Historians use a wide range of terms to talk about premodern partner choice conflicts, ranging from rape to ravishment and elopement. This variety largely stems from the ambiguity and multivalence of some terms frequently used in medieval England, like the intensely scrutinized term raptus. Through a study of the language used in late medieval legal texts and judicial records from the Low Countries, this article shows that medieval Flemish had a specific term to describe an offense not captured by any other term available, namely schaec. Authorities clearly distinguished between schaec, that is the seizure of women for marriage, and rape, the seizure of women for sex. Yet, the Low Countries’ multilingual legal culture as well as the ambiguity that was inherent to many abductions with marital intent, continued to make it difficult for judges to label the cases they encountered as rape or schaec.

This article examines state-society encounters in imperial Ethiopia through histories of exploitation and compromise. Focusing on the western province of Qellem, the article investigates Ethiopia's engagement with local rights claims over time, illustrating how the state was imagined, negotiated, and partially legitimated. The inherent incoherence within imperial state structures is traced back to the survival of nodes of indigenous power within territories conquered in the late nineteenth century. Peasant representatives, local elites, and Amhara governors and soldier-colonists engaged with the state to turn it to their benefit, or limit its excesses. Episodes of rebellion, withdrawal, and court arbitration punctuated a cycle of negotiation within which the role of the intermediary was key. Qellem experienced a state-making exercise that was contemporaneous with, and comparable to, the formation of European colonial states elsewhere on the continent. As such, this article provides a radical challenge to dominant historiographical perspectives on imperial Ethiopia.

This article studies the Ikoyi reservation in Lagos, Nigeria to assess changing relationships between the colonial state, urban space, and race between 1935 and 1955. Colonial authorities established reservations as special zones to house colonial officials and other white Westerners. The article shows that the Ikoyi reservation was a significant location where a wide range of actors contested relationships between statehood and race. These renegotiations contributed to making a late colonial state, a terminal form of colonial state in which explicitly racialised discourses of statehood and urban space were challenged while implicitly racialised standards and practices often persisted. Through a focus on Ikoyi, the article highlights the important relationships between segregationist projects and late colonial statehood.

In the essay “A Christian in the Office of Constitutional Judge,” Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde addresses the dilemma of the Catholic judge who is sworn to apply a secular constitution yet who confesses to a “spirituality [that] knows no separation between the personal-private and the occupational spheres.” Böckenförde faced that dilemma in the 1993 abortion decision of the German Constitutional Court, which—with Böckenförde voting with the majority—held that abortion, while still punishable, allowed exceptions subject to certain conditions and counselling requirements. In this essay, the author situates that issue within the nature of judicial power and the ethical duties of the judge; the jurisdictional constraints that in other jurisdictions are available to avoid normative conflicts; and, finally, the challenges to judicial power when called upon to validate laws that go beyond the traditional punitive approach that merely prohibits and condemns, and that instead use welfare measures to actualize substantive norms taking into account social and historical realities.

What is political about political refugeehood? Theorists have assumed that refugees are special because their specific predicament as those who are persecuted sets them aside from other “necessitous strangers.” Persecution is a special form of wrongful harm that marks the repudiation of a person's political membership and that cannot—contrary to certain other harms—be remedied where they are. It makes asylum necessary as a specific remedial institution. In this article, I argue that this is correct. Yet, the connection between political membership, its repudiation, and persecution is far from clear. Drawing on normative political thought and research on autocracies, repression, and migration studies, I show that it is political oppression that marks the repudiation of political membership and leads to various forms of repression that can equally not be remedied at home. A truly political account moves away from persecution and endorses political oppression as the normative pillar of refugeehood and asylum.

The article explores the political uses of the memory of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola's (MPLA's) heroic combatant Hoji ya Henda from the independence of Angola in 1975 to recent times. Based on extensive archival work in Luanda, the article maps the historical periods and circumstances during which the ruling regime invoked Henda's memory, noting how changes in the political system directly affected how his memory permeated the public domain, oscillating between presence, silence, replacement, and resurgence. In doing so, the article explores a dilemma in the study of memory, opposing historical continuity and active construction in memory-making. It concludes that even when subjected to political manipulation for several decades, the original memorialisation of national heroes such as Hoji ya Henda, although subject to historical circumstance, always retains its original mnemonic signifier in society. This signals an important nuance in entrenched debates concerning the opposition between history and the political construction of memory.

This article is a case study on the Yunnanese scholar Li Yuanyang under the background of the Ming's incorporating and sinicizing Yunnan, exploring how he views the Ming's actions and writes Yunnan's becoming a part of China. First, it retells Li's life experiences and examines the Yunnan native things and Chinese traditions in his writings. Then, after noting his emphasis of Yunnan's belonging to China, it concentrates on his comments on the Ming's military campaigns. As it analyzes, on the one hand, he justifies these campaigns against indigenous rebellions, on the other hand, he also criticizes unnecessary wars and some imperial officials' selfish deeds. Besides, he considers the constructing and reconstructing projects as a symbol of the central state's righteous governance, which should also bring benefit and benevolence to the indigenes. In a word, Li's case reflects the deep impact of the Ming's invasion on the local elites, as well as how they react to this.

Ownership has been a key tool in the exploitation of nature for centuries. However, ownership could also shield natural entities from extraction and pollution if it were vested in them, rather than in humans or corporations. Through a case study of German constitutional property law, this article examines the normative content of this constitutional right. It argues that in owning themselves, natural entities would have numerous tools to fend off human interference with their self-determination. Constitutional property law would require any harmful activity affecting the natural entity to be based upon legislation and necessary to achieve a public purpose. The natural entity would enjoy broader access to justice. Courts would also often award appropriate remedies; where the natural entity would be awarded only compensation, this would be unsatisfactory because money cannot replace nature. The article finds that constitutional property law offers the potential for further protection from human interference, which has not been realized because of anthropocentric value judgments prevalent in German legal doctrine. Ecocentric approaches to ownership and invalidity as a standard remedy would play an important role in unlocking the full potential of ownership for environmental protection.