A juridical commentary to this provision further states: ‘[t]hat which is protected is to be worth more than that which is harmed and the danger is not to be avoidable through any other means’ (Anonymous, 2025, see: https://lagen.nu/1962:700#K24).

In this chapter I argue that the norm against intentional killing is a moral absolute, identifying an action never to be done. On this ground, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and other allied bombings in World War II, are shown to have been morally unjustified.

Defences play a critical role in tort law by allowing courts to balance individual rights with broader considerations of justice and social policy. For example, a person who acts in self-defence or under necessity may interfere with another’s rights in a way that would ordinarily be unlawful, but their actions may be justified by the circumstances. Similarly, defences like consent or statutory authorisation reflect the idea that liability should not arise where the plaintiff has permitted the interference or where the defendant is acting in accordance with the law. Without defences, the law would be overly rigid, punishing conduct that, in context, may be entirely reasonable or socially acceptable.

In this chapter we begin by discussing the distinction between a denial of liability and a defence. A denial of liability challenges whether the plaintiff has proven the elements of the tort, whereas a defence assumes that the elements are satisfied but provides a justification or excuse for the defendant’s actions.

Chapters 6 and 7 dealt with the substantive requirements of the torts of trespass to the person and trespass to property and goods. This chapter deals with the defences and remedies available to those actions.Defences to trespass based on self-help include the defences of self-defence or defence of another, defence of property, necessity or abatement. Defences based on justification are consent and the exercise of disciplinary powers. There is a fault-based defence of inevitable accident. Provocation, mistake, contributory negligence and the incapacity of the defendant are not defences to trespass.The remedies available for trespass to the person include damages (nominal, compensatory, aggravated and exemplary) and injunctions.

This chapter takes a relatively broad approach to defences, covering a range of factors that might serve to exculpate a defendant who might otherwise appear to have committed an offence. The defences examined here are arranged into two, imperfectly realised, categories. The first group have been termed ‘mental state defences’ and the second ‘self-help defences’. The group titled ‘mental state defences’ are so categorised because they depend to a greater or lesser extent on the contention that the accused did not possess the requisite mens rea to commit the offence. In assessing whether an accused may be able to rely on a defence a number of subjective and objective elements have to be applied and analysed. It is important to understand that the considerations informing the development of each of the defences are often very different and sometimes controversial. The groupings are far from perfectly realised and the rationales and doctrines of each of the defences may manifest as many dissimilarities as they do similarities. It is hoped that the arrangement of the material in this chapter will aid understanding by drawing comparisons across different aspects of the criminal law.

This Chapter proposes a coherent approach to the review of security exceptions under international trade and investment agreements by international adjudicators. The contribution of this Chapter is two-fold. First, it examines whether the clarification of the scope of the existing security exception clauses and their coherent application by international adjudicators under both regimes could help restrain the securitization of states’ trade and investment policies. Secondly, and conversely, it aims to draw some conclusions about the extent to which existing security exception clauses provide sufficient policy space for WTO members to protect their national interests.

This Chapter examines whether and to what extent WTO members can be accountable for applying security measures before international adjudicators and how the invocation of security exceptions can impact the international courts’ or tribunals’ proceedings. The idea of balancing free trade and national security is bound to substantiate itself in a compression of the right to sovereignty, which can be assessed through the good faith review or the use of a necessity test. The investigation of the meaning and mechanisms of these tests and the scope of discretion that should be granted to the decisions of WTO members in their national security matters allows for establishing the framework for reviewing security exceptions.

The chapter argues for a reading of Parts of Animals I.1, 639b11–640a9 as a continuous argument, divided into 3 main sections. Aristotle’s point in the first section is that teleological explanations should precede non-teleological explanations in the order of exposition. His reasoning is that the ends cited in teleological explanations are definitions, and definitions – which are not subject to further explanation – are appropriate starting points, insofar as they prevent explanations from going on ad infinitum. Aristotle proceeds in the following two sections to criticize certain non-teleological accounts offered by his predecessors on the grounds that they are explanatorily defective: those accounts – unlike teleological explanations – neither begin from appropriate starting points nor entail the phenomena that they purport to explain. Along the way, the chapter proposes an alternative way to understand what “hypothetical necessity” refers to, for Aristotle.

This chapter explores the three levels of material constitution presented in the Part of Animals: (a) elemental powers, (b) uniform and (c) nonuniform animate parts, in order to answer the question whether uniform materials that go into the constitution of animal bodies are produced for the sake of the organism. My answer is negative. At the bottom level, we encounter inanimate mixtures, not just elemental powers, that possess all the non-elemental material properties that may then be used by an animal nature. Aristotle’s chemistry (in the GC and Meteorology) exploits non-teleological processes that explain the dispositions of uniform material bodies. Such materials are then used by animal natures, through the teleological process of concoction, for the constitution of uniform and nonuniform parts of their bodies: the animal kind works within the confines set by the non-elemental material properties. This helps locate the difference between mixis and pepsis (concoction) and to understand why these conceptual tools are used in different contexts by Aristotle.

Chapter 4 delves deeper into the discussion around the torturous suffering inflicted in the name of the state and how that is legitimated. This chapter continues to find states to exhibit an existential interest in keeping the legality of some forms of suffering ambiguous and thus deniable (and non-justiciable to the extent possible), given the degree to which state authorities rely on them. Certain methods (solitary confinement, coercive interrogation and life imprisonment) have come to be bracketed away from the prohibition. This evokes the (often effaced) question of the formation of legality and legitimacy of state violence and brings into focus legal concepts, such as ‘lawful sanctions’, ‘minimum severity’, ‘inherent or incidental’, ‘discomfort’, ‘special stigma’, ‘triviality’ and ‘necessity’. These stand to be critiqued as being born out of political imperatives to exceptionalise so as to invisibilise and render deniable certain state practices. These categories, as will be argued, have worked to preserve the category of torture as aberrational and nearly unattainable.

Crown finance in late medieval England had a lot of moving parts, not all of which fitted together. This chapter looks initially at income and expenditure, before examining the ways in which the financial system was managed, massaged and manipulated. The many moving parts which ultimately contributed to the evolution of a public financial system, forged in an often charged but fundamentally stable partnership with parliament through a period of protracted war, were one of the keystones of the expanding political society – king, nobility, gentry, merchants – which lay at the heart of the late medieval and early modern English state. The formative century in this process was circa 1260 to 1360 but, despite the political upheavals, ever more frequent financial crises and declining taxation revenues of the century which followed, it proved strong enough to withstand the challenges.

Metaphysics, Suárez teaches in Metaphysical Disputation I, is the science of being insofar as it is real being. Later he clarifies that this ‘being’ encompasses real natures, whether they actually exist or not. It seems therefore that for Suárez metaphysics engages not only with the most general features of actual things, but also with those of possible things. But to what extent are there possible things for Suárez in the first place? What does it mean for a thing or nature to be possible? And how do possible things relate to actual things? By answering these questions, the chapter reconstructs Suárez’s metaphysics of modality in general and illuminates his widely debated theory of necessary and eternal truths in particular.

Inspired by the later medieval development in logic, especially theories on the properties of terms, Ockham’s modal logic is an innovative expansion of Aristotelian modal logic. Ockham’s treatment of modal logic is evolved systematically on the ground of the medieval distinction between two readings of modal propositions, that is, the reading in the divided and in the composite sense, which can be compared to the de re and de dicto reading in modern modal logic. The result is a comprehensive theory of propositional modal logic and syllogistics. In addition to Aristotle’s modal term logic, Ockham works out syntactic rules for inferences of modal sentences in the composite sense and offers a framework for propositional modal logic. In this chapter, I outline Ockham’s modal logic by describing the related texts, semantics for modalities, the linguistic and logical structure of modal sentences, their truth conditions, propositional modal logic, and modal syllogistics in Ockham.

This chapter presents Ockham’s theory of demonstration in Summa Logicae III-2, the syllogism that produces scientific knowledge. He relies on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and Grosseteste’s commentary it. Grosseteste, however, founded the necessity of demonstration on necessary relations in the world. For Ockham, the main challenge is to elaborate a theory of science that addresses the singular beings in a contingent world. His theory is characterized by a conception of purely logical necessity, a semiotic conception of cause, and the requirement that subject terms must have reference in order for affirmative propositions to be true. Many propositions about the natural world are not susceptible to demonstration in the strict sense, but Ockham distinguishes different kinds of demonstration. He is not so much trying to limit the field of demonstrable natural knowledge as to relax the meaning of demonstrability so that it includes many dubitable propositions that can be made evident.