This essay argues that the 1675 conviction of John Taylor by the Court of King's Bench for slandering God reveals Chief Justice Matthew Hale implementing a model of conjoint law-making between courts, Parliament, and crown that gave pre-eminent power to the common lawyers, and none to the Church of England. In doing so, it counters the prevailing literature on Restoration English law, which has treated the law as hierarchical, with the common lawyers subordinate to the sovereign. Rather than following statute or ecclesiastical law, which emphasised the spiritual nature of crimes like Taylor's, Hale located Taylor's offence in the exclusively temporal common law jurisdiction of defamation, which existed largely outside of monarchical purview. Hale's judgment reflected his rhetoric of judicial office outside the courtroom, where he argued the judiciary worked alongside King and Parliament in making law, but were not subservient to these institutions, for common lawyers relied on sources of law beyond sovereign-made statute. The language of sovereignty as hierarchical was thus a factional attack on an independent common law, an attempt to subordinate the common lawyers to the crown that was resisted by the lawyers like Hale in his rhetoric and exercise of office, and should not ground accounts of the Restoration regime.

This article examines the main theorists of economic nationalism (Romanianization) and their ideas promoting protectionism and anti-Semitism in 1930s–1940s Romania. Trying to offer a rational scientific justification for excluding foreigners, especially Jews, and increasing the role of ethnic Romanians in the economy, major scholars of economics offered solutions toward successful Romanianization. Because some of these economists were also influential politicians and public intellectuals, their investigations and blueprints for the project gained wide publicity and provided steps for achieving it rapidly and thoroughly. These economists disseminated their theoretical and empirical constructions of Romanianization in university courses, public lectures, and publications. Some were important scholars; among them, Virgil Madgearu, Mihail Manoilescu, Gheorghe N. Leon, Ion Răducanu, and D. R. Ioaniţescu, They examined Romanianization of the economy from the 1930s to the 1940s and influenced the agenda of local elites and the general public, due to their prestigious positions as politicians, public intellectuals, and professors at local universities.

This article examines the novel Final Respects by Abdi-Jamil Nurpeisov from a postcolonial ecocritical perspective. Nurpeisov was one of the first Kazakh writers to discuss the decolonization of the environment and the “process of self-apprehension” by writing about the tragedy of the Aral Sea, power relations between the center and periphery, and the interconnectivity of humans and the environment in the Soviet Union. Through the prism of a small fishing village, he shows the tragedy of a nation that has an impact on the entire world. The novel is thus a critique of anthropocentric policies imposed by Moscow on Kazakhstan and other Soviet republics. Throughout the text, Nurpeisov reiterates the connection between the local and the global on one hand, and human culture and the environment on the other.

This article explores the relationship between memory, political violence, and identity among the Roma minorities in Kosovo. In the aftermath of the 1998–1999 conflict in Kosovo, countless Roma were forced to escape Albanian retaliation, accused of being Serb collaborators. Many had to resettle in enclaves near Fushë Kosovë on the outskirts of Kosovo’s capital Prishtina, others left for Serbian-controlled northern Kosovo or to neighboring countries or to Western Europe. Through an ethnographic investigation with displaced Roma families around Prishtina and in Prizren, the article examines how the communities mobilize collective memories of the violent past to adapt to a new political situation, find their place, and navigate their present within Kosovo’s social, economic, and political landscape. It shows that the past is a constant reminder of compromised loyalties toward the majority group, which in turn dictates their (non)relations. Roma voices and narratives about the violent past are not part of the dominant and official discourse; they are counter-memories, telling a story that is silenced and unrecognized by the majority.

Most arguments in support of act utilitarianism are elaborations of one of two basic strategies. One is the consequentialist strategy. This strategy relies on the consequentialist premise that an act is right if and only if it produces the best possible consequences and the welfarist premise that the value of a state of affairs is entirely determined by its overall amount of well-being. The other strategy is based on the idea of treating individuals respectfully and resolving conflicts among individuals in whatever way best conforms to that idea. Although both of these strategies can be used to argue for the principle of act utilitarianism, they are significantly different from each other, and these differences cause them to have different strengths and weaknesses. It emerges that which argumentative strategy is chosen by a proponent of act utilitarianism has a large impact on which virtues her view has and which objections it is vulnerable to.

The role of the ‘ideal’ in political philosophy is currently much discussed. These debates cast useful light on Mill's self-designation as ‘under the general designation of Socialist’. Considering Mill's assessment of potential property-relations on the grounds of their desirability, feasibility and ‘accessibility’ (disambiguated as ‘immediate-availability’, ‘eventual-availability’ and ‘conceivable-availability’) shows us not only how desirable and feasible he thought ‘utopian’ socialist schemes were, but which options we should implement. This, coupled with Mill's belief that a socialist ideal should guide social reforms (as the North Star guides mariners), reveals much more clearly the extent of his socialist commitments (even if he thought political economists would be concerned with forms of individual property for some time to come). Moreover, this framework for assessments of ‘ideal’ institutions makes a useful contribution to an ongoing contemporary debate.

After WWII, a new form of Europeanism emerged in legal history that gained momentum from European unification. This article explores the emergence of this new narrative as part of the process of exile from totalitarianism and its connection with the reestablishment of the European intellectual and political order after the war. The purpose is to explore the parallel afterwar processes of narrative and normative change and the influences and connections between them. It focuses on a specific historical case, the turn toward Europe, its legal heritage and human rights in the post-war era writing of legal history, especially in the writings of Paul Koschaker, Franz Wieacker, and Helmut Coing, and its linkages to the simultaneous process of European integration. It explores a new argument about the interlinkage between narrativity and normativity as cognitive processes that rely on the creation and sustaining of belief, and the ideas of legitimacy and identity construction.

Communicating about health risks in the Arctic can be challenging. Numerous factors can hinder or promote effective communication. One of the most important components in effective communication is trust in an information source. This is particularly true when a risk is unfamiliar or complex because the public must rely on expert assessment rather than personal evaluation of the risk. A total of 112 Inuit residents from Nunavik, Canada, were interviewed to better understand the factors that influence trust in individuals or organisations. Results indicate that there are six primary factors that influence trust in an information source. These factors include: (1) whether the information source is a friend or family member; (2) past performance of the individual or organisation; (3) the general disposition of the audience member (that is, he or she believes that most people are trustworthy); (4) the openness or candidness of the source; (5) value similarity (referring to the perceived correspondence in values between the audience member and communicator); and (6) the credibility of the source. The results of this study can help determine who or what agencies should provide messages about health risks in the Arctic. It also provides insight about effective strategies for engendering trust among Arctic residents.

In 1816, the mostly-American crew of a slaving brig bound from Cuba staged a mutiny before reaching West Africa, and then sailed on (without a captive cargo) to the antislavery republic of Haiti. Their voyage culminated in a remarkable prize case before the admiralty court at Port-au-Prince. The sailors claimed indignation at the “diabolical” slave trade, hoping to win profits from the condemnation of the vessel and to avoid future prosecution for enlisting in a slaving voyage that was illegal under U.S. federal law. Haitian prosecutors invoked the agreements of the Congress of Vienna, arguing that the trade had been prohibited by the laws of nations. It fell to the admiralty court to reconcile such aspirational claims with Haiti's ongoing struggle for political survival. The brig's journey between the United States, Cuba, Spanish Florida, Cape Verde, and finally Haiti reveals the ways in which slave traders calculated the relative risks of legal penalties against the possible gains from the trade. The records of the adjudication of the case show how Haitian officials developed their own legal strategies for the suppression of the trade, laying the foundations for an escalating campaign to police slaving traffic off of their shores.

In a recent article in this journal, Alexander Dietz argues that what I have called the ‘institutional critique of effective altruism’ is best understood as grounded in the claim that ‘EA relies on an overly individualistic approach to ethics, neglecting the importance of our collective obligations’. In this reply, I argue that Dietz's view does not represent a plausible interpretation of the institutional critiques offered by others, primarily because, unlike Dietz, they appear to believe that their critiques provide reasons to reject the EA view about the content of our individual obligations. I also argue that EA's identity as a social movement provides grounds for denying Dietz's claim that it is objectionably incomplete.

Many influential theorists of nationalism see war as a social conflict that to a great extent homogenizes and unifies the nation. Nowhere is that unity more clearly expressed than in war memorials and cemeteries. This article considers the examples of Britain and the USA during the aftermath of World War I in order to examine how the state legitimized its ownership of the bodies of its dead soldiers. It argues first that in an internal dispute, when all sides share a normative ideology, nationalism cannot offer an effective basis for legitimacy. Second, it shows that during the aftermath of World War I, the bodies of dead soldiers were not symbols. This article concludes that in order to transform a dead body into a symbol, the body first has to be “de-individualized.”

This article discusses the chronology and nature of the earliest Viking activity, based on a group of early burials from Norway containing Insular metalwork. By focusing on the geographical distribution of this material and applying the concept of locational and social knowledge, the importance of establishing cognitive landscapes to facilitate the Viking expansion is highlighted. It is argued that the first recorded Viking attacks were only possible after a phase in which Norse seafarers had acquired the necessarily level of a priori environmental knowledge needed to move in new seascapes and coastal environments. This interaction model opens the possibility that some of the early Insular finds from Norway may represent pre-Lindisfarne exploration voyages, carried out by seafarers along the sailing route of Nordvegr.

It is a commonplace in the history of science that reputations of scientists play important roles in the stories of scientific knowledge. I argue that to fully understand these roles we should see reputations as produced by communicative acts, consider how reputations become known about, and study the factors influencing such processes. I reapply James Secord's ‘knowledge-in-transit’ approach; in addition to scientific knowledge, I also examine how ‘biographical knowledge’ of individuals is constructed through communications and shaped by communicative contexts. My case study is Carl Sagan, widely discussed – amongst scientists, media professionals and publics – for his skill as a charismatic popularizer, his perceived arrogance, his political activism, and his debated merit as a researcher. By examining how aspects of Sagan's reputation circulated alongside his scientific work – rather than existing as a static context for his scientific work – I show how different forms of knowledge (biographical and scientific) influence each other as they circulate.

This paper identifies education, skills training and improved social infrastructure as key development issues to address population decline in regions of steady out-migration from the Russian Arctic. Migration flows have mostly stabilised after the sharp and unexpectedly large population decline in the Arctic in the 1990s, during the transition to a market economy. However, the trends set in motion during that collapse, including falling general levels of education, declining size of all but the largest cities, and ageing of the populace, are becoming more serious for some regions, even where government resettlement programmes exist. As young professionals continue to leave, resettling compatriots and hiring shift labour may contribute to the vitality of more resilient regions, for example, Krasnoyarsk and Yamalo-Nenets. However, the European part of the Russian Arctic, despite its critical importance to commerce and to military security, and despite assistance programmes and subsidies, is conforming more to the ageing, less productive contours of neighbouring Arctic states on the periphery of Europe.

This study examines the role of distance in the decision among grammatical variants. The empirical test case is the English mandative subjunctive construction, which co-occurs with an embedded modal auxiliary, a subjunctive or an indicative verb form. The fact that the subjunctive is triggered by specific lexical items allows one to measure the distance between the triggering unit and the target verb. This distance is found to play a significant role in the grammatical decision process. With increasing distance between trigger and target, the probability of selecting a modal auxiliary increases and the probability of selecting the subjunctive decreases. The theoretical account hinges on the range and strength of linguistic units. Syntactic units (i.e. modals) are claimed to have a wider range than morphological units (i.e. indicative and subjunctive). Furthermore, the indicative is claimed to have a wider range than the subjunctive. Varying ranges are interpreted as varying decay rates. The lower decay rate of syntactic as compared to morphological units results from the syntactic level being superordinated to the morphological level in language production. The inclusion of the semantic and the phonological levels confirms that the position of a level in the structural hierarchy determines its range.