The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the rise of illiberal democracy and authoritarianism globally, granting governments unchecked power. In contrast, Asian jurisdictions like Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore have resisted this trend. This chapter investigates the respective constitutional foundations, jurisprudential developments, and democratic processes in Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore that enabled the varying degrees of resistance against the rise of illiberal and authoritarian governance during the pandemic. For example, in Taiwan and South Korea, democratic competition continued unabated during the pandemic, and rights assertions by affected individuals and human rights groups became stronger. In Singapore, albeit usually seen as an authoritarian constitutional polity, the government proactively sought community engagement and social support for undertaking pandemic measures, which were surprisingly less restrictive and more transparent. Moreover, nongovernmental organizations and courts provided counterbalancing forces, ensuring accountability, civic participation, and due process. These experiences show that tensions between the rule of law, human rights, and crises such as COVID-19 can still be mitigated democratically.

Doing useful research, or wanting to do research, or not having sufficient skills to do research are ongoing concerns for teachers, despite an increasing expectation that teacher research should be part of a teacher’s professional life. Cases in this chapter look at high school teacher-researchers in Vietnam, an MA student choosing a dissertation topic in the UK, and an ethical dilemma experienced by a student teacher while on a teaching practicum in the US.

A framing case study examines North Korea’s nuclear tests. Then the chapter examines how states make international law. The chapter specifically discusses: (1) treaties, including entry into treaties, reservations, interpretation, and exit; (2) customary international law, including state practice, acceptance as law (opinio juris), and conceptual challenges; and (3) other important factors, including general principles, unilateral declarations, and peremptory norms (jus cogens).

The mobility of individuals raises a host of tax and non-tax issues. This chapter explains an underappreciated phenomenon: how the corporate income-allocation rules have developed in recent years in a way that magnifies the impacts of human mobility on the corporate income tax system. For example, activities of a relocated or remote employee might trigger the permanent-establishment threshold, thereby creating a taxable presence for the relevant employing company (and/or other group companies) in the state of relocation. In that event, additional questions would arise about the level of the reward to be assigned to those activities for the purposes of the transfer-pricing and/or profit-attribution rules. This chapter demonstrates how recent controversies about the interpretation of the income-allocation rules in the light of the BEPS changes to the arm’s-length principle and the taxable threshold rules are likely to further fuel corporate income tax difficulties from mobility, and in some cases create entirely novel problems. A prognosis of the likely future outturn relating to these issues concludes the discussion.

Age-Friendly Health Systems include hospitals, clinics, and long-term care facilities that provide state-of-the art care to older adults. They organize care around 5 core principles known as the 5Ms: Mobility, Mentation, Medications, Multicomplexity, and What Matters Most. The 5Ms have not been applied previously to care delivery for older adults with post-intensive care syndrome (PICS); thus, this chapter offers a novel, interprofessional 5Ms approach to evidence-based care delivery for older adults with PICS. The first section provides essential background on interpreting evidence about PICS through the lenses of ageism (bias related to age) and ableism (bias related to disability status). Each of the next five sections explains one of the 5Ms constructs and summarizes relevant evidence related to PICS. The final section summarizes offers a vision linking Age-Friendly Healthcare, Age-Friendly Communities, and Age-Friendly Public Health after critical illness.

Houston Smit argues that Kant’s conception of the faculties possessed by a rational mind makes use of Aristotle’s notion of energeia and proposes an interpretation of the transcendental deduction of the categories built on this idea. On this interpretation, it is a central plank of the deduction to argue that such a mind possesses the capacity to think only if it is the subject of activities that exhibit characteristic features of Aristotelian energeiai. This shows that Kant conceives of the thinking subject as what Smit calls a robustly Aristotelian substance, even while insisting (consistently) that we do not have cognition of ourselves as “thinking things.” However, this point can be fully appreciated, Smit argues, only if one realizes that the deduction relies on a distinction between objective and non-objective uses of the categories

The seventh chapter of Invisible Fatherland examines the transformation of August 11 into “Constitution Day.” Introduced in 1921 in the form of a modest celebration, this annual commemoration of President Ebert’s signing of the Weimar Constitution became a key moment of republican self-representation. The chapter traces the expansion of the festivities during the years of relative stability in the mid-1920s and their culmination on the occasion of the constitution’s tenth anniversary in 1929. Despite its growing prominence, the holiday faced strong opposition from representatives of the far-left and far-right, who rejected the republic’s legitimacy. The chapter explores how this obstruction shaped the government’s efforts to establish an inclusive and forward-looking democratic tradition. In tying together different strands of this book, this chapter demonstrates that the republic pioneered an early form of constitutional patriotism, even before the concept was formally articulated.

Rising to speak in the House of Commons in November 1947, Winston Churchill – by then no longer prime minister but still member of parliament, his party having been defeated in the general election of May 1945 – remarked that “No one pretends that democracy is perfect … Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” Churchill felt especially convinced that it was superior to those varieties of governance that relied upon “a group of super men and super-planners … ‘playing angel’ … and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction.” The following year, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed. While the term democracy is not mentioned, its essence is enshrined in the document, signed by democracies and autocracies alike: “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.”

Robert Schumann was brought up in the household of a publisher. Robert was used to editorial processes such as correcting galley proofs. He worked as editor of musical compositions for the musical supplement to his music journal. And he edited his own compositions for publication. Clara Schumann not only prepared her own works for publication, but also edited works by other composers, not least the complete edition of Robert’s works. This latter, though lacking a critical apparatus, still deserves attention, as does the instructive edition of the piano works with performance indications by Clara. Today Urtext editions are complemented by the ongoing New Complete Edition of Robert Schumann’s works.

Carla Bagnoli takes up a worry about Kant’s version of constitutivism about moral norms, which says that the norms of rationality are too abstract to account for the exercise of rational agency and fail to do justice to the significance that the consequences of action have for moral assessment. Bagnoli argues that: (i) the constitutive norms of practical reason are not meant to provide normative reasons for action by themselves. So, the incompleteness of constitutivism about practical reason is not a bug, but an essential feature of the constitutivist agenda; (ii) the full story about determining rational action includes reference to the consequences, which are importantly comprised in the Kantian account of the agent’s description of the action under assessment; (iii) to explain how this works, it is best to deploy a strategy that deserves to be called Aristotelian – that of placing action in its circumstances.

This chapter focuses on a relatively unknown Jewish/German jurist, Dr Walter Schwarz. Schwarz returned to Berlin in the 1950s and practiced as a restitution lawyer. He was one of only a few Jewish lawyers working in Berlin at this time. Schwarz set up a legal journal, where he also published ‘glosses’ under pseudonyms. Found in a library in Berlin, I translate and analyse a selection of these glosses written by Schwarz. Going beyond the legal representation he could offer to his clients, I contend the writing of the glosses is a different method for Schwarz to take responsibility for the conduct of the restitution program. This chapter sets up the way giving an account of restitution can be an ethos – of writing, but also of conduct, of practice.

More than any other of Emerson’s essays, “Experience” shows us a succession of states, moods, and “regions” of human life. It is not a “carpet” essay in Adorno’s sense, in which a set of themes is woven into a core idea, but a journey essay, which moves from region to region, and portrays life as a set of moods through which we pass. Like a piece of music, “Experience” is in motion. It provides an exemplary case of the essay as Montaigne describes the form: “something which cannot be said at once all in one piece.” Chapter 7 considers whether “Experience" is to be seen as what Cavell calls a “journey of ascent” – as in the journey up and out of the cave in Plato’s Republic; as a version of Plato’s myth of Er; or, with its praise of “the midworld,” as a return to the ordinary as Wittgenstein thinks of it.