Chapter 4 focuses on the impact of the settlement laws on local community life. A rare personal diary by a Sussex village shopkeeper (1754–1765), records his activity as a parish officer and helps to paint a detailed canvas and to connect the history of parish administration with studies of gender and the social order. This chapter also returns to the legal framework to explore further the responsibilities of the overseer of the poor and the parish vestry.

The introduction traces the history of legal discrimination against women in the UK, from exclusion in university education and voting rights to the legal profession. Courts presumed sex-based distinctions as default, requiring parliamentary intervention for reforms including women’s suffrage, equal pay, and the protection of women from sex discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace. The Sex Discrimination Act 1975 prohibited discrimination while allowing exceptions for protection of women, including single-sex spaces. These legal developments operated on a tacit understanding of sex as biological sex, which can be distinguished from emerging concepts of gender as a system of social norms overlayed on biological sex and gender identity as an individuals internalised experience of these norms. The chapter then provides a descriptive overview of the Equality Act 2010 as a resource for readers unfamiliar with its structure and core principles.

The fifth chapter turns to war and peace. The role of England’s poor relief system in assisting war efforts has been suggested by scholars. This chapter argues that were it not for the development of settlement laws, one can only wonder whether the ‘fiscal-military state’ would have enjoyed such support. The chapter shows how the responsibilities of the parish officer expanded to assist the fiscal-military state, and the roles taken by the county administration. It also explains how the New Militia, established at the start of the Seven Years’ War, relied on the parish’s administrative apparatus and employed the settlement legislation in sophisticated ways. However, as time went by complexities arose. The greater the needs of recruitment and disbandment, the more the eighteenth-century state relied on the mechanisms of parish settlement; at the same time, military needs also led to partial suspension of the settlement laws.

It was a turning point in the history of European integration and a unique moment for the first President of the European Commission, Walter Hallstein. On 16 June 1965 in the afternoon, Hallstein appeared before the European Parliament (EP) to express his strong support for the constitutional interpretation of European law launched by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in the new Van Gend en Loos (1963) and Costa v ENEL (1964) judgments. Here the ECJ had controversially assumed the competence to define the relationship between European law and national constitutional orders. By doing so the ECJ sidestepped the respective constitutional clauses of the member states on how to receive international (and European) law. Primary legal norms from the founding treaties, when clear and unambiguous, would have direct effect inside the legal order of the member states as well as primacy vis-à-vis national legislation, whether precedent or antecedent. This was a remarkable breakthrough for a constitutional interpretation of European law.

In many European countries, sodomy statutes institutionalized the scrutiny of homosexual acts. Magistrates’ reliance on forensic experts to explain sexual deviance in terms of criminal responsibility stimulated the emergence of a medical concept of homosexuality. Belgian courts, however, displayed no such ‘will to know’ about the nature of ‘perversion.’ A comparison of German and Belgian legal logics pertaining to indecency demonstrates how the former was preoccupied with a perpetrator’s motives, while the latter deliberately ignored them. German courts often had recourse to medical expertise to understand what drove (homo)sexual offenders, whereas the Belgian judiciary preferred to omit these hard-to-prove intricacies by stubbornly sticking to the facts of the matter. Belgian trials pertaining to homosexual acts of public indecency were therefore mostly bereft of any special interest in the psychological significance of the acts in question. Unlike elsewhere, they did not stimulate forensic physicians to account for such ‘unnatural acts’ in terms of a medico-psychiatric ‘condition.’

This chapter analyses the historical transformation from ritualistic and therapeutic use of mind-altering substances to their global regulation and criminalisation. Focusing on the colonial and industrial eras, it highlights how opium, coca, and alcohol were recontextualised as economic commodities and instruments of empire. The chapter tracks the emergence of international drug control regimes, moral panics, and racialised legislation — particularly the British Opium Wars, US Harrison Narcotics Act, and global treaties. The intersection of state regulation, corporate profit, and public health is critically examined through case studies including the US opioid crisis. In parallel, sugar and caffeine are discussed as ‘soft’ stimulants that escaped moral scrutiny despite their neurochemical effects. The chapter concludes with a comparative look at regulation and commodification, showing how different substances became entangled in legal, moral, and economic narratives.

This chapter moves from the semi-privacy of homes to the more public arena of urban courts. It looks at the surprising role of the pox in two different kinds of legal cases involving unlawful sex: suits for separation and rape cases. In both types of case, the disease served as a proxy for sex, material evidence of otherwise unprovable acts. Yet its role in court was much more complex than this. Marks of the disease were visible and long-enduring, an early form of medical forensics, and women could talk about the disease more freely than they could talk about sexual matters. Mothers of rape victims could bear witness to the horrifying effects of disease and disgruntled wives could frame their husbands’ abuse as contagion stemming from illicit sex. The disease allowed women to speak the unspeakable. What is more, cases did not rest wholly on women’s words, which were accorded little value in courts. Confirming the existence and transmission of disease called for the allegedly more trustworthy testimony of medical men. The disease centered legal cases about sex on to the words and bodily inspections that the court deemed reliable.

Rights are at home in law-courts. In popular understanding, they seem like attributes attached to individuals who are found in isolation. When carefully examined, however, they can be characterised as aspects of relations in the sight of a tribunal (which may, of course, be conscience or public opinion or God). They have their being, it might be said, within a field of vision - the version of reality that the tribunal sees - in which a right apparently located in one person must have a dissimilar correlate located in another. If, when the information that counts as fact in, a court is in principle willing to do X for A against B, it cannot simultaneously have the same willingness to do X for B against A. On the account definitively worked out by Wesley Hohfeld, my claim must have its correlate in someone else’s duty, but even the simplest privilege (my right against the world to take a walk into the park) has correlates in ‘no-rights’ attaching to the indefinite range of other individuals who might take legal action with a view to stopping me.

This book benefits from weaving together intellectual history and political and legal history, illuminating legal practices through the lens of philosophical ideas and re-examining philosophical ideals within the tapestry of historical experience. As the title From Utopia to Serfdom suggests, this approach uncovers profound paradoxes within the political and legal practices of early Chinese empires. Contemporaries keenly observed the hardships these legal practices imposed on the population and called for change. However, reforms either were never initiated or failed to fundamentally alter the core practices. The legal practices of early Chinese empires, which often distorted the concept of justice, were not arbitrarily devised to serve the absolute power of the throne, as some scholars have claimed. Rather, they were frequently grounded in a utopia complex and perfectionism in classical Chinese thought. A deeper exploration of these ideals, along with the evolving notions of justice and sovereignty, is essential to fully grasp their impact on Chinese history, particularly on its political and legal culture and practices.