Law plays an important role in reshaping and enforcing governance efforts in radical shifts and can function as a catalyst for transitioning governance towards sustainability. This article assesses the capacity of law to facilitate decarbonization as a radical societal shift. It argues that decarbonization demands fundamental and systemic restructuring in law and legal thinking. This should also be reflected in legal scholarship and, most importantly from the point of view of this article, in the methodological choices and approaches that legal scholarship relies on to study societal challenges. To that end, the article develops a new methodological approach (disciplinary comparison) through which to study law's capacities in respect of decarbonization as a radical societal shift. Disciplinary comparison can be used to gain information on both the friction and the synergies between legal disciplines. This new methodological approach will contribute to increasing insight into law's capacities for the radical, cross-sectoral change necessitated by the need to decarbonize societies.

From the nineteenth century onwards, municipal authorities vested increasing amounts of power in experts, those who could provide specialist knowledge on areas outside the remit of local councillors. This, though, was attached with risk, as municipal resources could be wasted. This article takes the example of the Ure Valley waterworks project, a scheme developed by Leeds Corporation at the start of the twentieth century. What was deemed a necessary and straightforward project to alleviate future water shortages became embroiled in engineering difficulties and financial issues which resulted in only one of the five planned reservoirs being built. This case-study shines a light on the inner workings of local government, as well as the confluence between politics, economics and the urban–rural hinterland environment.

When is it modernism? This article poses this question to traditionally based Indonesian musik kontemporer, as an occasion to examine a distinctive instance of musical modernism, but most importantly to illuminate issues with the question itself. Taking it literally, I identify when musik kontemporer was most clearly modernist, recognizing that modernism, and its conception of history, itself has a history. Scrutinizing the question's more usual goal of drawing a distinction between that which is and is not modernist, I show how the case of Rahayu Supanggah – a musician with a deep and primary commitment to the traditional performing arts, whose work has been shaped by his adoption of modernist ways of thinking without being fully defined by them – defies a simple answer. Ultimately, the article is concerned with what is at stake when invoking modernism, and what this means for the larger project of understanding musical modernism as a global phenomenon.

This article investigates the impact of male migration on left-behind women in nineteenth-century Chongqing, focusing on the intersection among gender, migration, and religion. It analyze the unintended consequences of failed male migration, in which the husband's failure to send regular remittances was prone to cause tremendous anxiety and financial difficulties for his wife. In the absence of strong male-centered kinship organizations, Chongqingese women exploited unorthodox options to support themselves. Buddhist monasticism proved appealing because it provided both a stable source of livelihood and an inclusive all-female space. However, female renunciation was controversial because it challenged state-sponsored patriarchal values. Returned husbands enlisted the state's help in revoking their wives' religious decisions. Paradoxically, for vulnerable women like concubines, nunhood proved an attractive option because it helped them obtain migration-triggered divorces on favorable terms. They strategically synergized the bodily practice of monastic celibacy with the discourse of female chastity to assure their estranged spouses of lifelong commitments to non-remarriage. By doing so, these women succeeded in receiving generous financial compensation. This study highlights how the combination of religion and translocality enabled women to renegotiate their positionality within the patriarchy.

This article investigates continuities and changes in abbreviation practices from late Middle English to twenty-first-century digital platforms. Adopting a diachronic perspective and lexicological framework, it quantitatively analyses frequency patterns across fifteenth-century memoranda, letters and administrative receipts, seventeenth-century letters and depositions, late nineteenth-century letters, early twentieth-century letters and a subcorpus of WhatsApp instant messages dating from 2018–19. It then presents analyses of the frequencies of various abbreviation forms, such as clippings, and abbreviated lexemes, such as their use for names, over time. The article then provides a qualitative analysis of these lexeme categories over the centuries, with a focus on specific examples. Major changes to overall abbreviation density across time are identified. The forms of abbreviation also go through major change, but the types of lexemes that are abbreviated stay more consistent over time. For example, abbreviations being used for closed-class function words such as the and that are dominant from the earliest data we have looked at to the present day. Overall, the study demonstrates how situating new media abbreviation practices within a historical continuum can enhance our understanding of them.

Considerable research has examined Turkey’s discursive governance of the Syrian refugee crisis, identifying the central themes and metaphors in top officials’ refugee-related messages. However, since they tend to rely on qualitative analyses based on convenience or purposive samples, prior studies have failed to assess the relative frequency of these themes and fall short of reliably gauging the shifts and continuities in the official discourse on refugees. Moreover, while several studies have noted the growing emphasis on the repatriation of Syrian refugees in recent years, no research has yet explored how the Turkish government has sought to reconcile this with its pro-refugee posturing. This paper addresses these limitations via a mixed methods analysis of 382 speeches President Erdoğan gave from September 2014 through December 2022. Quantitative findings show that Islamist and neo-Ottomanist themes have played a major role in Erdoğan’s refugee discourse throughout his presidency. However, since 2018, there has been a sharp increase in Erdoğan’s remarks about repatriating Syrian refugees. A critical discourse analysis of these remarks indicates that Erdoğan has appropriated the language of international law and standards on refugee returns so that he can continue to claim the moral high ground while simultaneously advocating mass repatriation of the Syrians.

This article argues for a fundamental raison d’être reconceptualization of international investment law (IIL) through Martha Fineman’s ‘vulnerability theory’. The theory helps identify the structural sources of IIL’s shortcomings, whilst philosophically challenging the one-sided view that foreign investors are entitled to protections, but are free from obligations vis-à-vis the communities affected by their undertakings. Emphasizing the productive power of the state to take positive action that acknowledges ordinary citizens’ embeddedness within, and dependence upon, surrounding structures, the vulnerability theory challenges the hegemonic perception of the state as a source of danger – a view which has hitherto undermined both the potency and the enforceability of investor obligations. Used as a heuristic device in studying both IIL’s existing structures and the potential avenues for reimagining it, Fineman’s theory not only shines a novel light on the foundational premises of IIL, but also grants theoretical traction to existing ideas about improving the system.

This piece recounts the efforts by NGO Sign of Hope (SoH) to rectify human rights violations in South Sudan, which manifested themselves as drinking water pollution by the oil industry. Committed to exposing and remediating this water contamination, SoH was able to prompt the automobile company Daimler’s CSR to engage in extended dialogue with the oil industry stakeholders in Unity State. Despite a tactful use of various methods ranging from cooperation to confrontation, SoH’s campaign did not lead the oil producers to reverse the harm inflicted on the people of Unity State. When SoH tried to hold these companies accountable, SoH had the impression that it was hitting an elastic wall. This piece identifies lessons which may help to counter corporate human rights violations and compensate for the weakness of CSR in fragile states and in the face of corporate irresponsibility.

Xenotransplant patient selection recommendations restrict clinical trial participation to seriously ill patients for whom alternative therapies are unavailable or who will likely die while waiting for an allotransplant. Despite a scholarly consensus that this is advisable, we propose to examine this restriction. We offer three lines of criticism: (1) The risk–benefit calculation may well be unfavorable for seriously ill patients and society; (2) the guidelines conflict with criteria for equitable patient selection; and (3) the selection of seriously ill patients may compromise informed consent. We conclude by highlighting how the current guidance reveals a tension between the societal values of justice and beneficence.