The Supreme Court's decision in Lochner v. New York (1905), invalidating an act limiting working hours for bakers as a violation of contractual freedom, has come to symbolize an era in constitutional law. The period covers the years from the end of the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era. Its chief characteristic, according to its critics, is the judiciary's hostility to progressive labor legislation. Statutes intended to protect vulnerable classes from the ravages of industrialization were routinely defeated in the courts. Progressives pioneered an interpretation in which Lochner became a leading “anticanonical” case, wrongly deploying the doctrine of substantive due process to shield inherited distributions of wealth and power. The time is long past when scholars characterized the era as a product of judges' reactionary commitments to laissez-faire or, worse, to Social Darwinism, following Justice Holmes's quip, dissenting in Lochner, that “the Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics.” Contemporary scholars have reconstructed the period's jurisprudence, finding in it a principled commitment to a conception of justice grounded in the Founding. The most widely accepted explanation, developed by Gillman's influential study, is that substantive due process embodied a principle of neutrality requiring courts to distinguish the authentic public aims of legislation from illegitimate attempts to advantage some classes at others' expense. An alternative explanation is that judges, drawing on the theory of natural rights, developed the doctrine of substantive due process to limit government's discretion to encumber prepolitical rights to private property and liberty of contract.

On 27 January 2011, the Fort Severn Cree nation presented its perspectives on the management of wabusk (Cree term for polar bear meaning the great wandering one) or polar bear (Ursus maritimus) to the international community. The following article provides an overview of the events that have transpired since the Conférence internationale mondes polaires held in Paris, France, on 26–28 January 2011. It begins by discussing the current state of the southern Hudson Bay polar bear sub-population and describing Cree interactions with polar bears before highlighting how the Fort Severn Cree nation is developing a co-management strategy through the indigenous stewardship model for polar bear management in its traditional territory in northern Ontario, Canada.

Statelessness continues to trouble today's international legal and political spheres. Despite the International Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, the stateless remain an unwelcome presence and awkward anomaly within an international human rights regime still fundamentally dominated by the nation state structure. In 1945, Marc Vishniak wrote that the stateless were “… restricted in their rights more than any other people and constitute the weakest chain in the link of human rights.” Hannah Arendt, who was herself a Jewish refugee from Germany, placed the enigma of the stateless in an even more central philosophical position. Whereas Visniak emphasized the problematic and marginalized legal status of the stateless within the dominant international paradigm, Arendt proposed a re-imagining of the international legal order, a vision that would prioritize a solution to the situation of the stateless, especially stateless Jews, by “somehow or other restoring to them the inalienable rights of man.” For Arendt, Jewish former citizens of Germany, stripped of their nationality by the Nazi regime, occupied a newly paradoxical situation as empowered and voluntary Heimatlos, precisely because they now rejected the standard legal normativity of the state/citizen template. Arendt found historical support for her argument about statelessness as both abnormal within dominant international legal thinking, and at the same time strangely empowering, with regard to the situation of the mainly Jewish refugees displaced during World War I. They had fallen outside the protections offered by new succession countries at the end of that conflict, very often by their own decision to refuse incorporation as citizens of the emergent nation states. These Jewish apatrides discovered “privileges and juridical advantages in statelessness.” For Arendt, Jewish former citizens of Germany at the end of World War II further embodied a move toward conceptualizing a new international paradigm wherein rights could be sought beyond the traditional bounds of a state-based legal order, precisely because those bounds had been irrevocably shattered by the state itself.

Changes of the lipid composition (mainly of membrane lipids) in gills in response to various seawater salinities were studied in two groups of mussels Mytilus edulis L. from the White Sea, living under different environmental conditions (intertidal zone and artificial substrates used in aquaculture). Modifications in the lipid composition involved the basic indices characteristic of the physical state of biological membranes, and minor components of the lipid bilayer, which perform regulatory functions, indicating that the lipid metabolism of the bivalves has undergone acclimation transformations in response to salinity. It is demonstrated that the response to critical salinity (5 ppt) in membrane lipids was similar in the two investigated groups of mussels, whereas with salinities of 15, 35, and 45 ppt the pattern of fluctuations in the lipid composition depended on the initial habitat (intertidal zone or aquaculture).

This article is dedicated to the aggravation of negative natural and anthropogenous changes in Central Siberia in the Yenisei River geo-system. These changes are probably the result of global warming and climate destabilisation combined with intensified destructive processes in the region.

The last decades were characterised by the following:

1. 1. Growth of mean annual temperatures and change of annual climate structure resulting in extreme weather and hydrologic situations;

2. 2. Large-scale degradation of insular permafrost with corresponding decrease of their water-cut;

3. 3. Dry thunderstorms, fires, forest disease outbreaks became more frequent and abundant in the large areas;

4. 4. Forage resources failures and game animals’ depletion in numbers became more frequent;

5. 5. Overgrowing of the Angara and the Yenisei Rivers. Significant drop of spawning sites’ reproductive functions;

6. 6. Northern borders of some wild populations’ habitats started moving further north;

7. 7. Aggravation of boat traffic conditions and traditional use of natural resources;

8. 8. Taiga lost its fire-suppression and chemical-protection functions almost completely;

9. 9. Some issues have emerged regarding protection of people and domestic animals against natural-endemic diseases as well as predators;

Antarctic tourism has experienced a boom period over the last thirty years. Beginning in the 1980s, the number of tourists who visited the continent annually began to rise sharply, and within the space of twenty years the numbers had increased by more than six hundred percent. Despite a global recession and downturn in visitor numbers over the last two austral seasons, the expectation is that Antarctic tourist numbers will trend upward again as the world tourism market recovers and the demand for Antarctic visits increases. In a continent renowned both as the last great global wilderness and as a place dedicated to scientific research in the interests of humankind, tourism on this scale presents a formidable range of issues for the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties (ATCPs) to contend with. This article suggests that the rapid growth in Antarctic tourism, and the impacts of that tourism coupled with the lack of a comprehensive regulatory and management framework for tourism now pose a considerable challenge to both the Consultative Parties and to the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) itself. The obligations and duties of the ATCPs under the Antarctic Treaty and other ATS instruments require a robust, strategic response by them to the issues and concerns generated by the growth of tourism. What is needed, it is argued, is for the parties to initiate a more interventionist pro-active policy approach to create a holistic, binding tourism framework so that they may fulfill more effectively their stewardship and governance roles in Antarctica, prevent degradation of Antarctica's environment, and reduce risks to tourists themselves.

One of the aspects of the formation of consensus under the Fascist state concerns the construction of the Fascist ‘man’. This article takes up this notion and explores it in relation to children. The first part deal with the legislative process according to which Fascist rituals and myths were introduced into the school curriculum. The second part examines the letters that were sent to the Duce by children during the period of the regime. The majority of letters appear to have been dictated by elementary school teachers according to precise directives, but nonetheless there is some evidence of the spontaneous manifestation of the feelings of infants. The most significant aspect concerns the transfiguration of the Duce himself into a figure of fable in ways that could not but impact on the imagination of those who were born and raised between the 1920s and later 1930s.

The papers published in this issue of Polar Record were first given at the Polar Worlds International Conference: Environmental and Social Sciences which took place in Paris in January 2011 and was organised by the GDR Mutations polaires (GDR 3062). A research group hosted by the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the GDR brings together social and environmental scientists. It has been promoting on-site data collection and interdisciplinary projects in Arctic studies for 30 years.

During the Fascist regime millions of postcards circulated featuring Mussolini in many different guises and forms. This article reflects on their production, distribution and consumption and considers the extent to which they can be seen as part of the propaganda of a totalitarian regime. It also explores the meanings of the imagery of a selection of postcards. It argues that Mussolini postcards, despite their vast numbers, amounted in fact to only a small proportion of those circulating under the regime. Moreover, many of them were produced by private publishers for profit rather that Fascist organisations or the state. Therefore they cannot simply be considered as a manifestation of totalitarianism and must rather be conceived in large part as an effect of the impact of Mussolini on popular culture.

Agriculture in southern Greenland has a two-phase history: with the Norse, who first settled and farmed the region between 985ad and circa 1450ad, and with the recent reintroduction of sheep farming (1920ad to the present). The agricultural sector in Greenland is expected to grow over the next century as anticipated climate warming extends the length of the growing season and increases productivity. This article presents a synthesis of results from a well-dated 1500-year lake sediment record from Lake Igaliku, south Greenland (61°00′N, 45°26′W, 15m asl) that demonstrates the relative impacts of modern and Norse agricultural activities. Pollen, non-pollen palynomorphs (NPPs), sediment mass accumulation rates, diatoms and stable isotopes of nitrogen provide a comprehensive history of both phases of agriculture and their associated impacts on the landscape and adjacent lake. The initial colonisation of southern Greenland is marked by a loss of tree birch pollen, a rise in weed taxa, and an increase in coprophilous fungi and sediment accumulation rate consistent with land-use changes. The biological and chemical proxies within the lake, however, show only slight changes in diatom taxa, and a rise in δ15N. After the Norse demise and during the Little Ice Age, most of the markers return to pre-settlement conditions. However, the continuation of non-indigenous plant taxa suggests that the landscape did not completely return to a pre-disturbance state. After 1988, the character of the lake changed markedly: mesotrophic diatoms and N isotopes all reveal major shifts consistent with a trophic shift, together with a sharp rise in sediment accumulation rate. The post-1988 lake environment, affected by modern farming development, is unprecedented within the context of the last 1500 years. These results demonstrate the potential of lake sediment studies paired with archaeological investigations to reveal the relationship between climate, environment and human societies.