How do adults form preferences over education policy? Why do Democrats and Republicans disagree about how schools should work and what they should teach? I argue that public opinion follows a “top-down” model, in which rank-and-file voters largely adopt the positions of prominent national leaders in their parties. This causes policy preferences to become polarized. I illustrate these dynamics with four case studies: (1) public opinion toward school reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) debate about Common Core education standards; (3) voting behavior on a 1978 California initiative that sought to ban gay teachers; and (4) voting behavior on a 1998 California initiative that banned bilingual education in that state.

I combine a national dataset on high-profile education culture wars – dealing with school mascots, curriculum, religion, sexuality, and evolution – with information on student achievement on standardized tests to examine how adult political conflicts impact student learning in the classroom. I show that student achievement declines after an outbreak of controversy, an effect that persists for several years and appears driven mostly by controversies involving evolution and race. In addition to a large-N, “difference in differences” analysis, the chapter provides two detailed case studies, over a controversial school mascot in California and a federal court case involving a Pennsylvania’s district policy to teach intelligent design.

As seen in chapter 5, the Court’s expansive construction ofArticle 1 of the First Protocolto include intellectual property rights (IPRs) as a type of ‘possession’ enabled the entrenchment ofsupranational protection of companies intellectual property as a fundamental human right in Europe. Thisexamines how the ECtHR’sconstruction of companies’ IPRs as protected human rights under the Convention,in turn opened the way for a new ‘dynamic’ approach, whereby IPRs stood to be weighed and balanced against other fundamental rights, notably freedom of expression in Article 10 ECHR. The analysis of the Court’s case lawshows that, contrary to the optimistic expectations from IP scholars that human rights that could act as a counterweight to IPRs, the Court’s balancing exerciseresulted in the strengthening of owners’ intellectual property in the balance with Article 10 ECHR.

This book is based on a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust on Intellectual Property and the human rights of corporations in Europe. The aim of the project was to investigate the history and rationale for the paradoxical extension of human rights to companies in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and to analyse the Court’s jurisprudence on protection of companies’ intellectual property in this light. The book investigates the history and rationale for the extension of human rights to’legal persons’ in the First Protocol to the ECHR (A1P1)and how the right to ’enjoyment of possessions’ has been applied by the Court to intellectual property rights (IPRs).To answer these questions, the methodology adopted in this study involves a combination of historical, theoretical, and comparative legal analysis.

Ezra Pound called Ulysses ‘a triumph in form’. In contrast, Holbrook Jackson deplored it as ‘chaos’, referring to ‘the arrangement of the book’ as ‘the greatest affront of all’. T. S. Eliot justified the ‘formlessness’ of Ulysses as a reflection of Joyce’s dissatisfaction with the novel form. Taking such comments as a springboard, this chapter attends to Ulysses’s capacity to produce pronounced effects of both form and formlessness, arguing that its longstanding position at the apex of the modernist canon is connected to this artful duality. Through its extensive intertextuality and practice of a gamut of generic forms, Joyce’s shape-shifting book invites its own critical insertion into ‘the tradition’. Simultaneously, it resists full absorption into any singular critical scheme through its flouting of expectations of stylistic unity and narrative closure. Ulysses achieves that exquisite balancing of pattern and disorder, or novelty and familiarity, that maximizes a work’s chance of being rated as ‘high art’. Yet its recognition as such was also considerably aided by the interpretations formulated by Joyce and his champions in the early days of the book’s reception.