Many contemporary international organizations (IOs) are empowered to adopt international law that claims to bind their Member States (and, directly or indirectly, their peoples). Certain IOs have also become members of other Ios or, at least, active participants in international lawmaking processes that claim to bind those IOs and their Member States (and their peoples).Generally speaking IOs play a central role in contemporary international lawmaking: they institutionalize most of the processes through which international law is adopted today, be it through international conferences, international courts, or as IO secondary law. From the perspective of the democratic legitimacy of international law, this raises the question of the conditions under which those Ios may be regarded as democratic representatives of their Member States’ peoples and, accordingly, under which the international law they have the right or discretion to adopt inside and outside of IO organs and processes may claim to bind those peoples legitimately.

In providing an overview of the state of the discipline, this chapter introduces the Handbook not as a comprehensive inventory of the anthropology of death but as a mesh of cross-cutting inquiries into the subject matter. We begin by sketching some of the field’s touchstones and how they’ve been reimagined and reengaged with in recent years. We set forth our vision as to how this compilation of scholarship adds to the discipline’s intellectual remit and how it wrestles with broader movements and preoccupations that extend beyond the object (death) itself. The diverse contexts of being with the dead explored throughout the chapters illustrate how living with the dead and dying among the living are processes nested within and in dynamic interplay with ethical, political, economic, ontological, and epistemological arenas. This analytical focus on being with the dead, we argue, foregrounds relationships and draws together scholarship often positioned outside the traditional ambit of the anthropology of death. Finally, we contextualize this editorial effort, reflecting on the exceptional conditions of death, namely a global pandemic, that shaped both the course of the collection and the subject of so many of its contributions.

This chapter examines the legislative veto, allowing Congress to override executive actions without bicameralism and presentment, tracing its rise amid broad twentieth-century delegations. Textually and structurally, the Constitution assigns distinct powers to each branch and specifies how each power can be exercised. INS v. Chadha (1983) rightly held that legislative vetoes are unconstitutional because, if such vetoes are legislative in nature, they do not satisfy bicameralism and presentment. If the veto were an executive or judicial act, it would be unconstitutional because Congress possesses neither executive nor judicial power. The chapter introduces the concept of “nonexclusive functions,” recognizing that some governmental actions, like agency rulemaking, can be achieved through legislative or executive power; others, like resolving claims against the government, can be resolved by any of the three branches exercising its respective power. Each branch must, however, exercise its power according to the constitutional requirements. Despite the unconstitutionality of legislative vetoes, the chapter advocates a constitutional amendment to permit such vetoes for regulatory actions, offering a practical solution to balance executive rulemaking with legislative authority and aligning with the Constitution’s original design.

Functionalism proposes that the translation process is guided by extra-linguistic factors, more specifically by the function of the translation. Chapter 2 reviews the theory of functionalism (based on Skopos theory, from the Greek skopos meaning “purpose”) and some basic notions associated with it, while also explaining how to apply them in translation practice and discussion. It addresses basic functionalist concepts: extralinguistic factors (also known as situational features) and how they shape both monolingual and translated texts; the translation brief and translation norms; changes in situational features, and how they influence and guide translation decisions; and the “lifecycle” of a commissioned translation. Examples and illustrations accompany the presentation. The chapter starts by considering the relationship between extra-linguistic factors and monolingual texts, progressing to translated texts and translation tasks.

Ch. 7 Analytic philosophy and hermeneutics offers two approaches to overcoming the contradiction between the God of Being and God as person. Analytic philosophy offers notions of paradox, modalism, and functionalism. And hermeneutics gives us the “face,” “spirit,” and “Name” of God.

If the history of human rights shows anything, it shows that claim-making has no predetermined agents, and this volume nods to the rights of the non-human in a chapter by Jim Davies, who analyzes what might be at stake in the recognition of artificial intelligence not just as an instrumental tool, but a rights-bearing claimant in its own right. Indeed, Davies pursues this possibility through an analogy with the rise of entitlements of non-human nature, especially non-human animals.

Brexit was a great revealer in many respects. In relation to Northern Ireland, it revealed the almost invisible role that joint EU membership had played in providing a scaffold for the peace process in the province and in resolving a postcolonial conflict with cross-border dimensions. In addition to EU political support and in facilitating good relations between Ireland and the UK, joint membership of the single market and customs union, along with the Common Travel Area between the two jurisdictions, reduced the practical and symbolic effect of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. It was thus the functional effects of single market law which provided the context within which a postcolonial conflict with cross-border dimensions could be managed. Brexit, particularly of the ‘hard’ variety, threatened to reintroduce this border, undermining a key element of the peace process. The Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol or Windsor Framework is an imperfect substitute which results in an extremely complex legal landscape of multiple interacting sources of law: a form of legal pluralism or even legal entanglement.

This chapter addresses the Supreme Court’s recent, partly paradoxical lines of cases involving issues of presidential power, prerogative, and immunity. On the one hand, the Court has held that Article II and the Constitution’s overall structure endow the president with sweeping authorities and prerogatives. These include powers to control a “unitary” executive branch by removing officials who refuse to do the president’s bidding and, separately, a prerogative-like “immunity” from prosecution for many unlawful official acts, including ones that would constitute serious crimes if committed by anyone else. On the other hand, the Court has sought to limit the powers of agencies within the executive branch, which the president heads, on the theory that post–New Deal agency officials were allowed to assume functions that the Constitution reserves either to Congress or to the courts. Nowhere, this chapter explains, has the Court’s conservative supermajority pursued, or does it seem more likely to continue to pursue, a doctrinally revisionist agenda with more sweeping practical consequences.

This semi-autobiographical essay offers the perspective from the 1970s to the present of a leading historian of Nazi Germany. It shows how a series of paradigms in one way or another obscured the Holocaust, while at the same time underling the importance of the scholarship on the Final Solution that took off in the 1960s. A particular focus of the essay is the debates around fascism and the difficulty of acknowledging the centrality of racism within the fascist model.

Chapter I elucidates Tolkien’s puzzling claim that The Lord of the Rings should be primarily considered as “an essay in linguistic aesthetic”. It first analyses a passing reference to the “cats of Queen Berúthiel”, described by Tolkien as the only element in The Lord of the Rings “which does not actually exist in legends written before it was begun”. This example introduces a discussion of a typical pattern of composition of Tolkien’s works: this begins as an experience of purely aesthetic fascination for a linguistic entity, which is then expanded into a narrative item, and later developed into a full, meaningful tale, through a heuristic process of ‘sub-creative discovery’. The second part of the chapter investigates the theoretical implications of such an approach, reconstructing Tolkien’s perceptions on the value and heuristic potential of a ‘gratuitous’ aesthetic event, and especially of a linguistic one, given the ‘divine’ inspiration of language and its original expression of both wonder at and knowledge of created reality.

This concluding chapter reflects on the volume’s contributions to how we see, think, and do international organisations. The editors of this volume draw a sharp distinction between doing international organisations law and thinking about international organisations, and propose that the discipline must ‘start seeing international organisations differently’. Yet the sequence could just as easily be reversed: what one sees will inevitably be shaped by what one thinks, how one imagines the world, what one expects to see. This chapter begins with ‘ways of doing’ scholarship on international organisations – crudely divided into ‘deconstructivist’ and ‘(re)constructivist’ approaches – and proceeds to reflect on the diverse ways of seeing and thinking suggested by the preceding chapters, before making some tentative suggestions about possible ways forward.

What does it take for international institutional law to break away from its problem-solving tendencies and fixed list of subjects and methods, and explore international organisations as sites of socio-political struggles over the shape of local and global life? This editorial introduction discusses ethos and epistemological boundaries of the mainstream international law scholarship, and the prospects of critical and interdisciplinary approaches for the study of international organisations in international law. It offers an overview of the objectives of the volume and its five sections, and argues that combining macro and micro critique, as reflected in the volume chapters, offers a promising pathway for mapping power, stability, and change in the world order.

As interdisciplinary work inquires into the scope and content of the right to freedom of thought, we confront two crucial questions; for the purposes of this legal right, what should qualify as thought and what makes thought free? This chapter draws upon philosophical and psychological literature to suggest answers to these questions. First, we argue that thought does not only occur in a forum internum inside our heads. We propose that the right to freedom of thought should recognise and protect two types of what we call forum externum thought. Type 1 is ‘extended thought’. This occurs when we extend our mind using features of our body or environment, such as diary use and internet search (under certain circumstances). Type 2 is ‘thoughtspeech’. This occurs when we speak with others to think aloud together. We propose Type 1 and Type 2 forum externum thought should receive absolute protection only when they are employed for the purposes of self-government and truth-seeking respectively. We then turn to the question of what makes thought free. Here we focus on how the ‘trust and glue’ criteria for the extended mind can inform our consideration of what should count as impermissible alteration of extended thought. We conclude by pointing to the need for future transdisciplinary work to support the development of this right.