegenwart als dunkle, düstere Zeit wahr und bearbeitet mit seiner Jesuserzählung die krisenbehaftete Gegenwart. Ein zentraler Baustein in seinem Krisenmanagement ist ein strategischer Einsatz literarisch-theologischer Mehrdeutigkeiten. Die vorliegenden Beobachtungen illustrieren diesen strategischen Einsatz am Beispiel der programmatischen Basileiaaussage in Mk 1,15. Unsere Kernthese lautet: Markus bändigt die Ambiguität der ἤγγικɛν-Aussage in 1,15 durch die ἤγγικɛν-Aussage in 14,42 und beansprucht damit Deutungshoheit inmitten einer existentiellen krisenhaften Zuspitzung in der erzählten Welt. Dieser Gewinn an Deutungshoheit marginalisiert weder die Krisenerfahrung am Vorabend des Todes Jesu noch die Krisenerfahrung in den 70er Jahren, sondern dient dazu, ein wenig festen Boden in all der verbleibenden Unklarheit und Ungewissheit unter die Füße zu bekommen.

For almost a century, the Supreme Court has not invalidated a law using the nondelegation doctrine. Recognizing that Congress seldom has expertise to address the ever-increasing complexities of society, the Court has long held that Congress can legislate broadly and seek help from federal agencies to fill up the details. Accordingly, courts defer to Congress’s delegation choices, as long as it lays down an intelligible principle to guide the agencies entrusted with implementing legislation. Under that approach, the Court has upheld broad delegations of authority to federal agencies. This approach has been the bedrock of meaningful agency action, especially in health policy in which agencies must leverage their expertise to respond to highly technical issues, emergencies, advances in technology, and the need to address health disparities. While this deferential approach has guided the courts and Congress for decades, delegation is increasingly under attack. Braidwood Management, Inc. v. Becerra, which challenges the Affordable Care Act’s preventive services requirement, exemplifies nondelegation-based attacks on agency authority. With several members of the Supreme Court signaling interest in revisiting the current deferential delegation standard, Braidwood likely provides an opportunity for the Supreme Court to do so. Reinvigorating the nondelegation doctrine — coupled with the major questions doctrine and rolling back of Chevron deference — will hurt U.S. health policy. It will not only constrain how agencies work, but also aggrandize the courts and limit how Congress may achieve legislative goals.

In the past decade, the practice of investor–State arbitral tribunals addressing investment protection in the context of armed conflict and military occupation has expanded. This has prompted a growing interest in the relationship between international investment law and international humanitarian law (IHL), two regimes with markedly different relationships to war—IHL more pragmatic and international investment law more idealistic. This article argues that, while its lack of pragmatism might render international investment law ineffective in changing how war is conducted, it is the regime under which States are most likely to be held liable for the conduct of war. This is a result of its more robust primary obligations, more effective enforcement mechanisms and large awards of damages. Nevertheless, comparing international investment law and IHL does also reveal some similarities—the legacy, it is argued, of a time when the laws of war were more about protecting private property and neutral commerce than civilians. Putting these two regimes together in this way exposes international law's uneven distribution of protection in war.

Gerald Barry's approach to composition has undergone a number of changes. Frequently these developments coincide with the composition of a large-scale opera. One of these points of transition in his output occurs in the period before he commenced work on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Between 1999 and 2000 Barry composed three works – 1998, The Eternal Recurrence and Wiener Blut – in which he attempted to find a new compositional direction after a period in which canonic proliferation dominated his musical material. This article examines some of the main traits of these works, and Wiener Blut in particular, since it contains a greater variety of approaches than the other two compositions. The article also considers how Barry's shift in approach may have been linked to his decision to set Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play. Its quite plain, realistic prose was a contrast to the sort of text Barry had previously chosen to set, requiring a different musical response, and the article draws out some possible connections between Barry's three ‘pointillistic’ compositions and the opera.