With innovations in medicine, ethicists are consulted on cases without sufficient clinical knowledge or ethical precedent to call upon. Under pressure from a distraught care team, the ethicist in this case tries to justify a unilateral withdrawal of an advanced form of cardiac life support – VA-ECMO. She shares how her sense of obligation to relieve the team’s moral distress blinded her from appreciating that the patient was not "really, most sincerely dead." In consultation with the hospital’s legal counsel, the ethicist agreed that the patient did not meet strict criteria under the definition of death by circulatory criteria/cardiac death.

The patient’s family, in shock by his rapid decline following a complicated aortic dissection repair, were holding out for a miracle. Because they could see the ECMO machine pumping blood throughout his body, they struggled to believe he would never recover. The ethicist used a different strategy to resolve the conflict: She coached the team to present the medical facts in lay-person’s terms, using a commonly recognized sign of cardiac death, the flat-line. The family then accepted that patient’s native organ was gone. Since he was not a candidate for transplant, they agreed to disconnect the ECMO machine.

The conclusion draws together the themes of the chapters, returning to the analogy between marriage and anthropology as encounters with difference. Weaving together the stories of two protagonists encountered in the Introduction with the themes of ethical imagination and temporality, it draws out the broader significance of the everyday labour of moral imagination in kinship relations, and of marriage as a crucible of long-term social transformation. The discussion reflects on the importance of attending anthropologically to seemingly insignificant, everyday, domestic encounters and judgements, and to their cumulative effects.

Good hypotheses identify observable implications of the theory – things we would observe if the theory were correct – and make predictions about relationships between measurable indicators of the theory’s concepts. Measurement thus plays a critical role in the transition from claims to tests. Six types of hypotheses are common in political science. Probabilistic hypotheses include directional, relative, no-effect, and conditional types; these hypotheses make claims that they expect to be true, on average, across many cases. Deterministic hypotheses, on the other hand, make claims that should always hold; these include claims of necessity and/or sufficiency. Preregistration attempts to reduce the incentives to adjust hypotheses to match findings.

Chapter 5 examines national identity and immigration in the United States, with specific attention to undocumented immigration. Approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants live across the United States. These undocumented immigrants present major challenges for the US government authorities. First is the challenge to the nation’s ability to successfully manage immigration. The second challenge is perhaps of greater psychological importance: the ability to manage American identity. Undocumented immigrants present a major challenge to a nation’s ability to successfully manage immigration to, and the identity of, the country. American identity was founded not from people coming from a common place and bloodlines but for a common purpose. Yet recent studies and public opinion polls have shown these shared ideals (e.g., individualism, hard work, liberty, equality of opportunity, and rule of law) are not so common across the United States. There is polarization and division in beliefs regarding America’s history, present, and future. This chapter concludes with discussion of a recent research study exploring the extent that differences in beliefs regarding American identity relate to differences in beliefs regarding undocumented immigrants.

This chapter examines how international relations (IR) scholarship has approached two central questions concerning international law and legalisation: why do states create international law, and what makes a particular norm ‘legal’ in nature? It then outlines the concept of legalisation as described in Abbott et al.’s well-known article of the same name. Under the classic legalisation framework, legalisation has three components: obligation, precision and delegation. The chapter argues that the classic OPD framework cannot fully capture the expanding role of non-state actors or conceptualise law as a process. It therefore proposes an adapted model for the transnational legal system that incorporates a crucial omitted dimension – implementation. Implementation refers to the concrete actions taken by agents to translate legal or law-like principles into practical, workable instructions for courts, governments, companies, and other non-state actors.

The book’s conclusion draws together the hymns and themes addressed in previous chapters to reflect synthetically on the visions of death and the afterlife that emerge from them, and to examine their affective, social, and theological resonances in conversation with other, roughly contemporaneous traditions, including those attested by Orphic Hymns and by funerary poetry preserved in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. The chapter both presents a concise review of the material covered in earlier sections, and encourages next steps in the study of ritual sources across different communities.

This chapter serves to identify barriers and solutions for PICS clinic formation and success. Systematic identification of patients with PICS risk factors and their stakeholders in care can facilitate education about the pathophysiology of PICS during hospitalization. Early clinic team contact with the patient and their care stakeholders increases clinic recruitment and reduces attrition through clarifying the need and purpose of the clinic. Secondary to the patient’s medical complexity and progression through hospitalization, rehabilitation, and home, there are inherent risks for gaps in care. These gaps can be bridged with an interdisciplinary screening process and transition of care plan.

Abstract: This chapter explores the dynamics of international law within a horizontal legal order, characterised by the absence of a central enforcement mechanism and the layered system of compliance that emerges. It conceptualises international law as a normative framework shaped by interactions rather than hierarchy, examining how states are induced to comply with legal norms despite the lack of centralised coercive sanctions. The chapter develops a five-layer model of compliance control, ranging from voluntary internal compliance to institutionally authorised sanctions, highlighting the interplay between internal state mechanisms, bilateral enforcement, collective responses, and institutional determinations. It examines how a horizontal normative order can operate under realist and rationalist assumptions about state behaviour, while showing that insights from behavioural theory, two-level analysis of state conduct, and constructivism enhance the understanding of state compliance with norms. International law operates by facilitating interaction, shaping expectations, and leveraging decentralised enforcement mechanisms to influence state behaviour.

The CPC presides over a large state-owned economy, which is a key pillar of China’s state capitalist model and a critical source of Party power. The party has adapted its governing strategies of the state-owned sector to maintain its economic dominance without stifling growth and innovation – largely by learning from outside. We highlight the importance of the international system as a source of both policy inputs and pressures to change. We find that in the early phases of China’s marketization process during the 1980s, Chinese policymakers looked to Japan and the World Bank as they restructured state-owned enterprises. In the 1990s, American, European, and Japanese policymakers’ pressure on China to downsize its state sector as a condition of WTO accession was a key consideration in Chinese policymakers’ efforts to build “national champions” capable of competing with foreign multinationals in domestic and international markets. We analyze Chinese leaders’ responses to successive challenges in the state-owned economy, and the resilience of state capitalism which buttresses party rule.