In 2015, a Pakistani court in the case of Leghari v. Federation of Pakistan made history by accepting arguments that governmental failures to address climate change adequately violated petitioners’ rights. This case forms part of an emerging body of pending or decided climate change-related lawsuits that incorporate rights-based arguments in several countries, including the Netherlands, the Philippines, Austria, South Africa, and the United States (US). These decisions align with efforts to recognize the human rights dimensions of climate change, which received important endorsement in the Paris Agreement. The decisions also represent a significant milestone in climate change litigation. Although there have been hundreds of climate-based cases around the world over the past two decades – especially in the US – past and much of the ongoing litigation focuses primarily on statutory interpretation avenues. Previous efforts to bring human rights cases have also failed to achieve formal success. The new cases demonstrate an increasing trend for petitioners to employ rights claims in climate change lawsuits, as well as a growing receptivity of courts to this framing. This ‘rights turn’ could serve as a model or inspiration for rights-based litigation in other jurisdictions, especially those with similarly structured law and court access.

This article presents an analysis of the distribution and syntactic behavior of the English expression slash, as in John is a linguist slash musician. The interpretation of this ‘effable slash’ is largely equivalent to intersective and, but it differs from other connective devices like Latin cum, N–N compounding and the orthographic slash </>. A corpus study of American English finds that slash is productive in this use. Its syntactic properties confirm its status as coordinator, but it is distinguished from standard coordinators and and or, in that it imposes category restrictions on the conjuncts: it cannot coordinate full clauses or noun phrases with determiners. I propose that words like slash, period and quote form a class of ‘effable punctuation’ that entered the spoken language from writing. In sum, by incorporating slash into the grammar of English, I argue that slash is a rare example of innovation in a ‘very closed’ functional category.

For almost a month in 1877, the Russian public was engrossed in one of the largest nonpolitical trials in the history of Russian law. An alleged criminal organization dubbed the “Jacks of Hearts Club” (Klub chervonnykh valetov) involved 48 defendants in addition to several who had died or managed to escape, as well as more than 300 witnesses. The charges included dozens of episodes of fraud and forgery committed between 1866 and 1875, in addition to one murder and one count of sacrilege. Even more sensational was the fact that the group of defendants belonged to “respectable” society, among them wealthy merchants, landowning nobles, and even a member of the aristocratic Dolgorukov family. In the Russian popular lexicon, a “Jack of Hearts” became enduring shorthand for a personable young swindler of upper-class origins. Over the years, the story grew in the telling, with some of the legends travelling from author to author, such as the story of Pavel Speier, the alleged leader of the club who supposedly tricked a naïve English tourist into “buying” the official residence of the Moscow governor general on Tverskaia Street.

This article examines the impact of the Paris Agreement on the human rights of communities who are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of anthropogenic warming because of their geographical location, their spiritual and cultural connections with land and the wider environment, and their histories of colonialism, dispossession and other forms of exploitation. It focuses on two groups: forest dwellers, and inhabitants of small island developing states who are in danger of inundation as a result of rising sea levels. The Paris Agreement on climate change includes stand-alone articles on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), and loss and damage. The main argument in this article is that the inclusion of human rights in the Preamble to the Paris Agreement is a step forward, but is incommensurate with the scale and urgency of climate change.

The system of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) found in over 3,000 bilateral investment treaties and numerous regional trade agreements has been criticized for interfering with the rights of sovereign states to regulate investment in the public interest, for example, to protect the environment and public health. This article argues that while much of the public debate around ISDS has focused on a small number of cases that have arisen over the regulation of tobacco packaging, there is a far greater threat posed by the potential use of ISDS by the fossil fuel industry to stall action on climate change. It is hypothesized that fossil fuel corporations will emulate a tactic employed by the tobacco industry – that of using ISDS to induce cross-border regulatory chill: the delay in policy uptake in jurisdictions outside the jurisdiction in which the ISDS claim is brought. Importantly, fossil fuel corporations do not have to win any ISDS cases for this strategy to be effective; they only have to be willing to launch them. The article concludes with three options to reform trade and investment agreements to better align them with climate change mitigation efforts: (i) exclude ISDS provisions; (ii) prohibit fossil fuel industries from accessing ISDS; or (iii) carve out all government measures taken in pursuit of international obligations (for example, under the Paris Agreement on climate change) from challenge under ISDS.

This paper tests whether lemma frequency impacts the duration of homographic noun–verb homophones in spontaneous speech, e.g. cut (n)/cut (v). In earlier research on effects of lemma frequency (e.g. Gahl 2008), these pairs of words were not investigated due to a focus on heterographic homophones. Theories of the mental lexicon in both linguistics and psycholinguistics differ as to whether these word pairs are assumed to have shared or separate lexical representations. An empirical analysis based on spontaneous speech from the Buckeye corpus (Pitt et al. 2007) yields the result that differences in lemma frequency affect the duration of the N/V pairs under investigation. First, this finding provides evidence for N/V pairs having separate representations and thus supports models of the mental lexicon in which lexical entries are specified for word class. Second, the result is at odds with an account of ‘full inheritance’ of frequency across homophones and consequently with speech production models implementing inheritance effects via a shared form representation for homophonous words. The findings are best accounted for in a model that assumes completely separate lexical representations for homophonous words.

Verdurization (lühua), a term coined in Japan and adopted into the Chinese vocabulary in the early twentieth century, was an emotive concept and relentless practice in Mao's China. The Chinese state used various verdurization campaigns as part of its project of building a socialist state and as a way of exercising ideological control, particularly in cities. At the same time, ordinary citizens had their own ideas about the role of vegetation in their daily lives – ideas that were often different from, and sometimes counter to, those of the state. The article takes Shanghai as a case-study to examine the politics of urban greening along the spectrum of state, society and everyday life in the early years of the People's Republic.

The wetland find in Levänluhta (western Finland) consists of unburnt, mixed up remains from almost 100 human individuals along with artefacts and animal bones. This spring site, a small lake at the time of use (ad 300–800), has been investigated archaeologically from the late nineteenth century onwards. An impressive array of finds, including precious artefacts, is on display at the National Museum of Finland. However, the material has not previously been subjected to systematic research to clarify who these people were, and why they were buried in a small lake at a time when cremation was the prevailing burial tradition. Here we present the results of a multidisciplinary study that includes new analyses and interpretations of the finds and the site. Prestigious artefacts, peripheral location, and the fact that only a few males were found suggest this unusual burial site was a cemetery for socially or ideologically deviant members of the society.

In the present article we explore the possibilities of reconstructing social behaviour through a detailed analysis of the so-called ‘ashmounds’ of the Late Bronze Age in Eastern Europe, starting from new research at a settlement of the Noua culture, Rotbav in south-eastern Transylvania. For the first time, the excavations comprised not only the ‘ashmound’ but also its vicinity, revealing the existence of structures like houses and pits. Furthermore, the analysis and comparison of the finds revealed significant differences between the ‘ashmound’ and the rest of the domestic spaces. This leads us to a new interpretation of the ‘ashmounds’ as special places, linked with feasting activities and collective leatherworking. This new interpretation is supported not only by the examination of the finds but also by new archaeozoological and chemical analyses, which are usually missing in Eastern Europe.

In this article, we discuss passive se constructions in Romanian and Spanish. We argue that there is a projected implicit external argument in passive se constructions in both languages based on an available inalienable possession interpretation of body parts. These constructions, however, differ from each other in one important way: Romanian passive se allows a ‘by’-phrase, while Spanish passive se shows severe restrictions. Moreover, we illustrate that in Old Spanish, passive se freely allowed ‘by’-phrases. Thus, Modern Romanian reflects an earlier stage of Spanish. We propose a linguistic cycle to explain these differences, where Spanish and Romanian are at different stages of that cycle. The approach offers an explanation for a general pattern within Romance, where ‘by’-phrases are initially grammatical with passive se, but then become ungrammatical over time, a pattern to date that has not yet been explained. It also offers a thereotical account for why some languages do not develop passive se constructions.

The attainment of justice through a private dispute-resolution process, such as the mediation process, is an elusive objective. With the prominent place mediation has been given in civil justice, debates about the ability of mediation to deliver substantive justice are relevant, particularly when proponents of the process argue that mediation offers some form of justice to its participants, while critics argue that it provides no justice. This paper explores the issue of justice in the private dispute-resolution process of mediation and its ability to deliver a substantive form of justice (rather than procedural or popular justice, which is often seen as the type of justice, if any, that is provided by mediation). It does so through an analysis of ethnographic data of the mediation process using Amartya Sen's justice framework set out in The Idea of Justice.