This article investigates the collective responsibility organizations among boatmen in nineteenth-century Chongqing, when the city became one of the most important metropolises on the southwest Qing frontier. It also introduces two successive turning points in self-organization that were associated with two different classes of boatmen – skippers and sailors. First, in 1803, skippers gained the authority to institutionalize their organizations through their negotiations with the local state regarding official services and service fees. Second, when similar service and fiscal tensions emerged between skippers and sailors in the mid-nineteenth century, the skippers facilitated and supervised the institutionalization of collective responsibility organizations that were run by the sailors themselves. By contextualizing this expansion of collective responsibility organizations within the multilayered interactions between skippers and sailors, this article proposes that the perspective of interclass networks is crucial for deepening the study of state−society interactions, the capital−labor relationship, as well as the tension between imperial integration and regional diversity in early modern China.

Many consider Nozick's “utility monster” – a being more efficient than ordinary people at converting resources into wellbeing, with no upper limit – to constitute a damning counterexample to utilitarianism. But our intuitions may be reversed by considering a variation in which the utility monster starts from a baseline status of massive suffering. This suggests a rethinking of the force of the original objection.

This article examines private international law issues raised by civil liability cases commenced in the courts of home states against transnational corporations concerning their alleged involvement in the overseas human rights violations. These claims have been particularly successful in the United Kingdom, where in the last several years the framework of Brussels I Regulation (recast) and English common law rules made it appropriate for the English courts to assert jurisdiction over corporate defendants without the possibility of subjecting claims against the parent companies to forum non conveniens control. In 2019, however, the Supreme Court in a high-profile case Lungowe v Vedanta Resources plc expressed doubts as to whether England should always constitute a proper forum for litigating overseas wrongs arising from the operations of British multinationals. The article aims to assess how the search of the most appropriate forum to litigate the dispute might impact victims of business-related human rights abuses in the post-Brexit environment and propose avenues for legal change.

By foregrounding a widened view of the rule of law in transnational legal processes, the works under discussion in this symposium can support innovative critical perspectives on global health law –a field that has gained wide attention due to the spread of COVID-19 around the world (Lander, 2020; Bhatt, 2020). Legal and socio-legal scholars in the decade and a half before the pandemic worked on locating global health law and articulating its underlying principles. Lawrence Gostin's 2014 monograph offers a synoptic view centred on international institutions (e.g. the World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, UN Human Rights Council) and problems (e.g. infectious-disease response, tobacco control), along with an elaboration of its normative basis in universal moral principle and international human rights law (Gostin, 2014). Struggles over access to essential medicines and intellectual property in the early 2000s are, for example, represented in terms of the right to health constraining international trade law. Andreas Fischer-Lescano and Guenther Teubner's 2004 reading is oriented more by social theory than by doctrinal or ethical frames (Fischer-Lescano and Teubner, 2004, pp. 1006, 1008). A functional health regime has ‘differentiated out’, they observe, and operates as a discrete communication system across borders, albeit one that is threatened by the preponderant economic system. On this model, the battle for access to medicines amounts to ensuring, via human rights guarantees, that the rationality of the health system is not replaced by that of its economic rival in legal and policy communications (Fischer-Lescano and Teubner, 2004, pp. 1030, 1046).

Mendelian Inheritance in Man (MIM), a computerized catalogue of human genetic disorders authored and maintained by cardiologist and medical genetics pioneer Victor A. McKusick, played a major part in demarcating between a novel biomedical science and the eugenic projects of racial betterment which existed prior to its emergence. Nonetheless, it built upon prior efforts to systematize genetic knowledge tied to individuals and institutions invested in eugenics. By unpacking the process of digitizing a homespun cataloguing project and charting its development into an online database, this article aims to illuminate how the institution-building efforts of one individual created an ‘information order’ for accessing genetic information that tacitly shaped the norms and priorities of the field toward the pursuit of specific genes associated with discernible genetic disorders. This was not by design, but rather arose through negotiation with the catalogue's users; it accommodated further changes as biomedical research displaced the Mendelian paradigm. While great effort was expended toward making sequence data available to investigators during the Human Genome Project, MIM was largely taken for granted as a ‘legacy system’, McKusick's own labour of love. Drawing on recent histories of biomedical data, the article suggests that the bibliographical work of curation and translation is a central feature of value production in the life sciences meriting attention in its own right.

This essay sketches the lineaments of the relationship between international law and the jurisprudence of Peter Fitzpatrick. It argues that Fitzpatrick was a model ‘transnational jurisprudent’ who accepted responsibility for the ongoing conduct of lawful relations, even as he offered a thoroughgoing critique of occidental law. For the occidentally trained international lawyer, Fitzpatrick's work offers a way to take up that responsibility by reimagining international law through its historical roots as a parochial law of encounter.

In the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the British state enacted a series of restrictive legal measures designed to pacify the Scottish Highlands and crush the military power of the Gael. With the evolution of scholarly work on the British state, these measures are increasingly seen through the prism of state power, with the Scottish Gàidhealtachd cast as the victim of a fiscal-military system determined to impose obedience on its territory and peoples. In analyzing the implementation and enforcement of the laws passed between 1746 and 1752, this article challenges this narrative. By focusing attention on the legal system—particularly with regards enforcement—this article considers the local reception of the laws and the ideological, legal, and bureaucratic limitations to state authority. Yet it also explores how clan chiefs and traditional elites, who were the primary target of the legislation, quickly turned the laws to their own advantage. This analysis challenges the idea of effective state intervention in the Gàidhealtachd after 1746 and instead brings attention to how parliamentary legislation was mobilized by regional actors to local ends in ways that cast a long shadow over the history of the Scottish Highlands.

While private corporations have become increasingly influential in the global economy, a comprehensive legal framework for their activities is missing. Although international and regional legal instruments may govern some aspects of, for instance, international investments and the supply of goods and services, there is no overarching structure for assessing the impact of large-scale private projects. In the absence of such a comprehensive framework, specific rules of private law allow profit-seeking companies to expand their activities on an economic basis, mostly without having to heed social concerns (Pistor, 2019). This is particularly problematic insofar as multinational companies have obtained power to set the rules for their engagement with states, organisations and individuals, for instance in the form of transnational investment contracts. Given the fragmented nature of the legal sphere in which such contracts are elaborated and performed, those who face the harmful consequences of such investments may not be able to participate in decision-making processes. The contracts remain in ‘wild zones’ of globalisation (Fraser, 2014, p. 150), where powerful private companies rule.

When listening to a recently rediscovered home cassette recording of South African musician and activist Hugh Masekela, which was a gift from the late legal theorist Peter Fitzpatrick in 2004, unleashed are a series of recollections and reflections on the distinctiveness and significance of Fitzpatrick's scholarship, especially in relation to the emerging field of critical legal studies in improvisation. This short piece recalls Peter's boundless wisdom, kindness and generosity, and the lasting impact that his thought and texts have had on his students, colleagues and readers the world over.