The two recently recorded CD sets of Hrabina (The Countess) and Straszny dwór (The Haunted Manor) in complete concert versions with eighteenth-century instruments add enormously to the Polish operatic repertoire in the nineteenth century, and offer a fresh listening experience for those who have long wished for first-rate recordings of lesser-known, yet brilliantly executed, works of the hitherto neglected composer, Stanisław Moniuszko (1819–1872). Born in the Minsk district of modern Belarus, Monisuzko was gentry, and his nostalgia for the customs, the fields and forest, and the rural community that shaped his childhood years, fuelled his enthusiasm for modern operas set in the eighteenth century. These stellar concert versions of The Countess and The Haunted Manor provide a fascinating glimpse into the provocative and glittering salons of the eighteenth-century Warsaw nobility, whose inhabitants stand firmly in contrast to the more modest and self-effacing life of the peasants and the country gentry. In both operas Moniuszko successfully provides a romanticized portrayal of pre-Partition courtly life in Poland. While these two operas were highly regarded as national treasures in Poland, they were not particularly well known outside of the country. Polish opera at that time was largely overshadowed by Italian, French, and German composers, and the nation's subjugation to the Hapsburgs, Prussians, and Russians throughout the nineteenth century contributed mightily to the neglect of staged works by Polish composers. Additionally, singers needed to be trained in the nuances and inflections of the language. Prior recordings were either incomplete or were not available with English translations of the librettos. With the Biondi and Nowak recordings, Moniuszko's vision of expanding his art to a global audience has finally been achieved. These recordings are accessible to all opera enthusiasts on an international playing field.

Between 1870 and 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy provided uniquely broad legal protection to subordinates who perpetrated crimes under the orders of military superiors. Legal immunity was provided not only to soldiers who obeyed orders contrary to international law, but also to those who under orders violated domestic standing legislation of the Japanese Army. This gave rise to a so-called “paradox of obedience”: while disobedience among officers was rampant, their subordinates were expected to unquestionably obey their orders, even in rebellion against the Japanese government. This mix of blatant disobedience to the system at large on the one hand, and blind obedience to immediate superiors on the other, was a remarkable feature of the Imperial Japanese armed forces. Drawing on legal codes, court cases and juridic writings, we analyze how this “paradox of obedience” encouraged mutinies as well as atrocities, especially in the 1930s and during the Asia-Pacific War.

Grill (2023) defends the sum of averages view (SAV), on which the value of a population is found by summing the average welfare of each generation or birth cohort. A major advantage of SAV, according to Grill, is that it escapes the Egyptology objection to average utilitarianism. But, we argue, SAV escapes only the most literal understanding of this objection, since it still allows the value of adding a life to depend on facts about other, intuitively irrelevant lives. Moreover, SAV has a decisive drawback not shared with either average or total utilitarianism: it can evaluate an outcome in which every individual is worse off as better overall, even when exactly the same people exist in both outcomes. These problems, we argue, afflict not only Grill's view but any view that uses a sum of subpopulation averages, apart from the limiting cases of average and total utilitarianism.

Russia’s Arctic policy since 2008 has been influenced by two competing foreign policy lines (discourses): the “Arctic as a resource base” and the “sovereignty discourse”. The “Arctic as a resource base” has been the dominant one since the first Russian Arctic Strategy in 2008. It is primarily about exploiting the vast oil and gas resources estimated to be located there, as well as turn the Northern Sea Route into a “global transport corridor”. In Russia’s Arctic Strategy of 2020, however, there is enhanced emphasis on sovereignty and power balancing in Russian Arctic policy. And the focus on sovereignty was heightened with the amendments to Russia’s Arctic Strategy in March 2023. This increased emphasis on sovereignty, territorial defence and balance of power in Russian Arctic policy is likely to be further reinforced by the growing great-power competition between the USA and Russia, which has gained new momentum following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Opening its general meeting on 27 December 1966, the state-sponsored National Union of Tanganyika Workers, known as NUTA, proposed a combative response to a presidential commission's investigation into mismanagement in the union. The union's general secretary also issued an azimio (resolution) that prefigured much of the socialist rhetoric and policy prescriptions that appeared a month later in Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere's Azimio la Arusha (Arusha Declaration) that refined his policy of African Socialism or Ujamaa. Although the NUTA azimio circulated widely and was submitted to the Arusha party meeting, it was excluded from both the record of that meeting and NUTA's own file of related material. This elision happened before its main author, NUTA general secretary Michael Kamaliza, was convicted of treason two years later. The suppression of NUTA's azimio offers a point of entry to investigate the diffuse agency of political rhetoric and the history of Nyerere's influential speech.

Theists commonly hold that God endows humans with rights. Standard explanations draw on natural law theory or divine command theory. However, the natural law account does not give God a central role in explaining our rights, and the divine command account does not assign human nature a significant explanatory role. A successful theistic explanation of human rights must meet three conditions: (1) God must directly explain human rights; (2) human nature must also directly explain human rights; (3) this dual contribution must explain why morality forbids rights violations by grounding the deontic reasons associated with rights. I propose a holiness account of rights. On this view, God endows human nature with rights by making human nature holy, and God does so by fashioning humans with one of God's essential properties: the capacity to love. This theory satisfies all three conditions and explains the deontological character of rights.

In this essay, the author reflects on a decade’s old essay on baseball and bioethics inspired by a conversation with the late David Thomasma. In a reprise of his earlier paper, Fins worries that modernity has come to baseball with the advent of the pitch clock and that this innovation brings age discrimination to a timeless pastime.

As law graduates wield significant influence in public life, law schools’ responsibility for cultivating students’ civic capacities and dispositions remains an important but often neglected project. Taking up this project, this article traces a thread of deliberative democratic aspirations within legal education scholarship and explores the potential of participation within law schools’ own political processes for realising these ideals. To do so, it examines law students’ experiences of an experiment with deliberative democracy’s leading institutional innovation – the deliberative mini-public – and demonstrates the ways in which participation fostered deliberative capacities, a more collective orientation, and increased confidence. Ultimately, the article illustrates the mutually reinforcing nature of civic and legal education, affirms law schools’ broader role within society and offers both theoretical and practical insights into the place of democratic innovation within the law school.

This article examines images of revolution in Chinese artworks within a global context. It argues that the theme of revolution in Chinese art can be divided into three movements: (1) Art of Scars, (2) New Wave ’85, from which political pop art and cynical realism took their roots, and (3) the modern twenty-first century trend of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. An analysis of political pop art identified a synthesis of academic and iconographic features and Western philosophical concepts, which can be found in the semiotic elements of the painting Maozedong: AO. Its cynical realism is similar to the satire of the American painter in his Daughters of Revolution. Both artworks depict images of the "citizen" in an era of historical change. This analysis of the painting in the style of Mao and the Cultural Revolution offers a rethinking of traditional Chinese canons as a response to the Western religious traditions influenced by a multicultural environment. The data can be used as an additional source to examine symbolism and semiotics in the artistic language of Chinese artists representing the culture of revolution.

Colonial Latin America had the fame of being a land where lower-class people were forever suing their betters. To Latin America's popular classes, the law was an indispensable instrument for claiming rights, solving conflicts, and advancing interests. Fast-forward to the middle of the twentieth century, however, and Latin American law held a very different fame. The law was now something to be shunned. It was seen as an instrument of power, manipulated by the rich and influential. Public trust in the law was low, and support for alternative forms of justice, high. In comparison with the colonial era, we are faced with a baffling reversal. This article seeks to explain that reversal by elaborating three propositions: (P1) popular trust in the law declined because of the law's increasing formalism, particularly evident in the codification of civil and criminal law over the course of the nineteenth century; (P2) popular trust in the law declined because of the rise of patrimonial capitalism over the period of study; and (P3) popular trust in the law declined because a new generation of social rights became politicized, first under populist, corporatist regimes that arose in the region in the early and mid-twentieth century and then under the region's Cold-War military dictatorships.

There is no greater honor for an author than to respond to such generous and thoughtful engagement with one’s work such as the two commentaries by Mila Dragojević and Tamara Trošt. These commentaries are that much more appreciated as both Dragojević and Trošt have contributed tremendous scholarship on memory politics and historical narratives in the Western Balkans and in many ways Yellow Star, Red Star builds on their own work.

Recently, we have been witnessing the emergence of scholarly interest and professional advocacy efforts centering on systemic, intersectional, fluid, and contextualized inequalities and dynamic hierarchies constructed by essentialized and idealized (non)native speakerhood (speakerism/speakering) and its personal and professional implications for English language teaching (ELT) profession(als). This critical literature review aims to portray, examine, and guide the existing scholarship focusing on a myriad of issues related to ELT professionals traditionally conceptualized as “native” and “non-native” English-speaking teachers. We come to a working conclusion that (non)native speaker/teacherhood is an epistemologically hegemonic, historically colonial, contextually enacted (perceived and/or ascribed), and dynamically experienced socio-professional phenomenon intersecting with other categories of identity (e.g., race, ethnicity, country of origin, gender, religion, sexuality/sexual orientation, social class, schooling, passport/visa status, and physical appearance, among others) in making a priori connections and assertions about individuals as language users and teachers and thereby forming discourses and practices of (in)equity, privilege, marginalization, and discrimination in ELT.

If preference-based freedom rankings are based on all-things-considered preferences, they risk judging phenomena of adaptive preferences as freedom enhancing. As a remedy, it has been suggested to base preference-based freedom rankings on reasonable preferences. But this approach is also problematic. This article argues that the quest for a remedy is unnecessary. All-things-considered preferences retain information on whether the availability of an option contributes to the value that freedom has for a person’s self-expression. If preference-based freedom rankings use all-things-considered preferences to evaluate whether an option contributes to a person’s self-expression, they are immune to the problem posed by adaptive preferences.