Individuals less closely professionally connected to the deceased may simply be a witness of fact at court instead of being an interested person. Some people worry that being an interested person means that they are in ‘trouble’ with the coroner or more likely to face censure. This is not usually the case. This chapter gives an understanding of what an interested person is, in the context of an inquest, and the advantages and disadvantages of that position.

This study used semi-structured interviews to examine daily stressors and coping resources as experienced by twenty-one racially and/or ethnically diverse, undocumented college students residing in Massachusetts (USA). A legal violence framework and stress process theory were used to analyze the stress and coping experiences of undocumented college students. The findings reveal the presence of financial burdens, fears of deportation, blocked opportunities, and legal status concealment as daily stressors, as well as needed peer and informational supports as coping resources for undocumented students. Furthermore, for undocumented students, fear of deportation and stigma hindered their ability to identify and capitalize on needed peer and institutional support. The authors argue that not recognizing the structural and symbolic ways that immigration laws serve as legitimizing sources for afflicting social, psychological, and material harm places students with precarious legal status at risk for poor mental health. This chapter concludes by offering practice implications to help improve the ability of institutional agents within higher education to meet the needs of undocumented college students.

The international human rights regime is characterized by extensive jurisdictional overlap between global and regional institutions that address and monitor the same or closely related human rights through partly complementary, partly similar procedures. Taking Europe as an example, individuals alleging violations of the core physical integrity right to freedom from torture can lodge complaints – depending on case specifics and the State involved – with up to five different institutions. While the complaints procedures are similar in many respects, they also differ in important ones, notably the legally binding/non-binding status of their decisions and the mechanisms for supervising second-order compliance with them. The descriptive statistical data on compliance with torture-related decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Committee and the UN Committee against Torture against European States shows that the court and committees induce compliance with their decisions similarly well with respect to findings of conditional non-refoulement violations against liberal democracies, but that the court performs better with respect to remedying actual violations.

Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Flemish women had been active in key stages of cloth production, such as weaving, or other finishing crafts (apart from fulling). However, when the textile industry shifted during the fourteenth century towards guild-controlled production of more expensive woollens, job opportunities for women declined. Their involvement as independent workers became rather restricted. They were gradually pushed towards lower-paid, labour-intensive activities in the preparatory stages of cloth production such as washing, combing, carding and spinning the wool. As no scholar on either side of the English Channel has ever considered the position of immigrant women in the fourteenth century, we are left with several open questions: would this shift in production within the urban industries be one of the push factors? How better off were Flemish women if they emigrated to England (alone or with husbands)? The purpose of this chapter is to examine the economic activities of Flemish women in England, with a specific focus on the textile industry and the ways in which women contributed separately from their male compatriots.

This chapter investigates why a competitor would want to become a member of one of the ecumenical synods. What could the associations do for them after they had paid the relatively high entrance fee? A major preoccupation of the synods was obtaining and safeguarding privileges for their members. There were three main types: privileges providing personal security, financial privileges and honorary privileges. A special category were the so-called opsonia, pensions granted to victors in a select category of games. Another aspect was the legal status of synod members. There are indications that synodic lobbying protected their members from the Roman infamia laws that targeted people performing in shows. The second section of this chapter focuses on the support offered by the synods during festivals. They ensured, for instance, that their members were well lodged and fed. This chapter argues that in securing privileges and offering local support, the synods relied on their extensive social networks, which reached out to local elites as well as to Roman administrators and the imperial court.

International organizations perform activities in areas in which states can no longer operate effectively in isolation, and in which there is a common interest in cooperation within a permanent international framework. This chapter will examine international organizations primarily from a legal perspective. The chapter aims to present a general overview of the law of international organizations. It discusses the legal status, privileges, and immunities of international organizations. The chapter further deals with membership issues, powers, and institutional structures. The chapter also looks at decisions of international organizations: the way in which they are taken and the different types of decisions. The chapter will briefly examine the finances of international organizations. There has been an exponential increase in activities of international organizations over the years. Not all of these activities have been successful, however, and there have been failures and wrongdoings. In recent years, a much-debated issue is the extent to which international organizations and/or their members may be held responsible for such failures and wrongdoings.

International organizations perform activities in areas in which states can no longer operate effectively in isolation, and in which there is a common interest in cooperation within a permanent international framework. This chapter will examine international organizations primarily from a legal perspective. The chapter aims to present a general overview of the law of international organizations. It discusses the legal status, privileges, and immunities of international organizations. The chapter further deals with membership issues, powers, and institutional structures. The chapter also looks at decisions of international organizations: the way in which they are taken and the different types of decisions. The chapter will briefly examine the finances of international organizations. There has been an exponential increase in activities of international organizations over the years. Not all of these activities have been successful, however, and there have been failures and wrongdoings. In recent years, a much-debated issue is the extent to which international organizations and/or their members may be held responsible for such failures and wrongdoings.

This chapter looks at the varieties and trajectories of unfree status in the Carolingian empire. Rather than seeing it only as a point of transition from A (Roman slavery) to B (medieval serfdom), it aims to consider the practical logic of unfreedom as a category in the early medieval West, in a variety of different contexts: enslavement (the slave trade, self-sale, penal enslavement), household slavery, on great estates, and in law-making.

In this introduction, McMillan introduces key concepts and definition discussed throughout the book, including: liminality, ‘the embryo’, process, and ‘legal status’. The regulation of emerging technologies may be described as the governance of processes in persistent flux, and in some cases, it is the regulation of what we do not yet know or fully understand. Reconciling process with progress, therefore, has not been easy. Nonetheless, the regulation of the embryo in vitro, and all the practices that law currently allows are, in essence, regulating for processes of change. Considering that it has been over 30 years since the 1990 Act was passed in its original form, is it time to legally reconceive ‘the embryo’? In this book McMillan calls for, and considers, the basis for a more coherent and robust intellectual defence of the ways in which we justify the different manners in which law treats different types of embryos created purposively towards different ends. The main questions that this analysis seeks to answer are the following: Overall, does law reflect and embody processual regulation, if so, what does this look like? And if not, what form could it take if reform were thought to be desirable?

This chapter attempts to assess whether and to what extent international law can be seen as governing intra-state peace agreements; and, by turning to the practice of negotiating such agreements, whether international legal obligations, such as with respect to the inclusion of civil society actors, have emerged or are currently emerging. Demonstrating that there exist complex relationships between the practice reflected in peace agreements and international law, the chapter argues that when trying to understand these relationships, much depends on our theoretical stance vis-à-vis international law. Relying on an interactional and pluralistic conception of law, this chapter emphasises the relevance of process-related obligations and the continuous creation and adjustment of legal norms. Finally, the chapter considers the reasons why it might be desirable to ground the practice of peace agreements in international law and to allow this practice to contribute to the development of international law.

The second chapter focuses on women's legal status and ethnicity grouping together the partly overlapping categories of female slaves, freedwomen and women of foreign (non-Roman) background on the basis of their funerary inscriptions. The first part starts with female slaves followed by the more abundant evidence for freedwomen and discusses their employment within large households, their relationship with their (former) masters, including marriages between owners and their (former) slaves, their relationships with their fellow slaves and freedpeople, and their achievements. It ends with issues of manumission and the benefits of Roman citizenship (such as the ius liberorum freeing female citizens with three of more children from guardianship). The second part on citizenship and ethnicity focuses on women in the regions along the northern and western frontiers of the Roman Empire,where we find non-Roman citizens adopting Roman burial customs but at the same time underlining their ethnic identity by their local dress or the record of their ethnic origin in the inscription.The chapter also includes local citizenhip and ends with the various relationships between local women and the Roman army.

Identity in seventeenth century colonial Virginia was in a liminal state. Enter Elizabeth Key, an African-Anglo woman living in the colony during the middle of the seventeenth century. Key sued for her freedom when the overseers of her late master’s estate classified her in the estate inventory as a negro rather than a servant. To the overseers the term negro implied a permanently or perpetually unfree person, an inheritable condition. In contrast, the term servant implied someone born free who voluntarily relinquished her freedom for a definite period.  Thus, Key’s classification raised serious questions about her legal status and the status of at least one of her two children. Hers is one of the earliest freedom suits in the English colonies filed by a person with some African ancestry. Her representative argued that because her father was an English subject, she could not be enslaved for life. A negative consequence of her successful lawsuit was a law consigning the children of enslaved women to permanent servitude. In effect, Key’s attempt to emancipate herself from slavery and its concomitant forms of oppression resulted in larger changes to the racial status quo.

Youth who immigrate to the US navigate unique and increasingly complex challenges. These challenges include stressful or unsafe sociopolitical pre-migration contexts, protracted or unpredictable migration processes, and post-migration stressors while adapting to a new culture. In this chapter, we examine such effects of immigration and acculturation on children in different historical periods. The example of migration from Mexico to the US is used to illustrate how our historical perspectives change and shape developmental possibilities and experiences for children. Our recent historical perspective embraced the goal of assimilating children and families into the US host culture, with little adherence to the values and traditions of the culture of origin. Over time this perspective has shifted to the current view that the goal of acculturation should be a bicultural one. Implications of various migratory paths for children’s adjustment are discussed, as are the developmental implications of current policies related to migration.

In this chapter, we argue that the timing of societal events in an individual’s life plays a major role in shaping that life through interacting developmental processes at multiple levels. We focus on classic research by Elder showing how two such events in historical proximity dramatically altered the lives of California children who were born at opposite ends of the 1920s, 1920–21 and 1928–29, the Great Depression of the 1930s followed by World War II (1941–45) and the Korean War (1950–53). We employ insights from both Elder’s cohort historical life course approach and developmental science including recent work on developmental neuroscience to understand the life-long impact of exposure to events that occur at different times in life, and the mechanisms through which these exposures may influence development, as well as experiences that may provide turning points in development.