This chapter describes the IMF and the World Bank, the two big international financial institutions created after World War II to stabilize the global economy. The two have similar goals and mechanisms but work with different instruments and in different contexts. Both pool the resources of their members and use the money it raises to make loans to governments with specific needs. The IMF lends to countries experiencing critical balance-of-payments problems. It makes short-term loans of foreign currencies that the borrowing country must use to finance the stabilization of its own currency or monetary system. As a precondition to the loan, the Fund generally requires that the borrower change its policies in ways that the Fund believes will enable monetary stability in future. The World Bank makes longer-term loans to pay for specific projects related to development or poverty reduction. Most Bank loans are tied to a particular project undertaken by the borrowing government. The Bank and the Fund are twinned institutions in the sense that they share a common origin and many structural features, but their practices and purposes are very different. As a result, they contrast each other in ways that are useful for exploring the mix of law and politics in global affairs.

The ICJ is the primary court for legal disputes among governments. It hears cases in which one country claims that another country has violated its obligations under international law. This chapter introduces the ICJ by examining its legal foundation in the Statute of the ICJ, and shows its powers and limits in practice by looking at the cases of Belgium v. Congo (on genocide) and Australia v. Japan (on rights and obligations for whale hunting under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling).

This chapter examines the law and politics of migration and refugees in global governance. Most governments are committed to an international refugee regime that requires them to welcome and support refugees, but also many governments wish to prevent refugees and other migrants from crossing borders into their countries. This contradiction provides fuel for legal and political disputes, with migrants bearing the human costs. The dynamics illustrate ways in which legal obligations and politics preferences weave around and through each other, sometimes in conflict, sometimes together, in surprising combinations.

The United Nations was designed to be the central world institution for peace and security, with the Security Council at its core. This chapter looks at the law and history of the UN’s role in international peace and security, along with the secondary role played by the General Assembly. The Security Council is at the intersection of law, politics, and enforcement in world politics. The chapter looks at the formal powers given to the Security Council in the UN Charter and then examines how the practical life of the Council since 1945 has been both more than and less than what the Charter says. Case studies of mass killings in Sudan, Rwanda, and Syria show the limits of Council power under the influence of the US, Russia, and other powerful governments.

What is an international organization? Intergovernmental agreements often create new institutions such as the United Nations which have independent status and some autonomy. This chapter considers how these organizations come into being and how they are studied by scholars of international politics and law. Depending on how one looks at things, an international organization can appear as an actor in world politics, a place where politics happens, or a resource used by others in political fights. These are the roles of actor, forum, and resource. I examine the main scholarly theories that are often applied to understand the function and effects of international organizations in international relations: realism, liberalism, constructivism, and marxism.

This chapter describes contemporary patentable subject matter as a form of technical knowledge. The chapter considers whether technical knowledge is a thing that can be owned (the metaphysical question).

This chapter considers what arguments can be offered to defend copyright (the normative question). It introduces and evaluates three types of argument: the labour, utilitarian and personality arguments.

This chapter outlines the complex system of contemporary design rights in the UK. In doing so, it demonstrates how design rights frequently overlap. It considers to what extent overlapping design rights amounts to a form of property (the conceptual question).

This chapter introduces design rights. It introduces and evaluates arguments for design rights (the normative question).

This chapter considers what signs can be protected by trade marks. It discusses whether signs are things that can be owned (the metaphysical question).

The Charter of the United Nations presents governments with authoritative rules for international politics. The Charter also defines the power and the limits of the United Nations organization. This chapter describes the main rules, limits, and powers of the United Nations from a close reading of the text of the UN Charter. We see the authority of the United Nations in balance with the sovereignty of member states. Two case studies, on the Goldstone Report on Israel’s 2009 invasion of Gaza and on the UN’s legal immunity for the cholera epidemic in Haiti in 2010, show the ambiguity, dilemmas, and politics that arise when these rules are applied in practice.

This chapter introduces the law of trade marks and passing off. It considers what arguments can be offered for rights in signs (the normative question).

We continue discussion of row operations to solve linear systems. In particular, we see how to characterise when a system has no solutions (is inconsistent) and, if consistent, we show how the method can be used to find all (possibly infinitely many) solutions, and to express these in vector notation. Here, the notion of the rank of the system, which determines the number of free parameters in the general solutions, is shown to be important. Continuing the earlier discussion of portfolios, we explain how the existence of an arbitrage portfolio is determined by the existence or otherwise of state prices.

This chapter starts by exploring basic questions related to the learning of second language vocabulary such as What is a word? and What does it mean to know a word? It discusses form–meaning mapping as well as a word’s grammatical features and its collocations. The chapter focuses on different types of vocabulary knowledge including receptive knowledge, productive knowledge, breath and depth of knowledge, and knowledge related to multi-word units. The chapter refers to corpora as a way to understand how language functions in the real world. It also discusses different ways of learning new words, that is, incidental and intentional learning. The chapter moves onto issues related to the teaching of vocabulary, starting with explicit instruction involving memorization, and then moving on to more implicit activities (e.g., extensive reading). More specific techniques are reviewed such as glossing, corpus-based instruction, form-focused instruction, and strategy instruction.