Literature on tribes in Iraq is scant and often falls prey to simplistic binary approaches to state-society relations. Scholars of legal pluralism provide tools to conceptualize interrelations between adjacent normative fields. Several legal specialists have talked about “a thin form of cooperation” between tribal “private orders” and the Iraqi state. By the same token, many scholars presuppose that the capacity of the tribes and the state to mediate and settle feuds covary in opposite directions and are correlated with the strength of state institutions (tribes step in to fill a vacuum during times of state weakness). However, careful examination of Iraqi penal legislation and its implementation in tribal areas invalidates this stereotypical paradigm. Already in her seminal 1973 article, Sally Moore drew the attention of scholars of legal pluralism to the idea that legal orders should be approached as partially discrete, overlapping social fields. The various arenas intersect and create meaning for each other.

In the oral traditions of Jordan's Balga tribes, one event occurs many times: local shaykhs are invited to a feast by the Turks, and at this feast the shaykhs are attacked, arrested, or killed. Sometimes it is the Ottomans who are betrayed by their bedouin hosts. Either way, they should have seen it coming—that is usually the narrator's conclusion—but the lure of hospitality was strong. Something about these encounters was worth the risk of ending up in manacles, or dead.

The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.

Scholars have long recognized that the states’ authority to charter corporations bolstered their antitrust powers in ways that were not available to the federal government. Our paper contributes to this literature by focusing attention on the relevance for competition policy of lawsuits brought by minority shareholders against their own companies, especially lawsuits challenging voting trusts. Historically judges had been reluctant to intervene in corporations’ internal affairs and had been wary of the potential for opportunism in shareholders’ derivative suits. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, they had begun to revise their views and see shareholders as useful allies in the struggle against monopoly. Although the balance between judges’ suspicion of and support for shareholders’ activism shifted back and forth over time, in the end the lawsuits provoked state legislatures to strengthen antitrust policy by making devices like voting trusts unsuitable for purposes of economic concentration.

The continued use of the term “tribe” to describe groups with segmentary organization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has long been recognized as problematic, albeit without viable alternative English translations of the local terms: qabīla, ‘ashīra, sha‘b, ‘ilt, and others. Yet the equally problematic but enduring uncritical acceptance of genealogical classification of MENA's tribes leads to fundamental misunderstandings of the basic principles of tribal organization as well as the multiple roles of kinship in the region. This propensity is not only misleading but is loaded with social evolutionary assumptions about presumed “stages of development” that hinder scholarship on tribes and have a negative impact on international policy toward countries like Yemen with significant self-identified tribal populations. Key to this essay is the wide diversity and flexibility in the terminology applied to tribal segments and in the sizes of segments.

The Christian and Islamic doctrine of the virgin birth claim God asexually impregnated the Virgin Mary with Jesus, Mary's impregnation was fully consensual (virgin consent), and God never acts immorally (divine goodness). First, I show that God's actions and Mary's background beliefs undermine her consent by virtue of coercive incentives, Mary's comparative powerlessness, and the generation of moral conflicts. Second, I show that God's non-disclosure of certain reasonably relevant facts undermines Mary's informed consent. Third, I show that a recent attempt by Jack Mulder to rescue virgin consent fails. As divine goodness and virgin consent are more central to orthodoxy, Christians and Muslims have powerful reason to reject virgin birth.

Historians of radicalism have long held that following the repression of the English Jacobins in 1794–95, open agitation by plebeian reformers remained dormant until 1802, when they reemerged in a more clearly constitutionalist pose to fight a number of contests in that year's general election. According to this view, the contests led directly to Sir Francis Burdett's victory at the 1807 Westminster election, a foundational moment for nineteenth-century radicalism. This article argues instead that the previously overlooked English Jacobin intervention at the 1796 general election was the ultimate foundation for the 1807 election victory and far more significant than the contests evident in 1802. While this argument indicates that the Jacobin organizations for radical reform were not in a steep terminal decline by 1796, as is widely assumed, it also undermines the notion that the electoral politics of the 1802–1807 period was a major novelty. There was nevertheless not a clear-cut continuity from 1796 to 1807. This article demonstrates that in 1796 Jacobin political thought led to the development of a pure style of electioneering that rejected corrupt practices in order to turn the electoral process into a venue for the enaction of general will through the open use of sovereign reason. Between 1802 and 1804, this position was abandoned in favor of a more traditional, pragmatic and patricianly form of electioneering. However, this article concludes with a major revision of the 1807 Westminster victory by illustrating that, far from an innovation, it was a direct revival of the “purity” pioneered by the Jacobin contests of 1796.

According to Hobbes, individuals care about their relative standing in a way that shapes their social interactions. To model this aspect of Hobbesian psychology, this paper supposes that agents have social preferences, that is, preferences about their comparative resource holdings. Introducing uncertainty regarding the social preferences of others unleashes a process of trust-unravelling, ultimately leading to Hobbes’s ‘state of war’. This Trust-unravelling Model incorporates important features of Hobbes’s argument that past models ignore.