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.

The concept of enforced disappearance has undergone a multifaceted normative and jurisprudential evolution which occurs, among other areas, in the legal determination of which rights are violated in each case of enforced disappearance. In addition to the rights that were initially protected, other rights have arisen. The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance has created new rights including the right not to be forcibly disappeared and, the right of the victims of (enforced) disappearance to be searched for. However, neither the Convention as the most modern instrument in this evolving process or the Committee on Enforced Disappearances do not explicitly recognize the violation of economic, social, and cultural rights in cases of disappearances. As the Convention requires the Committee to “cooperate” and “consult” with all the relevant organs, it is crucial to look at the contributions of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the field.

Chapter 2 locates the history of firearms litigation over the past sixty years as a progression through four distinction waves, in the context of the arc of mass tort litigation. The chapter surveys initial gun litigation in the 1960s–1970s based on conventional tort theories sounding in negligence and product defect, noting that virtually all these lawsuits failed. During the 1980s and 1990s, firearms litigation followed the mass tort pattern of attempted aggregation of claims, but courts still did not allow these suits to progress. The second wave of firearms litigation occurred in the early twentieth century, following the 1998 tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. This new litigation model was based on governmental entity lawsuits seeking redress for communities harmed by gun violence. The third wave of gun litigation occurred after Congressional enactment of PLCAA in 2005. Plaintiffs in these PLCAA suits sought relief under PLCAA’s six exceptions. These suits also largely failed to gain traction. And the fourth and current wave of firearms litigation post-2019, after the successful Sandy Hook litigation, is being pursued by state attorneys general under new, targeted consumer protection and public nuisance accountability statutes.

The brief coda reflects on how the model developed in this book can be applied to later premodern societies.

This chapter outlines how the Principle of Multispecies Legality offers solutions to the barriers to legal inclusion facing animals in both criminal and civil law contexts: by enabling animals to take legal action; by ensuring that, in civil suits, harms to animals are taken seriously and benefits are awarded to the animals themselves; and that defences of ‘necessity’ in animal welfare laws only apply when the otherwise harmful action is taken for the ultimate benefit of the animal him- or herself. The chapter then explores four institutional safeguards needed to ensure the PML is effective: that legislation is developed under the principle of anticipatory accommodation; that there is the establishment of independent offices of animal welfare; that there is the establishment of dedicated animal crime units and public prosecutors; and that there is equal access to legal services to ensure that all humans who seek to assist animals in taking legal action can do so, regardless of their financial circumstances. Finally, the chapter considers how we need to learn to recognise more expansive conceptions of (political) communication and learn how to be more receptive to them.

The conclusion summarises the book and reflects on what is at stake in reconceptualising the transformation of European banking as extroverted financialisation. It contemplates recent financial endeavours to ‘improve’ our global financial architecture and finds most somewhat lacking in their ability to introduce a global financial system that serves social rather than financial ends. In fact, missing the implications of EF, some of these endeavours have the potential to worsen, rather than improve, the threats of credit crunches and crises. Alternatively, we might be better off to consider more radical solutions that tackle the very nature of USD debt creation and the financial architecture itself.

The chapter explains the increasing frequency of so-called morality clauses imposed by sponsors in sponsorship agreements with professional tennis players. The aim of these clauses is to restrict players from particular conduct that reflects negatively on the product sponsored. The chapter explains the contractual nature of these clauses and provides an explanation as to how a violation of these restrictions may bring about a right of termination on the part of the sponsor. In the particular tennis context, the chapter explains the impact of social media and the digital world. It goes on to provide examples of morality clauses in tennis endorsement agreements.

In this chapter, a particular form of intercession, namely snatching from the gallows, highlights how the existence of different moral codes could generate tension in society. An insistence on mercy, especially but not exclusively found in ecclesiastical discourse, conflicted with the logic of imperial law, which did foresee the death penalty for certain crimes. In recognition of this moral imperative, we see emperors recalling at the last moment from the scaffold individuals whom they had themselves condemned, whilst the people and especially monks also interrupted executions. The usually lenient way in which emperors dealt with such illegal actions shows how upholding the legal order stood in tension with the virtue that was expected of the emperor.