Abraham Lincoln turned his attention to reconstructing the damaged union very early in the war, and tried several different experiments in recreating civilian governments in confederate states where federal authority had been re-established. He encountered his greatest difficulty in dealing with unionist factions in those states, and with a radical caucus within congress which pressed for more vigorous treatment of the former slave states. Lincoln was inclined to operate on the most generous possible terms to end the fighting. But he also declined overtures from confederates that would in any way compromise the commitment to emancipation and the end of slavery in America.

Abraham Lincoln entered onto the presidency even as the breakaway southern confederacy was in the process of detaching itself from the union. Lincoln undestood this as a defiance of the constitution and an undermining of democracy (as represented by the election of 1860) and he initiated war measures to suppress what he would recognize only as a rebellion. He was careful not to agitate public opposition by billing this suppression as an abolition campaign. Nevertheless, union forces met with repeated defeats, and Lincoln was frustrated by over-mighty generals who believed that they knew better than he what was at stake. This frustration nudged him further toward incorporating some form of abolition into his war plans.

This chapter situates the Declaration of Independence in relation to another founding document of the United States, the federal Constitution. It assesses the Declaration’s role in debates over the Constitution, first during the latter’s framing in 1787, then in the struggle for ratification, and then later as political actors sought to interpret each document in light of the other. From the outset, debate over the Constitution highlighted the Declaration’s multivalence as well as its rhetorical power. Both defenders and opponents of the Constitution have sought to show how their cause best aligned with the ideals and aspirations expressed in the Declaration. Anti-federalists and their successors constructed a powerful narrative which juxtaposed the Declaration’s call to liberty with the Constitution’s blueprint for authority. Yet there was from the beginning an equally strong tradition that saw the Constitution as a consummation of the Declaration’s promise. Either way, this chapter argues, the Declaration continues to help shape the meaning of the Constitution – and to have its own meaning remolded in turn.

The majoritarian critique of judicial review asserts that democracies should assign the power to resolve questions regarding the nature and extent of individual rights to the majority and their representatives. The literature addressing these issues, however, suffers from a consistent failure to examine carefully basic questions about the nature of democracy. The western democratic tradition works from the foundational intuition that legitimate power derives from the consent of the governed. That intuition justifies majority rule as an important element of social choice, but it also requires the entrenchment of rights protections as an element of any acceptable set of political institutions. If entrenched rights are to provide effective protections to liberty interests, they must be enforced by an institution that is not subject to majority control. Democratic institutions must therefore include an institution independent of majority control whose purpose is to enforce rights protections against the majority. While this argument does not establish that the judiciary is the only institution appropriate for this role, it does demonstrate the essential role played in democratic institutions by a rights-enforcing institution that is independent of majority control.

This chapter provides an introduction to the core concepts of US law, for those with an HCI background but not a legal background. The chapter covers the history of U.S. law, the basic constructs of the U.S. legal system, the core sources of legal rules: constitutions, statutues, regulations, and case law, differences between civil and criminal law, the differences between law and policy at the federal versus state level, searching for and using legal resources, and how to apply basic legal principles to HCI research.

This chapter examines the growing prevalence and impact of sanctions designations on individuals, companies, and nations globally. It highlights the severe economic and personal consequences of such designations, which can lead to bankruptcy and business dissolution, often resulting in long-lasting and potentially irreparable damage. Further, the chapter critiques the process of sanctions designation as fundamentally at odds with core principles of the rule of law, particularly those central to Western legal traditions. These principles include the government’s duty to clearly articulate legal prohibitions, the necessity of providing specific accusations and supporting evidence to those penalized, the right to contest such evidence, and the availability of a meaningful appeals process. By analyzing these discrepancies, this chapter calls for a reevaluation of the sanctions framework to align it more closely with established legal norms and protections.

Chapter 8: In constitutional terms the emperor operated under the law and Tiberius noted the importance of the law in imperial actions, though it came to be accepted that emperors were also free from the constraint of the laws. The emperor, receiving his power by statute, could himself make law or change administrative procedures, which he did by edict or letter or suggestion or speech in the senate or by instructions to governors. The emperor was deeply involved in the process of the law by holding judicial hearings, dealing with appeals from Roman citizens on a capital charge, and responding to individual petitions from all over the empire on a wide range of issues both personal and legal; it was part of the emperor’s role to be accessible.

This chapter develops a theory of singular compositional explanation. The core idea is that a singular compositional explanation is a representation of an ontological dependence relation between entities mentioned in a representation of an explanans and entities mentioned in a representation of an explanandum. The account is realist in the sense that it postulates a real relation among entities in the world that would have been rejected by logical empiricists. Explanations are singular in the sense that the explanandum entity is a single spatiotemporal particular and the explanans entities are individual spatiotemporal particulars. The explanations are compositional in the sense that the explanandum entity is an individual, an individual property instance, or an individual activity instance that is explained by sets of lower level individuals, lower level property instances, or lower level activity instances.

In privileging collective over individual rights, Ned Richardson-Little points out, socialist states aligned themselves with the Third World. The concept of rights is usually seen as distant and foreign to communism where the Party reigned supreme and law was only a fiction. From the Russian Revolution onward, however, rights played an important role in communist ideology and politics around the world. Communist conceptions of rights cannot be reduced to a belief in collective freedom at the expense of the individual, nor the realization of social and economic rights in place of political and civil rights. According to communist theorists and leaders, rights played a vital role in defining the goals of the socialist revolution, in delineating the political and economic order of post-revolutionary societies and demarcating the conflict lines of the international order. Rejecting both the liberal and natural rights traditions of their political rivals, communists enacted their own reimagining of rights as instruments of the state working to further the cause of the socialist revolution.

Modelling the liability of social platforms has become a pressing issue, along with emerging efforts to institutionalise the accountability of digital collective actors, including human-algorithmic associations. However, to make social platforms liable, it is necessary to resolve the problem of the accountability of private actors for human rights violations traditionally immune to human rights challenges because social platforms are owned by private actors, who also manufacture their contents and coordinate and control them. Different strategies are employed or offered to remedy the situation. Considering that human rights violations in the digital sphere are of ‘constitutional quality’, this chapter identifies the horizontal application of constitutional rights as a possible response to human rights challenges raised by the actions of social platforms. This step does not require the recognition of new rights but the recognition of new duty holders, such as social platforms, in relation to existing rights. The examples from Germany, Canada, and the European Union illustrate its promising potential to remedy online human rights abuses.

After a successful fundraising campaign, the Church of Christ missionaries arrived in Italy in early 1949. They acquired a villa in Frascati, in the Castelli Romani area southeast of Rome, where they established a school and an orphanage and launched an ambitious missionary effort. Their activities quickly alarmed the local Catholic clergy and Vatican hierarchies, who viewed the mission as part of a broader Protestant strategy to undermine the Catholic Church’s near monopoly on religion in Italy. The Vatican promptly urged the Italian government to take action, relying on Fascist-era laws to curb the missionaries' activities. The Italian Ministry of the Interior, led by the conservative Christian Democrat Mario Scelba, targeted the Texas evangelicals for overstaying their short-term tourist visas and for opening a school without the requisite authorizations. Efforts to spread their message in various towns of the Castelli Romani were met with significant resistance, including violent attacks by locals. As tensions escalated, the missionaries grew increasingly frustrated with what they perceived as the indifference of US diplomats stationed in Rome. They began lobbying their congressional representatives in Washington, and soon members of Congress took up their cause, pressuring the State Department to intervene.

After his visa extension was denied, the mission’s leader, Cline Paden, made unsuccessful attempts to return to Italy. He moved to Denmark for a few years before eventually settling back in Texas, where he established a missionary school in Abilene – the Sunset International Bible Institute (SIBI) – and became a prominent figure in the Churches of Christ. Meanwhile, the Italian mission continued its precarious existence, never achieving the status of a major religious player as it had hoped and attracting only a few hundred members. One of the defining features of its story was the stark contrast between the mission’s limited success and the disproportionate political and diplomatic attention its activities garnered. Yet, thanks to their “Americanness” and the ability to leverage the United States’ unique power and influence over its junior Italian ally, the Texans played a significant role in advancing religious pluralism and freedom in Italy – a fact acknowledged even by other long-established Protestant churches such as the Waldensians that had little or no political or theological sympathy for the Church of Christ.

Using the library of eighteenth-century attorney and legal historian Frances Hargrave as a starting point, this chapter considers the place of law, property, and state formation in the causes and results of the American Revolution. Focusing on three related themes to the place of laws in independence – the influence and break from English legal culture, the pluralism of legal practice within North America, and the place of legal institutions in either maintaining or changing the status quo – this chapter considers how both different forms of property and the different individuals and communities involved with it played a central role in the creation of an independent United States. The governments that emerged from the Revolution each relied heavily on these varied legal threads.