The Statute of Uses enacted radical reform which can still be felt across the common law world. It was from exceptions to the statute’s execution of uses to perform last wills that the modern trust emerged. Our understanding of the passage of the statute has been shaped by the survival of several draft bills and ancillary documents. It has been argued that a draft bill introduced in 1529 was rejected by the Commons in March 1532. This in turn inspired the landmark litigation in Dacre’s Case (1533–35), which paved the way for the subsequent enactment of the Statute of Uses. This chapter challenges that orthodox position by demonstrating that there were in fact three early drafts which were considered. It then considers what this tells us about the role of the crown, parliament and the courts during this pivotal period in our legal history.

Palmyra is usually studied for one of three reasons, either its role in the long-distance trade between Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, its distinctive cultural identity as visible in the epigraphic and material record from the city or its rise as an independent regional power in the Near East in the third quarter of the third century AD. While Palmyra was indeed a special place, with a private sorte, or destiny of its own, as Pliny famously expressed it (HN 5.88), the city’s ability to maintain its distinctiveness arguably rested on deep entanglements with her local and regional surroundings. This chapter addresses how the city engaged with its neighbours and its Roman imperial overlords. Actions, events and policies attested in the epigraphic record from the city and from the Palmyrene diaspora in the Roman Empire are discussed in light of theoretical insights from archaeology, sociology and economics. It is argued that Palmyra’s remarkable success built on the city’s ability to connect with the range of social networks that constituted the Roman Empire.

This chapter critiques private property on four grounds. First, private property pushes resources into the hands of those who have more at the expense of those who have less. This arises because wealthier people are willing to pay more for normal goods so they tend to bid successfully for them, and because their wealth allows them to hold out for a larger share of the gains from trade. Second, private property is, in fact, allocatively inefficient. This is because the use of willingness to pay as an allocational technology means that the allocation of property is partially driven by ability to pay rather than a purchaser’s greater productive efficiency. Private property is also allocatively inefficient due to the monopoly power that it places in the hands of owners. Third, the regressivity of private property creates a powerful propertied class that can come to dominate the political system. Finally, both the regressivity and the inefficiency of private property have become even more stark in the internet era because markets which already have strong network effects and are vulnerable to domination by monopolists exacerbate both features.

In 1974 Geoffrey Chew, building on work by H. C. Robbins Landon, established that Haydn quoted a melody that has come to be known as the ‘night watchman’s song’ on at least seven occasions. Most of these works date from the earlier part of the composer’s career – divertimentos and pieces with baryton, as well as Symphony No. 60, ‘Il Distratto’, of 1774. A canon from the 1790s, ‘Wunsch’, represents a late engagement with the tune, while it is also used in the minuet-finale of the Sonata in C Sharp Minor, one of a set of six sonatas published in 1780. The melody has been found in many sources dispersed over a wide area of central Europe, principally Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia, dating at the least comfortably back into the seventeenth century.

The book’s introduction explains the history of thought experiments in philosophy. It also describes Hans Christian Ørsted’s interactions with Kierkegaard and his influence on Kierkegaard’s concept of Tankeexperiment. The introduction outlines the ways in which thought experiments make thoughts meaningful by providing immediate presentations.

This chapter provides economic explanations of the level of total national health expenditures in the US and of population health outcomes. It helps managers explain the role of wage differences with other countries and the impact of income inequality and racism on spending and outcomes. Wages of healthcare workers are much higher in the US than abroad. The healthcare GDP share has stabilized after growing for many years, but beneficial yet costly new technology still matters for cost and health growth. Metrics of relative health spending are distorted by exchange rate mismeasurement. Evidence on the fraction of total spending that is wasteful is very uncertain because no managerial or policy actions as yet have been proven to reduce waste in ways that do more good than harm. Changes in insurance and pricing policy have the highest promise for improvement.

A prevalent idea in scholarship on Athenian politics of the classical period is the assumption, based on figures like Pericles and Demosthenes, that political leadership depended on the ability to give good advice and communicate well with fellow citizens in the Council and Assembly. Without necessarily challenging this assumption, the present chapter focuses on a mechanism for attaining political leadership that has received less attention: gift-giving to both individual citizens and the entire community. Athenians with political ambitions built networks of followers (clients) through private gifts, but the phenomenon has not been fully appreciated because of the supposition that nothing comparable to the Roman patron/client relationship existed in the Greek polis. This chapter focuses on the case of Demosthenes.

10.1 [675] We have, I believe, given an account of the shadow in the law that is precise, since the enemy of the truth attempted – I do not know how – to persecute us and bizarrely brings the indictment of lawlessness against people who, more than anyone else, have made a firm determination to fulfill those divine laws in a more rational and precise manner than those who are conversant with the bare types alone. But since he takes us to task for absolutely everything we say and do, observe how he plunges us, so to speak, into yet more accusations, and says we stand in opposition even to the holy mystagogues themselves and have given no regard to the apostolic tradition, but instead have turned wherever our whim might carry us – and what’s more, without being taken to task for it! For he again writes as follows:1 [676]

This chapter explores the roles of different generations of lawyers in Estonia’s post-1991 democratic transformation. Focused on young, progressive lawyers familiar with Western legal culture and established leaders educated under the Soviet regime, the study draws on extensive interviews and document analysis to trace how these actors shaped the nation’s transition from Soviet legal structures to a contemporary democratic framework. The findings highlight the critical importance of individual efforts in redefining legal practices, emphasising the dual impact of innovative youth and experienced mentors in driving significant legal and institutional reforms. The study enhances understanding of the dynamics of legal transitions in post-Soviet states, highlighting the essential blend of innovation and experience necessary for successful legal reform.

Cinema as a mirror of postrevolutionary cultural negotiations. After the revolution, Iranian cinema becomes a shared format for national self-representation. Despite censorship and practical constraints, filmmaking developed a coded but locally recognizable language to explore tensions around class, region, gender, history, and politics. Acquiescing to censorship requirement that women actors never unveil, even when represented in private alone or with other women, filmmakers and audiences found themselves undermining the dramatic artifice of the cinematic fourth wall, the convention of invisible, passive dramatic observation taken for granted in modern filmmaking. Instead, audiences became collaborators of cultural meaning, acknowledging cinematic artifice and the possibilities of symbolic representation. Canny directors involved their viewers as conscious partners in a community of interpretation, pushing the limits of cultural critique. These self-reflexive Iranian films provide the most accurate format for reflecting on postrevolutionary national and political developments, making postrevolutionary Iranian cinema a mirror for national subjectivity and society.

A theoretical intervention into the challenge of thinking through the complexities of life, in Iran or elsewhere. Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault offer us a model of thinking as a practice. Each attempted one project in which they were thinking systematically about ongoing events, and offering that thinking as a contribution to public understanding. Arendt traveled to Jerusalem to observe the Adolf Eichmann trial, and her contemporaneous writing was published in The New Yorker magazine. Foucault traveled to Iran to observe the early stages of the revolution, and his contemporaneous writing was published (mostly) in the Corriere della Sera newspaper. These two projects have commonly been regarded as their author’s most controversial and have often been ignored or used to denigrate the writer’s entire theoretical oeuvre. Yet they offer compelling models of thinking as a practice that critically links the self and the world. Rescuing theory from the confines of academic specialization restores it, and us, to the possibility of thinking as a practice of freedom, and freedom as the daily possibility of beginning anew.