Chapter 2 maps the contours of this doctrine, indicating the sources of the questions on which the critique builds. This chapter purposefully identifies doctrinal understandings (inclusions, exclusions, preponderances and assumptions), as focussed on definitions, distinctions, interpretation, contexts and conditions. In so doing, it maps the grounds for my broader claims as well as identifying entry points for their critique in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 1 focuses on the career of Harlem writer Aubrey Bowser, who began his career editing the uplift literary journal The Rainbow, the official organ of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen’s Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, and who then re-edited some of that material, which, in turn, appeared in the New York Amsterdam News, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the Baltimore Afro-American. The printscape of Bowser’s work reveals the pressures that Jazz Age Black journalism placed on writers committed to racial uplift, as well as how Black newspapers bridged tensions between religious, dry, daytime tenets and wet, nighttime indulgence. As the Black press advertised, reported on, and editorialized “uplift” events concurrently with Harlem nightlife, it encouraged readers to mitigate at least some of the ideological divisions by offering a cosmopolitan vision of the New Negro. Within this context, the cultural work of Bowser’s fiction, especially after 1925 when most Black newspapers shifted their stance and saw Prohibition as a failure, assuaged readers that “knowing” wet Harlem did not mean abandoning the church and that attending church did not mean condemning the cabaret.

This chapter provides insights into the health-related aspects of beer law, both in contemporary society, and through history. It highlights the health benefits and health issues associated with beer, and explores how the law has sought to address both. It starts with examples where the law has looked favourably on beer, predominantly approached from the perspective of individual health. However, it is also important to consider beer law from a public health perspective, and the chapter includes discussion by Michal Koščík on this topic. The chapter covers areas of law that aim to limit or prevent the production, distribution, and/or consumption of beer, followed by a few observations about how beer-related health data are collected and used. It concludes by expressing some thoughts about beer, law, health, and the future.

This chapter explores the intersection of legal methodology and beer law, drawing parallels between brewing recipes and regulatory frameworks. It posits that beer law is a distinct legal field, akin to IT law, requiring an understanding of technological and market dynamics. The pragmatic method emerges as the most suitable approach for beer law, emphasizing practical applicability over rigid legal interpretations. The chapter highlights the role of institutions in shaping beer culture and law, using Iceland’s prohibition history as a case study. It discusses performance-based regulation as a potential framework for beer law, advocating for flexibility and innovation in legal structures. Additionally, the chapter addresses the teleological aspects of beer law, stressing the importance of purpose in legal interpretation, particularly concerning trademarks and quality assurance. Ultimately, it asserts that the guiding principle of beer law should be the practical availability of beer, advocating for interpretations that support the brewing and distribution capabilities of relevant institutions.

Each country in North America – the US, Canada, and Mexico – has a distinct beer culture and all made, and are making, significant contributions to how beer and beer law develops. The US is the source of the modern craft beer industry movement that has swept all over the world. Importantly, A legal reform catering for home brewing is seen as the foundation for this development. But this is not the only way in which North America’s brewing has challenged tradition. Other examples are also discussed in this chapter, and legal aspects are highlighted.

In this book, we have mostly depicted companies as legal actors in their own right that act through certain human agents. In this chapter, our focus changes: we now think of companies as things that may be owned and controlled. Nevertheless, the motivations of human agents remain at the forefront. Some of the law that we encountered in previous chapters will be relevant here, because it regulates the behaviour of the human protagonists; for example, the law on directors’ duties. However, the law of takeovers in Australia is a special body of law. This law is set out in chs 6, 6A, 6B and 6C of the Corporations Act, together with a unique dispute resolution system that diverts disputes away from the courts and into an administrative body—the Takeovers Panel (‘the Panel’)—during the life of a takeover bid. The decision-making of the Panel is guided by policy and commerciality, rather than legal doctrine.

This chapter reviews the proscription and criminalization of torture in domestic legal systems around the world. The 174 States Parties to the 1984 Convention against Torture are all obligated to ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. In fact, torture is prohibited in some form under domestic law in 195 of the 197 States recognized by the Secretary-General of the United Nations . The two exceptions are Niue (a State not party to the 1984 Convention against Torture) and San Marino.

This chapter deals with all manner of state-derived prohibitions. Ancient states prohibited a broad variety of behaviours, threatening punishment for those who would transgress boundaries. The logic of prohibition was wide-ranging: from the marking of spaces, objects and officials as somehow distinct from the rest of ‘society’, leading factions within ancient states sought to preserve and protect their individual prerogatives. They also sought to reinforce their claims to leadership by incentivizing subjects to settle their disputes in state-sanctioned venues. The evidence for such prohibitions is extensive, but did they add up to something that we might legitimately call ‘social control’? Did ancient states succeed at inducing subject populations to accept their claims to rule? If so, how? This chapter suggests that the logic of prohibition was a site of contestation for both statecraft and subject-craft.

Zakat returned to Middle Eastern political discourse in the 1930s, through modern Islamism. It became one of two concrete initiatives distinguishing an Islamic modern economy from economies ostensibly corrupted by secularists and colonialists. The other was Islamic finance. In both cases, the focus was more on the symbolism of Islamizing a secularized sphere than on solving actual economic problems. Islamism tacitly stripped zakat of all but one of its original functions: poverty alleviation. Sidelining zakat’s role in public finance and the protection of property rights, it frittered away golden opportunities to draw from Islam’s rich history universal lessons for economic progress and rule of law. Focusing on the functions that made zakat a pillar of Islam would have initiated a dialogue with secularists inclined to dismiss Islam as a source of backwardness. A similar scenario has played out in relation to Islamic finance. Nowhere has a categorical ban on interest, which is absent from the Quran anyway, been enforced. In any case, it is unfeasible. In making Islamic finance seem interest-free through euphemisms and accounting tricks, Islamism reduces economic transparency and institutionalizes dishonesty. Weakening rule of law, it also compounds mistrust.

One of the easiest ways to reduce crime is to shrink the footprint of the criminal law. The most obvious candidates are the parts of the criminal infrastructure that I have been calling the criminal legal system: pretrial detention, the war on drugs, parole and probation revocations, repeat offending laws, and so on. The best way to shrink the criminal legal system is to change the law so that violations of essentially regulatory rules do not lead to incarceration.