Chapter 6 traverses a test veteran group action against the British Ministry of Defence as it moved through the High Court of England and Wales, the Court of Appeal, to a final ruling in the UK Supreme Court. According to the legal principle of limitation, test veterans needed to offer the courts life histories proving ignorance of nuclear risk. The MoD’s legal counsel argued that an individual’s obligations to anticipate and understand injury were unrelated to the pragmatic enactment of such knowledge. In witness stands, test veterans recontextualized their knowledge of injury in ways that animated state, medical, and legal actors as powerfully capable of stymying their knowledge. In this case, claimants experience a series of unjust legal reversals and ironies. First, the actions and duties of claimants, not those accused of injuring them, became the subject of moral and legal judgement. Second, claimants’ long-running quests for knowledge about their health became the very legal rationale to deny them justice. And third, such legal processes imposed strict time limits on claimants’ actions, while also making claimants wait as appeals stretched over years.

Chapter 5 dwells on the legal reasoning that governed New Zealand military disablement pensions. It charts how test veterans experienced law as an arbitrary logic, one that remained simultaneously open and closed to them. Law, many felt, was a force capable of dividing their community according to the vicissitudes of luck. This chapter also engages with the labour of Pension Appeal Board members who tried to fit veteran accounts of injury within legislative notions of reasonable evidence and plausible causation. Sitting face to face in appeal board meetings, veterans and those adjudicating their claims attempted to embody the state’s legal and moral responsibilities to offer benevolent and exceptional military entitlements to veterans. Test veterans reveal how thresholds of proof and exposure become negotiable and unstable objects of law and medicine that shift dynamically throughout the proof-making process. As this chapter shows, flexible and informal proof-making systems that aim to overcome unfair evidentiary burdens of exposure can, for claimants, ultimately reinscribe a sense of injustice and harm due to their seemingly arbitrary, opaque, and inconsistent judgements.

This chapter introduces neural networks as flexible function approximators built by composing layers of simple processing units. A network with no hidden layers performs linear regression if its output layer is linear and logistic regression if its output layer uses softmax. Hidden layers increase expressivity: a network with one hidden layer and ReLU activations can approximate any continuous function on a closed and bounded input domain, though complex functions may require many units. Deep networks, with multiple hidden layers, are more efficient and scalable than shallow ones, especially for learning hierarchical structure. Neural networks are trained using gradient-based optimisation, with gradients computed via backpropagation. Training adjusts weights to minimise a loss function, using small batches of data. Techniques like early stopping and small batches act as implicit regularisers, while weight decay provides explicit regularisation. Convolutional neural networks use convolution and pooling layers to exploit spatial structure in image data. More broadly, architectural choices often reflect domain-specific assumptions.

This chapter introduces directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) as a way to represent multivariate probability distributions. DAGs help clarify the structure of probabilistic models and the dependencies among their variables and serve as a central tool in later chapters. Every DAG corresponds to a specific factorisation of a joint mass or density function into a product of conditional distributions. While a DAG encodes how the distribution breaks down into conditionals, it does not fully determine the distribution itself. Instead, it implies certain dependency constraints among variables. These constraints can be examined using the concept of d-separation, which allows us to infer conditional independence relationships directly from the graph.

This first substantive chapter introduces readers to Truth Commissions as an institution and their relationship with international law; the core problem examined in the book, and the overall argument; the main debates in scholarship and practice, which frame the book’s intervention; and the book’s methodological approach and contribution. The chapter begins with an overview of Truth Commissions, their contemporary role, and historical transformation. The discussion focuses on how the jurisprudential tradition of ‘jurisdictional thought’ offers a way of examining how Truth Commissions have ‘authorized’ their accounts of violent events as the truth by drawing on different dimensions of international law. The chapter explains how the book approaches the analysis of Truth Commissions through the study of their representations of truth and authority. This involves setting out the book’s theoretical orientation, which includes the jurisprudence of jurisdictional thought, law and humanities scholarship, and the theory and history of international law; and explaining the importance of the author’s in-country visits and archival research.

To investigate the micro-level interdependence between technological advancements and institutional diversity in IPR within business corporations, this chapter integrates the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework with the Institutional Complementarities (IC) approach. The former recognizes the importance of informal rules and community characteristics in knowledge governance, while the latter reveals inefficiencies arising from the interdependent nature of knowledge ownership and creation. The combined GKC–IC framework reveals the interplay between the characteristics of knowledge as a shared resource and the formal and informal rules governing its production. This offers insights into how corporations can be understood as knowledge commons within today’s environment that is increasingly shaped by the extensive use of IPR in governing knowledge assets. The chapter shows that the interdependence dynamics between IPR and technology excludes knowledge workers from accessing and utilizing the knowledge they produce, leading to the gradual deterioration of their skills and expertise. This vicious cycle further erodes the institutional diversity of corporate knowledge governance in favour of IPR-based governance mechanisms.