This chapter surveys current doctrine concerning the scope of Congress’s regulatory, taxing, and spending powers. The Court’s historic pattern of decisions both presents a study in constitutional change and illumines factors that sometimes make change difficult. Prior to the Great Depression and the New Deal, the Court struggled uncertainly to cabin Congress’s powers under Article I. But the Court, seemingly in response to political pressures, substantially abandoned that effort in 1937, when it began to interpret the Commerce Clause as giving Congress vast powers to regulate the national economy and the Taxing and Spending Clause as allowing it to create largesse-dispensing programs that the Founding generation could not have imagined. At least since the 1980s, a strain of conservative scholarship has maintained that the modern, swollen national government finds no justification in the original Constitution and that the Court should enforce the original design. This chapter traces the Court’s limited success in implementing a course correction and identifies the considerations that have given pause to conservative justices. It also describes the Court’s more aggressive efforts to limit congressional power under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, all of which include express authorizations of Congress to “enforce” their substantive guarantees.

This chapter explores one of the key facets of animals’ lack of legal inclusion in the context of civil law: their lack of legal standing. That animals are unable to take legal actions to seek redress for the wrongs done to them is particularly salient given – as the previous chapter demonstrated through the discussion of animal welfare laws – animals’ only other avenue for seeking legal justice is severely limited. This chapter explores the issue of animal standing by comparing various court cases that have involved animal plaintiffs, including the Animal Legal Defense Fund’s case on behalf of Justice the horse, and PETA’s cases on behalf of Naruto the macaque and orcas held captive in a Sea World. These cases have hinged on whether these animals – and indeed, non-human animals in general – can be regarded as having the legal and cognitive capacities that tend to be associated with legal subjecthood. With the courts in these cases finding that animals lack these capacities, the issue of standing exemplifies the broader problem that animals face in the legal system: they are rendered more-or-less invisible to the legal system because they lack the right legal status.

Financial flows and financial structures are fueling climate instability and worsening inequities around the world. A stable future now requires urgent change including transformative financial innovations. Yet the pandemic and recent financial disruptions reveal how financial architecture designed to promote stability in times of crises exacerbates economic inequities and vulnerabilities. Recognizing the division in climate politics among those advocating for stable policies and a smooth transition and those calling for more radical, disruptive politics, this chapter reviews the critical role of financial innovations, including central banks’ monetary policies, in redirecting society toward a more just and stable future. We propose a paradigm shift to reconceptualize stability and politicization in finance and central banking for climate justice. We argue that current depoliticized perspectives on financial stability are worsening climate instability, and that finance, central banks, and their monetary policies are an underappreciated part of climate politics. Transformative climate policy to promote stability requires repoliticizing finance and financial innovations.

California is often seen as a homogeneous entity that uniformly values environmentalism and climate action. This image universalizes the idea of climate change and detaches it from its cultural and political settings. It also obscures how the localization of environmental policy and science within the state involves processes of public contestation and legitimation. This chapter examines the culturally contingent nature of climate policy – the assumptions and worldviews that often create conflict between community understandings of local environmental conditions and the prevailing global regulatory culture of climate change. I argue that through a reoccurring process of conflict and collaboration, a broad range of individuals and organizations is co-constituting what climate change and environmental justice mean. California’s climate change programs are fostered by certain conditions of privilege – a robust economy, racial and ethnic plurality, and progressive statewide leaders. Nonetheless, they offer clear models of how to broaden climate change worldviews and imagine various relationships among the atmosphere, economic and racial disparities, and climate change policy.

This chapter makes a case for a historical materialism in the study of Ulysses. The historical materialism in question is conditioned by Joyce’s work. The historical contexts it considers as most relevant are those indicated by Ulysses itself, not ours nor continental European ones. They are, firstly, Irish and, secondly, British. A Joycean historical materialism seeks to deepen and complicate our knowledge of those contexts in all their myriad detail, and to read Ulysses accordingly. Assuming the historical priority of Irish and British preoccupations, what is it likely Joyce cared about, in any given episode, passage, or detail? The chapter contrasts a historically materialist method with others relying on a more idealist historicism. In line with this case, the chapter moves from concrete detail – a lengthy, highly particularized discussion of ‘Sirens’ – to a more theoretical conclusion whilst seeking to avoid the limitations of an unreflective empiricism.

Limited research has been devoted to investigating assumptions about competition dynamics established through a neoliberal lens. Advocates argue that competition fosters innovation and benefits consumers by incentivizing private enterprises to develop better products or services at competitive prices compared to their rivals. Critics argue that competition exacerbates inequality by disproportionately rewarding high achievers. Rewarding high achievers reflects the meritocratic aspect of competition, which has been widely assumed to be rooted in the individualistic culture of Western countries. Contrary to this assumption, the ideology of meritocratic competition thrived in ancient collectivist Asian countries. Moreover, the assumed linear relationship between individualism, competition, and inequality is contradicted by economic literature, which suggests more individualistic nations display lower income inequality. Despite extensive economic and cultural examination of competition, competition’s political dimensions remain understudied. This interdisciplinary book challenges conventional assumptions about competition, synthesizing evidence across economics, culture, and politics.

This chapter explores three particular circumstances where integrity has been found to be breached in tennis, namely doping, match-fixing and other less serious offenses, such as failure to report or failure to cooperate. The chapter goes on to explain anti-doping jurisprudence in tennis, the nature of proceedings, the relevant burden of proof and the intricacies of “intent” and “fault,” as well as the standard of “no fault or negligence” and “no significant fault or negligence.” The section on anti-corruption examines match-fixing by athletes and third parties, and also by umpires and other officials, as well as the sanctions imposed under relevant rules. These offenses are typically associated with legitimate betting and may involve money laundering and other non-predicate offenses.

Aquinas recognizes a number of wildly different kinds of individual happiness. What fundamentally unifies these various kinds of happiness so that they all count as varieties of happiness to begin with? This chapter gives a novel answer to this question and thereby identifies a new heart of happiness in Aquinas, which the author calls the Enjoying Good Activities Reading. On that reading, in every case, happiness is exclusively constituted by engaging in and enjoying a genuinely good activity. After giving a brief textual case in favor of reading Aquinas this way, the bulk of this chapter explains Aquinas’s understanding of enjoyment and his account of what it takes for an activity to be genuinely good. This makes clearer what this new reading amounts to and reveals something of its philosophical interest.