This article explores the distribution of women witnesses in a selection of English church courts between the mid-sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, in order to assess the extent to which women's participation as witnesses in these jurisdictions might be characterized as a form of legal agency. It shows that women's participation was highly contingent on their marital status and between places and over time and was shaped by the matters in dispute as well as the gender of the litigants for whom they testified. Although poverty did not exclude women witnesses (higher proportions of female witnesses than male claimed to be poor or of limited means), women were more vulnerable than were men to discrediting strategies that cast doubt on their authority in court. Such findings show that the incorporative dimensions of state formation did not deliver new forms of agency to women but depended heavily upon patriarchal norms and constraints.

This article uses fifteenth-century Chancery court bills to demonstrate how women negotiated solutions to social and legal disputes not just in Chancery but through a variety of legal jurisdictions. This approach sheds light on women's actions in courts where the records have not survived, and it also adds nuance to the long-running debate about whether equity was a more favorable jurisdiction for women than the common law. By bringing into view other jurisdictions—such as manorial, borough, and ecclesiastical ones—it demonstrates how litigants might pursue justice in a number of arenas, consecutively or concurrently. Some women approached Chancery because they did not think they would get justice in a lower court, while others were keen that their cases be sent back down so that they could be fully recompensed for the offences against them. A fuller understanding of the disputes to which Chancery bills refer complicates our understanding of why women “chose” Chancery. Chancery is only one piece of the puzzle of how women negotiated justice in late medieval England, but its records can also shed light on some of the missing pieces.

Joseph Persky's excellent book, The Political Economy of Progress: John Stuart Mill and Modern Radicalism, shows that J. S. Mill's support for socialism is a carefully considered element of his political and economic reform agenda. The key thought underlying Persky's argument is that Mill has an ‘evolutionary theory of justice’, according to which the set of institutions and practices that are appropriate to one state of society should give way to a new set of institutions as circumstances change and the people themselves improve. However, Persky does not spend a great deal of time discussing Mill's theory of reform, in particular the principles he believes should guide our reform efforts. Reflecting on these principles – notably his principle of impartiality or equal treatment – shows the consistency of Mill's thought over time.

This article focuses on the approaches and challenges to Kurdish autonomy in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Accommodation of Kurdish rights via autonomy arrangements has a long history as an idea but negotiating actual autonomy agreements was often a fruitless task. However, the weakening of state power in Iraq since 1991 and in Syria since 2011 has created opportunities for Kurdish movements in these states to develop and consolidate their autonomous administrations. Consequently, in recent years, the debate on Kurdish autonomy in the Middle East has taken center stage in the regional political discourse. This article first discusses the literature on approaches to autonomy to set out the main models and assess their strengths and weaknesses. It then provides accounts of the models of autonomy that are either practiced or proposed by Kurdish actors or entities in Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. The final section assesses the ability and suitability of the proposed or practiced models for the accommodation of Kurdish rights and demands and develops insights into how the current difficulties preventing the accommodation of Kurdish rights in the Middle East may be overcome.

This paper investigates the relationship between economic theory and theories of justice in the design of public policy.In particular, it focuses on the role of mechanism design in policy contexts beset with issues of social, racial and distributive justice. Economists’ involvement in redesigning Boston’s algorithm for allocating K-12 students to public schools serves as an instructive case study. The paper draws on the distinction between ideal theory and non-ideal theory in political philosophy and the concept of performativity in economic sociology to argue that mechanism design can enact elaborate ideal theories of justice. A normative gap thus emerges between the goals of the policymakers and the objectives of economic designs. As a result, mechanism design may obstruct stakeholders’ avenues for normative criticism of public policies, and serve as a technology of depoliticization.

R. M. Hare has an ambitious project of arguing from a limited set of premises about the nature of moral thought and language all the way to substantive utilitarian conclusions. I reconstruct Hare's argument, identify an important problem for Hare, and then develop and endorse a restricted Hare-like argument. This argument is less ambitious than Hare's, and does not substantiate utilitarian conclusions on its own, but I demonstrate that it nonetheless imposes important constraints on moral judgements and I indicate how it can play a role in a larger argument for utilitarian conclusions.

On 24 May 1847, Sir John Franklin’s third expedition reported “All well”, but less than a year later, on 22 April 1848, the 129 sailors who had set out from Britain on Erebus and Terror had been reduced to 105 survivors departing their frozen ships in a desperate attempt to escape the Arctic. At least 24 were so unhealthy that they would perish after having travelled little more than 100 km from the ships. By contrast, the small mortality rates on other contemporary Arctic expeditions, some of which stayed in the Arctic considerably longer, were consistent with the mortality rates in the Royal Navy worldwide. This paper explores the question of what difference caused so many of Franklin’s crew to die during their final months on-board the ships and in the initial stages of the escape attempt. From the perspective of cultural ecology, the most significant difference, and the ultimate cause of the catastrophe as it unfolded, was wintering in the ice pack. This distinguished the Franklin expedition from all of the other comparable overwintering expeditions, and precluded the Erebus and Terror crews from hunting or fishing. That in turn led to nutritional deficiencies due to much greater reliance on stored provisions than other expeditions.

This article examines the first novel about the Karabakh crisis and ethnic cleansing of the Armenian population in the city of Baku. Maiden Dreams (Devich’i Sny), published in 1995, was written by Evgeniy Voyskunskiy, an author born in Baku and generally known for science fiction novels. The novel explores the tragic fate of the city, and it includes stories of persecution and pogroms against the Armenian population in Azerbaijan in the late 1980s and early 1990s in light of the Karabakh conflict. Maiden Dreams is the story of Baku from the beginning of the 20th century to the turbulent period late in the century when violence and ethnic cleansing had transformed the cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic capital into a homogeneous city with no space for “others.” This article examines the novel from both literary and historical perspectives.