The Catalogue of Scientific Papers, published by the Royal Society of London beginning in 1867, projected back to the beginning of the nineteenth century a novel vision of the history of science in which knowledge was built up out of discrete papers each connected to an author. Its construction was an act of canon formation that helped naturalize the idea that scientific publishing consisted of special kinds of texts and authors that were set apart from the wider landscape of publishing. By recovering the decisions and struggles through which the Catalogue was assembled, this essay aims to contribute to current efforts to denaturalize the scientific paper as the dominant genre of scientific life. By privileging a specific representation of the course of a scientific life as a list of papers, the Catalogue helped shape underlying assumptions about the most valuable fruits of a scientific career. Its enumerated lists of authors’ periodical publications were quickly put to use as a means of measuring scientific productivity and reputation, as well as by writers of biography and history. Although it was first conceived as a search technology, this essay locates the Catalogue’s most consequential legacy in its uses as a technology of valuation.

In the autumn of 1790 Mozart undertook the penultimate journey of his life to participate in the coronation of Leopold II as Holy Roman Emperor in Frankfurt am Main. His attendance and performance at this significant imperial gathering were an investment designed to improve his fortunes. But Mozart's gamble failed. Though it was a key political event, and despite its significance as one of Mozart's final sojourns, not much more is known about the music of the Frankfurt coronation. This article offers a new understanding of Leopold II's imperial accession, positing the coronation as a vibrant context for music culture. Contrary to narratives that position Mozart's concert above all others, I argue that this was far from the case according to his contemporaries. During the coronation festivities the city hosted three theatre companies and many celebrated musicians, including Ludwig Fischer, Johann Hässler, Vincenzo Righini, Antonio Salieri and Georg Vogler, among others. Frankfurt was indeed filled with musicians who cooperated with and competed against one another in the hope of attracting substantial audiences comprised of the Empire's elite. Yet for Mozart, whose concert was poorly advertised and unfortunately timed, this competition proved too intense. By investigating the musical and political events of Leopold II's imperial coronation, I assert that Mozart's investment, which had the potential to alter his life forever, was unsuccessful in part because of a rumour that caused his desired audience to leave Frankfurt temporarily the very morning his performance took place.

The endeavour to take jurisprudence seriously is addressed by Baghai, a sociologist, to those within her own discipline who fail to engage with the internal understandings of law, most particularly those exhibited within the discourse that accompanies appeal court decisions, namely the discourse that helps to establish and develop legal doctrine. In effect, the book is an appeal for sociologists to assign greater attention to legal doctrine as an object of study. But such an appeal can also be interpreted as a request for theorists who study legal doctrine to take sociology seriously – namely an invitation to legal theorists to bring sociology, or at least one version of it, to bear on their study of the evolution of doctrine. This proposal faces considerable resistance from those on both sides of this divide. Whilst Hart notoriously described The Concept of Law as an essay in both analytical jurisprudence and descriptive sociology, the analytic tradition that he sponsored has sought to augment its academic credentials by moving ever closer to philosophy rather than sociology. With the important exception of Brian Leiter's arguments for ‘naturalising jurisprudence’, the general drift of analytical jurisprudence has been towards a prioritising of philosophical methods over empirical insights. And the resistance to some rapprochement has not been limited to the philosophical side of the divide. The sociology of law has a long tradition of approaching the study of law in a manner that distances itself from the self-understandings of participants in the legal system (lawyers and especially judges). This transfers in turn into hostility towards the manner in which legal philosophy has engaged with those self-understandings, with its willingness to consider, at high levels of abstraction, whether law consists of rules, norms or principles. Rather than organising insiders' views into conceptual schemes, and then examining them for their coherence and consistency, legal sociology has generated its own facts and truths about laws and lawyers, principally using empirical methods (but also other methods) and contrasting these ‘truths’ with lawyer's self-understandings, treating the latter as an inferior form of knowledge either disconnected from reality or ideological rather than descriptive. It has also noticeably failed to engage with much of the central concern of legal philosophy – the attempt to identify law as a separate entity within society. Rather than considering the existence of law as a unity, it focuses instead on parts of law as examples of more general sociological categories, such as studying the legal profession within the sociology of professions or courts, legislatures and administrative agencies within the sociology of institutions or organisations.

This paper aims to summarise the current understanding and literature around Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). It provides a brief history of the key terms associated with the right to equal recognition before the law and encompasses both academic writing in this area and General Comment No. 1 from the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The content is intended to provide readers of this Special Issue with a general understanding of developments surrounding Article 12 so they can fully engage with the other papers within this Special Issue and with the content of the Voices of Individuals: Collectively Exploring Self-determination (VOICES) project as a whole.

In a bid to promote consensus, this response article parses the subtle difference of meaning and emphasis that subsists between the various proponents of the new paradigm of legal capacity by closely reading four articles included in this issue of the Journal.

In this introduction to the special issue, “Postcolonial Reading Publics,” Mukherjee charts the history of reception of two texts, one a Bengali novel published in British India, the other a Shakespeare adaptation staged in twenty-first-century Kolkata, to examine the fortuitous ways in which reading publics baffle or exceed authorial intention and the given text’s addressable objects. Offering summaries of and continuities among the four essays that constitute the volume, the introduction ends with an analysis of the salience of this discursive context for postcolonial writing, theory, and critique in a world literary frame.

Over the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, colonial observers repeatedly recorded Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices in the French Caribbean. “Ritual Observances” charts four such records; the 1698 journal of Jean Baptiste Labat, trial records from 1784, Moreau de-Saint Merie’s 1794 Description Topographique, and Drouin De Bercy’s De Saint Domingue. Although these records span distinct historical periods and textual mediums, they all employ a set of recognizable forms to express the convergence of disgust and desire that have historically attended colonial observations of Afro-Caribbean agency. I argue, however, that the significance of this ambivalence is constitutive of the historical moment in which it appears and that these observations are connected by more than a “shared” ambivalence. Instead, we might categorize these records as themselves ritualistic. The term ritual observance gestures to the act of observing a ritual, but also the way in which the observation is itself ritualistic. The repeated and sequential forms, or “actions” as I term them, of the ritual observance work to inscribe a legible history over the turbulence of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French colonialism.