This article analyses domestic law cases brought by former slaves during the decade following the Civil War. It argues that ending slavery was a long and complex process that included not only granting rights to freedpeople, but also subtracting the incapacities previously imposed by bondage and applying certain rights retroactively. Reconstruction-era judges, throughout the era and across the South, overlooked the realities of slavery as a lived institution. Instead, they reimagined slavery as a collection of legal disabilities that could simply be subtracted and summarily resolved. This is how they would carry out abolition. The notion that slavery had to be undone stands in contrast to prevailing scholarship that emphasizes the acquisition and exercise of rights as demonstrative of consummate freedom. Instead, this article shows that even when positive law and judicial rulings were used to deconstruct the peculiar institution, slavery, as a legal construct, could not be fully demolished. Judges and freedpeople alike were left to face troubling legacies for which there was no remedy. No performance of legal acrobatics could alter, undo, or fully resolve the myriad ways slavery continued to affect many former slaves and influence the direction of their free lives. Abolition would remain incomplete.

The article examines a key attribute of Russian national identity—national pride—as it is reflected in mass consciousness. To trace the dynamics of multiple facets of national pride and related phenomena from 1996 to 2015, we use data from five surveys. The results demonstrate a substantial growth in Russian national pride in specific country achievements and general pride in Russian citizenship over the last 20 years. This change is the result of the population’s and state’s need for positive social identity as well as from both real and imagined progress in the Russian economy and political influence, and it started long before the Crimea mobilization and Olympics of 2014. The structural difference in pride in various achievements persisted for the 20 years examined here, but became less distinct. Across the years examined here, Russian national pride has become more strongly related to belief in the superiority of the country and is therefore increasingly competitive.

China’s most prominent dissident, the late Liu Xiaobo, criticized the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts “to promote what he considered a toxic mixture of traditional culture and modern patriotism.” He worried more about “a mentality of world domination” characterized by a “thuggish outlook.” Quoted in Orville Schell and John Delury’s (2013) book Wealth and Power, this statement reveals the culmination of some 150 years of nation-building, which now encapsulates what is probably the strongest and potentially most explosive primordial nationalism in the region since Imperial Japan. This article examines the sources of Chinese nationalism and gauges the extent to which Chinese nationalism contributes to cooperation or confrontation in China’s foreign relations.

In March 2017, Georgian citizens were able to travel visa-free to the Schengen Area. This development was highly significant to Georgia, whose narrative of “belonging to Europe” has long contrasted with the travel restrictions for Georgian citizens, who were previously required to undergo complicated consular procedures. However, this was far from being a routine bilateral negotiation. Visa disparities mirrored the contractual asymmetry between Tbilisi and Brussels. This article focuses on how Georgia calibrated its political discourse vis-à-vis the European Union. After outlining both the symbolic and political relevance of visa liberalization, this work assesses the Georgian political rhetoric at different times: in 2005, when Georgia unilaterally lifted visa requirements for Western visitors, and in 2015 and 2016, when visa liberalization was widely expected. The article’s theoretical framework and the final conclusions are relevant to the study of visa regimes and the external relations of small states.

In a school choice problem, each school has a priority ordering over the set of students. These orderings depend on criteria such as whether a student lives within walking distance or has a sibling at the school. A priority ordering provides a ranking of students but nothing more. I argue that this information is sufficient when priority is based on merit but not when priority is based on criteria such as walking distance. I propose an extended formulation of the problem wherein a ‘priority matrix’, indicating which criteria are satisfied by each student-school pair, replaces the usual priority orderings.

In February 2016 the French spelling reform of 1990, which introduced changes to approximately 2,000 words, became the object of discussion online, after it was announced that the new spellings would be included in textbooks from September. Analysing a corpus of tweets, containing key terms from the online discussion, JeSuisCirconflexe; ognon and réforme orthographe, this study gives an insight into the reactions to this governmental linguistic intervention, the recurring themes in their discourse and how this can be interpreted as prescriptive or purist behaviour. Although previous studies have extensively analysed reactions to the 1996 spelling reform in Germany, little research has considered online lay-reactions to the French reform. Given observations that online interactions differ in many ways to equivalent offline interactions, this study can form a point of contrast to previous studies conducted in offline contexts, thereby enriching the existing literature in this field. It is also often claimed that France is a country in which linguistic purism is deeply entrenched; this article will seek further evidence for these claims.

Building on an overview of dual systems theories in behavioural economics, the paper presents a methodological assessment in terms of the mechanistic explanations framework that has gained prominence in philosophy of the neurosciences. I conclude that they fail to meet the standards of causal explanations and I suggest an alternative ‘dual functions’ view based on Marr’s methodology of computational neuroscience. Recent psychological and neuroscience research undermines the case for a categorization of brain processes in terms of properties such as relative speed. I defend an interpretation of dualities as functional, without assigning them to specific neurophysiological structures.

While Bayesian methods are widely used in economics and finance, the foundations of this approach remain controversial. In the contemporary statistical literature Bayesian Ockham’s razor refers to the observation that the Bayesian approach to scientific inference will automatically assign greater likelihood to a simpler hypothesis if the data are compatible with both a simpler and a more complex hypothesis. In this paper I will discuss a problem that results when Bayesian Ockham’s razor is applied to nested economic models. I will argue that previous responses to the problem found in the philosophical literature are unsatisfactory and develop a novel reply to the problem.