Alcohol and other drug use (AOD) use tends to hold a privileged position within legal decision-making (Seear, 2020; Flacks, 2023), and the criminal case of R v Taj (2018) was no exception. The defendant, who was – it was agreed by all parties – experiencing paranoia and psychosis, launched a violent attack on a man he suspected of being a terrorist. Mr Taj had been drinking on eve of the incident, and the night before that, but tests on the day found no trace of alcohol in his bloodstream. He was nevertheless unable to plead self-defence on the basis that he honestly believed there was a risk to life and limb because, successive courts argued, he was already at fault for drinking alcohol, which led to the psychotic thoughts. There were some significant and potentially far-reaching claims in the case, including that intoxication-related behaviour does not require the presence of alcohol in the body, and that psychosis can be caused by alcohol alone. This allowed the court to conclude that Mr Taj was wholly responsible for his actions and so could not claim excuse or mitigation.

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. This chapter 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 briefly examines the finances of international organizations. There has been an exponential increase in the 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 to what extent international organizations and/or their members may be held responsible for such failures and wrongdoings.

The criminal law comprises a state response to wrongdoing on the part of the population, proscribing conduct that lies outside of the normal expected conduct of citizens. As such, the criminal law seeks to regulate socially transgressive or unacceptable (criminal) behaviour.In providing a framework of rules to address these behaviours, the criminal law actually comprises two discrete branches: substantive criminal law and procedural criminal law. This chapter is divided into two main sections. Section 1.2 looks at the nature of the criminal law; its purposes, limits and sources. This part examines a number of important issues, such as the purposes of the criminal law, the legitimate limits on its scope and its sources. Section 1.3 examines the notion of criminal responsibility, looking at who may be held liable for a criminal offence and the principles that underlie the state’s obligations in proving an offence.

This chapter delves into everyday administrative work at the Ministry of Culture, with a specific focus on the Mass Culture Institute, the ancestor of the current General Organisation for Cultural Palaces. Based on the personal papers of Saad Kamel, this chapter provides a brief institutional history of the Institute and the low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats who worked to accomplish its mission of cultivating the rural masses. This mission was influenced by diverging ideas about Arab socialism after the socialist turn of 1961. Thus, this chapter contributes to an intellectual history of Arab socialism, by showing how the Mass Culture Institute enacted a grounded version of ‘the socialism of culture’ (ishtirakiyyat al-thaqāfa). Moreover, the chapter explores the key relationship between responsibility and achievement at the Mass Culture Institute. Low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats are constantly concerned by what falls under their responsibility, which is managed by both avoiding to take responsibility for problems and seeking to take credit for achievements (however small). These everyday achievements embody, on a smaller scale, the postrevolutionary state project.

Takes up another aspect of free will, the challenge of scientific determinism. I argue that Jewish tradition contains surprisingly many thinkers who either deny free will or (more commonly) greatly limit its scope, question its value, or embrace compatibilism (the thesis that free will and determinism are compatible). Some of what these thinkers say can be transferred to the challenge of determinism as it exists today.

This chapter illustrates how a biblical text can bring certain philosophical problems to the fore, especially when attention is paid to its literary techniques. Such techniques are used in midrashic interpretations but have been put to extensive use by contemporary biblical scholars like Robert Alter. The story in Genesis of Joseph and his brothers provides a dramatic rendition of a philosophical problem: the seeming opposition between God’s control of history and human free will. I show how the problem is expressed through the narrative; discuss how a variety of midrashim and biblical exegeses address the problem; and relate the issue at hand to work by analytic philosophers such as Harry Frankfurt, Thomas Flint, and Peter Van Inwagen.

Deals with divine actions: are events in the world caused by divine interventions or by laws of nature? If both, which dominates? While some Jewish thinkers maintain that God is the only cause of anything, and that belief in other causes is a form of paganism or idolatry, others surprisingly endorse some form of naturalism (the idea that events in the world are brought about by natural causes). In the chapter I explore, through Jewish texts reasons that have been used to ground a theistic naturalist position.

The book begins by situating my key phrase ‘making-good-again’ through contrasting the history of the terms Wiedergutmachung and restitution. I give a brief history of understandings of responsibility and introduce my argument regarding material practice. Part two gives a brief overview of the methods used in the book, situating my approach in relation to jurisprudence and current approaches in law, humanities and their intersections.

Remote work in Korea rapidly accelerated mainly with digitalization and covid-19, posing challenging issues for traditional labor law in this country. The practice of long working hours, and the crisis of the country’s low birth rate and aging population demand fundamental changes of working style. With the development of information and communication technology, traditional ways of direct command and supervision by employers seem to be reduced, while the discretion of workers expanded. However, technologies themselves also make possible more detailed direction by employers - even by the contractors of the employers. The character of the employment contract as a mutual contract presupposes fair distribution of obligation and responsibility. Changing situations surrounding working conditions such as remote work may encourage the re-distribution of responsibility. This chapter explores the impact of remote work on the employers’ responsibility from the standpoint of the response by Korean regulation and policies.

The introduction opens the book, it offers its argument in short, situates the work in the existing scholarship, and offers a chapter-by-chapter overview of the book.

Hydraulic improvement aimed to abolish recurrent flooding in wetland commons and generate an environment capable of supporting intensive cultivation. In practice, however, the interventions of Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden and his collaborators created new flooding in unfamiliar patterns and places. As communities were left more exposed to risk and less able to adapt or recover, a fraught hydro-politics rippled out of drainage in Hatfield Level, pivoting on disputes over risk and responsibility. Displacing customary methods of water management, improved hydraulic systems generated institutional as well as environmental disruption. In 1635, a new sewer commission was established to manage Hatfield Level as a hydrological unit defined by improvement. Lacking legitimacy, it struggled to control flow, contain disorderly commoners, or compel cooperation from improving landowners. Wetland communities negotiated new risks by adapting customary practices, launching petitioning campaigns, and high-profile destruction of improved infrastructure during the English civil wars. In this context, water management became highly politicised and precariously balanced.

The book concludes with a chapter which summarises as to consolidate proposals for reorienting the field in practice and research. It calls on readers to rethink and reflect towards accepting responsibility for the failings of dominant approaches. It points in new directions for more reflexive law and torture practice and research.

Popular support for war is widely understood to solidify Britain’s sense of itself in the eighteenth century. This chapter argues that objections to war shape Britain’s identity in the closing decades of the century, as the people are called upon to evaluate the justness of the nation’s acts in war. These acts are understood to be public acts, authored by each and every individual, including those who do not directly wage war. The attention to public responsibility coincides with renewed scrutiny of war’s harms, and the moral urgency of recognising and halting war’s killing animates philosophical essays, sermons, and poems, including works by Jeremy Bentham and Anna Letitia Barbauld. The period’s anti-war arguments foreground concepts of injury and responsibility that anticipate later developments in international law and ongoing discussions in moral philosophy.