This article discusses the thin socio-legal conceptualisation of the rule of law in Hungary. Employing a culturalist perspective, it first shows how the rule of law had a thin foundation prior to the Second World War in this country. Then, the contribution demonstrates how, contrary to previous understandings, even in the most advanced stages of rule of law building in Hungary, in the early 1990s, the resulting concept had been thin mainly focusing on institutional guarantees and legal certainty. The remaining part of the contribution then critically discusses whether and to what extent it is possible to use backsliding to frame the ongoing legal changes in Hungary.

Both Hungary and Poland have been in the spotlight regarding their democratic backsliding, with Executives exerting control over supposedly independent pillars of democracy, such as courts or the media. While the concerns about these countries also voiced by leaders of European institutions were similar, the resistance against the systematic erosion of judicial independence comes in different forms. Using comparative longitudinal case study methodology, this article shows that a defining characteristic in the potential, visibility and feasibility of what judges did or could do under the current threats depends on the role judicial associations, understood as representative collegial judicial bodies. More precisely, the format, organisation and operative tools of judicial associations contribute to their influence on prior judicial reforms and their capacity to withstand ongoing efforts in curtailing their independence from political actors. Empirically, the article reviews multiple judicial changes in the 1992–2015 period in both countries and assesses how judicial associations then shaped the divergent responses to recent attempts at limiting judicial independence. The differences in the legal framework, organisation and network reliance explains variance in resistance. Overall, the article broadens the theoretical and empirical framework for studying the role of courts and judges with considerations regarding professional association organisation and co-ordination, as a potential layer of studying judicial resistance.

Recent research shows that, even under direct insertion, loan verbs are subject to constraints: for instance, they enter non-finite categories more readily than finite categories. To deepen our understanding of such loan word accommodation biases we investigate two contact situations to test whether biases hold in contact between closely related languages. A corpus study on Norse and French loan verbs entering Middle English compares the proportions of their finite and non-finite usage to gauge the impact of etymology and temporal distance to direct contact on loan integration. We identify significant bias towards non-finite use for both etymologies, but it is stronger for French than for Norse loan verbs. This suggests that biases are stronger in some contexts than in others: they are more prominent at a smaller temporal distance to direct contact and in contact between languages that are less closely related.

Medical practitioners, inevitably scattered across the country, need frequent periodicals to communicate the latest medical information. Journals are an essential component of the infrastructure of modern medicine, yet they were slow to achieve firm roots in Britain during the eighteenth century, with few sustained quarterly periodicals and the only attempt at a monthly lasting a year. Then in 1799, Richard Phillips, owner of the Monthly Magazine, published the Medical and Physical Journal, the first sustained monthly medical journal, which lasted for thirty-four years. Ever since, Britain has never been without a monthly or weekly general medical journal. Responding to the need for a strong commercial focus, the Journal used a magazine format which blended reviews and abstracts of already published material with original contributions and medical news, and it quickly achieved a national circulation by close engagement with all types of practitioners across the country.

Contrary to the historiography, the Journal was distinctly different from the contemporaneous monthly science journals. The key to success was two-way communication with all practitioners, especially the numerous surgeons and surgeon-apothecaries who were increasingly better trained and confident of their status. Much of the content of the Journal was written by these readers, and with rapid, reliable distribution and quick publication of correspondence, controversial topics could be bounced back and forth between all practitioners, including the distinguished. Initially, the editors tried to maximise circulation by avoiding any controversy, but this started to change in the first few years of the next century.

This article critically examines the significance of the relationship between past and present for understanding liberal democratic values in the European context. The article starts by reflecting on the terms used to evaluate the apparent decline in the rule of law in Europe, including ‘backsliding’. It argues that these terms are indicative of a conceptual framework of analysis that includes a temporal dimension but is only partly historical, demonstrating a presentist focus and a perception of the past as a separate period. The article links this perception with the conceptual construction of the rule of law itself, as well as national and transnational narratives about it, which evoke Europe’s non-democratic past as a definitional point of reference that is distinct from the present. Using examples of the legacies of Europe’s dark legal past, the article highlights the artificial nature of this distinction for a range of systems with differing historical experiences. The article argues that interpreting the past in terms of segmented and sequential temporal periods is conceptually contestable and it draws on the philosophy of history to show how the past can instead be understood to have ‘sedimentary’ layers and to endure over time. Ultimately, the article argues that the relationship between law’s past and law’s present needs to be reconceptualised in terms of metaphorical ‘fault lines’ in the rule of law, to acknowledge the potentially disruptive effects of history and to facilitate a critical reimagining of the rule of law’s theoretical and factual foundations.

Between 1750 and 1850, at least twenty versions of the Greenlandic Bible were published through the efforts of Greenlandic catechists, Danish Lutherans, German Moravians, the Danish Bible Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS). This article assesses the role of Greenlandic and other Inuit translators as they were engaged in the colonial project of devising a complete version of the scriptures in their own language. Using the relatively untapped correspondence of the BFBS, it considers how and why the status of Inuit translators changed over the course of the missionary translation project. In one response to the reception of new Bibles, Inuit people offered gifts of blubber to the BFBS to support translations for other mission communities. To understand the meaning of this exchange, this essay brings together the methodologies and perspectives of missionary linguistics. It uncovers the unique role played by Greenlandic and other Inuit translators and catechists, foregrounding their contribution to a successful national project, the creation of a national language for independent Greenland and the emergence of literate Christian communities. By reading along and against the grain of colonial archives, it seeks to recover something of the names and motivation of Inuit scripture translators.

In January 1967, under the infamous military head Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, the Democratic Republic of Congo nationalized its mining industry based on anticolonial rhetoric of “economic sovereignty.” Only two years later, the same Mobutu government welcomed foreign companies and investors with open arms to the inaugural Foire Internationale de Kinshasa. Even at this crucial postcolonial moment when ideas of economic independence and self-sufficiency had become so highly valued, an attachment to — even affinity towards — foreign capital persisted throughout Congolese politics. This article explores the political and intellectual tensions that arose from the postcolonial utilization of foreign capital for state consolidation and synthesizes these contradictions into a broader understanding of early development approaches in Mobutu's Congo. In contrast to those who have framed the Congolese leader's ideology as a rearticulation of colonial logics or the authoritarian whims of an individual, I argue that these early notions of Mobutist development should be understood as a kind of “worldmaking,” emerging from an anticolonial ideology that asserted Congo’s economic sovereignty while simultaneously inserting itself into the global streams of finance. By tracing the Mobutu government's fluctuating relationship to foreign finance, this research offers a longer history of the “neoliberal moment” in Congo — one in which the intellectual underpinnings for liberalization had percolated in Congolese nationalist politics for several decades.

In 1949, human skeletal remains discovered by RCMP Inspector Henry Larsen near Cape Felix, King William Island, Nunavut, were identified as an adult male of European ancestry and a member of the 1845 Franklin Northwest Passage Expedition. The identification has never been questioned and is considered significant to reconstructions of the fate of the Franklin expedition because the sailor’s death presumably pre-dated the desertion of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in April 1848 and because no other human remains of expedition personnel have ever been found between Victory Point and Cape Felix. The aim of this study was to re-examine the basis on which the ancestry of the skeleton was interpreted to be European. A review of archival records revealed previously unpublished details concerning the location and context of the discovery, and re-assessments of the antiquity and of key morphological attributes of the bones suggest they are those of an adult male Inuk and have no connection to the 1845 Franklin expedition.

Pandemics present opportunities for states to acquire emergency powers by narrativizing pandemics as “acts of God,” “acts of war,” “acts of outsiders,” “sanitation-hygiene,” or “acts of the invisible enemy.” These narratives conveniently justify the imposition of undefined and often unrestrained constitutional or extra-constitutional emergency powers to reshape individual, social, and governance modalities. These narratives conveniently establish the setting for states to justify the imposition of broad emergency powers by determining the plot of pandemic-appropriate modalities for individuals, society, and governance mechanisms and classifying the characters of pandemic as protagonists and antagonists as per the plot and settings of the preferred narrative. This article attempts to reveal the theoretical and applicational interconnections between state-sponsored narratives and exercise of emergency powers during the pandemic governance in plague, cholera, influenza, and Covid-19 pandemics.

While moral arguments for limiting market expansionism proliferate, a fundamental question has been left unanswered: the moral limits of what, exactly? Moral Limits of Markets (MLM) theorists tend to employ different terms – markets, putting a price tag, buying and selling – interchangeably and inconsistently to describe the phenomenon they are troubled by. I clarify this ambiguity by offering a novel taxonomy of different dimensions of exchange I identify as the sources of the normative concerns of most MLM arguments: Alienation, Commodification, Marketization, Privatization. This taxonomy allows us to better understand why and what about ‘markets’ should be limited.

The ideological conflicts of Japan's subnational politics have tended to be interpreted as either being largely muted or contained within national dimensions. Following two decades of substantial decentralization and growing local autonomy, however, a diversity of new ideological responses to local issues have appeared. These include neo-liberal parties and executives in wealthier regions such as Tokyo and Osaka or a rising regionalist identity politics such as that found in Okinawa. Nativist right and populist left along with single-issue parties are also now fielding candidates for subnational elections. Despite this increasingly crowded field, there is still no systematic understanding of the divergent ideological worldviews and dimensions of conflict operating at the subnational level. Nor do we know how these worldviews “deviate” from the traditional “norm” of a progressive vs. conservative conflict dimension assumed to characterize Japanese subnational politics. This paper begins to fill this gap by investigating the campaign discourse of gubernatorial candidates both before and after the pandemic outbreak. We find that the language, and underlying ideological orientation, of these candidates can be separated into four clusters: “mainstream”, “old left”, “neo-liberal”, and “fringe”. In addition, “regionalist” and “new left” populism can also be identified in select elections.

During the “steam century” between 1830 and 1930, major political and economic entities in Europe, Asia, and the Americas became increasingly connected by steam navigation and railway transportation. Against this global backdrop, steam navigation was established and became regular on the formidable Upper Yangzi River in China between the 1870s and the 1920s. This breakthrough hinged on developments in the methods of tackling rapids (tan) – fierce and unpredictable currents descending like small waterfalls. Previous studies have mostly focused on how agents of the British Empire and other imperial powers tried to solve such constraints in steam navigation through charts, sailing directions, and other initiatives to make the Upper Yangzi riverscape legible. Incorporating previously unused archives, this article highlights how local environmental and social conditions shaped the steam shipping system on the Upper Yangzi River. This article argues that rapids, as well as local boatmen's experiential knowledge of them, propelled British and other foreign agents to transform their ways of organizing steam shipping in terms of vessel design, crew recruitment, and infrastructure allocation. More broadly, this article exemplifies the need to look beyond imperial agents and employ more locally situated perspectives to explain the technological developments underlying the modern world.

Insurers draw on sophisticated models for the probability distributions over losses associated with catastrophic events that are required to price insurance policies. But prevailing pricing methods don’t factor in the ambiguity around model-based projections that derive from the relative paucity of data about extreme events. I argue however that most current theories of decision making under ambiguity only partially support a solution to the challenge that insurance decision makers face and propose an alternative approach that allows for decision making that is responsive to both the evidential situation of the insurance decision maker and their attitude to ambiguity.

A narrowly person-affecting (NPA) axiology is an account of the moral ranking of outcomes such that the comparison of any two outcomes depends on the magnitude and weight of individuals’ well-being gains and losses between the two. This article systematically explores NPA axiology. It argues that NPA axiology yields an outcome ranking that satisfies three fundamental axioms: Pareto, Anonymity and, plausibly, Pigou-Dalton. The axiology is neutral to non-well-being considerations (desert); and (assuming well-being measurability) leads to the Repugnant Conclusion (RC). In short, NPA axiology provides a grounding for Paretian, equity-regarding welfarism, albeit one that includes the RC.

In response to the short-term political cycles that govern law-making, there is growing international attention to the obligations owed to future generations. Within the diverse approaches there is often a single, temporally defined inequality; that is, between now and a depleted future. While inequality is imagined between generations, these generations are often constructed as homogenous. This elides not just contemporary inequalities, but that these injustices are caused by historically rooted inequalities that current planetary threats are likely to deepen. In response, we centre health inequalities which illustrate the complex temporalities and structural causes of inequalities. We argue for a focus on eco-social and embodied generations to better understand – and respond to – inequalities past, present and future. We apply this focus to the Capabilities Approach as an example of the work needed to better articulate what is owed to present and future generations to secure justice and inform future-oriented law-making.