This chapter surveys Supreme Court decisions involving the Second Amendment right “to keep and bear arms.” Nowhere is the current Court’s approach more originalist. Before 2008, the Court had never held that the Second Amendment protects a personal right to possess weapons unrelated to service in what the Amendment’s preamble characterizes as the need of “free states” for “a well-regulated militia.” This chapter describes events leading to the Court’s turnaround and analyzes its decisions since then. In applying other constitutional guarantees, the Court frequently asks whether restrictions are “narrowly tailored” to important or “compelling” governmental interests. By contrast, it insists that the permissibility of modern regulations of firearms depends exclusively on whether analogous restrictions were historically tolerated. In response to difficulties that the lower courts encountered in determining whether challenged regulations had historical analogues, the Court recently explained that precise factual similarity matters less than whether a modern restriction is “consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition.” Applying that test poses formidable challenges. But if the Court’s majority views its prescribed approach to defining Second Amendment rights as successful, it could imaginably extend its exclusive reliance on history and tradition to identify constitutional violations to other areas.

The ideology of Marxism–Leninism seemingly contradicts competition, yet competition was prevalent in former communist countries to foster productivity and economic growth. The Stakhanovite movement, originating in the Soviet Union, incentivized laborers to excel as an economic propaganda tool, while also honoring them as socialist heroes but also penalizing dissent as a political propaganda tool. Competition extended to managers of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) vying for government resources. Consumer competition arose from pervasive shortages, driving black market economies. Underground enterprises, which were protected from competition, resisted economic reform from a planned economic system to a more market-oriented system to maintain their privileged status. Post-World War II, some SOEs adopted market-based approaches, competing domestically and globally. This chapter argues that such forms of competition emerge when humans struggle for survival amid perceived inequalities in the existing system, prompting them to seek opportunities and thrive.

Chapter 4 situates the beginnings of extroverted financialisation at the time when US banks started to dominate the Eurodollar markets from the 1960s onwards. The Euromarkets are an important turning point for financialisation, but their impacts on European finance are rarely examined. During this time, however, German banks had their first contact with new US innovations, which fundamentally links the German post-WWII political economy with global offshore markets, significantly before the 1990s, when many accounts date the impact of financial globalisation. Identifying a gap of international funding for its developing export sector, this chapter shows that the making of the German coordinated market economy was already bound up with global financial markets. Tracing the financial innovations of German banks, this chapter argues that the transformative impact of US finance is not market expansion or regulatory evasion by going offshore per se. Instead, financialisation has posed distinct imperatives in relation to the rise of liability management that induced a qualitative change. Liability management fundamentally differs from the German banks’ original international strategies, which drove the banks' turn to the Eurodollar markets in order to meet the US challenge.

In armed conflicts, when people massively go missing, enforced disappearance is prohibited both by the ICPPED and customary international humanitarian law (IHL). While IHL is the primary regulator in armed conflicts, ICPPED complements and reinforces IHL protection from enforced disappearance including by providing more direct legal basis for the State Parties then customary nature of the matching IHL provisions which are often elusive for national practitioners. Obligation under ICPPED to introduce enforced disappearance as an autonomous and continuous domestic crime should provide potentially strong accountability mechanism given the absence of enforced disappearance from underlying offences considered war crimes and the contextual limitations of enforced disappearance as a crime against humanity and may also help break the silence about the disappeared. Limitation of the ICPPED’s definition of enforced disappearance as state-sponsored crime may be overcome in armed conflicts by the commensurate IHL prohibition which applies to non-state actors too.

Most research on education governance begin with the premise that school boards are the natural default and that locally elected school boards must be defended. This chapter demonstrates why this assumption is wrong. I show that: (1) most voters don’t have school-aged kids and thus lack sufficient “skin in the game” to prioritize academic achievement; (2) voters don’t hold school board members accountable for student learning; and (3) local school board elections are uncompetitive, with nearly 80 percent of the turnover driven by incumbent retirements rather than Election Day defeats. Several case studies, focused on school districts in San Francisco (California) and Easta Ramapo (New York) illustrate why broken elections have negative impacts on education quality. At best, school board elections are extremely low-turnout affairs, in which a small and highly unrepresentative group of adults impose their parochial, self-interested, and often uninformed views on the rest of the community. At its worst, school district governance devolves into an absolute clown show, where performative politics takes precedence over serious policy meant to serve the academic interests of students.

This chapter explores how the postcolonial predicament bequeathed by the British Empire challenges us to rethink conceptions of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘Britishness’. The specifically Anglo-American sense of the close connection between postmodernism and postcolonial studies is established via the identification of ‘grand narrative’ with the ‘civilising mission’, but this equation is problematised through a reading of Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) and a review of the changing history of British imperial ideology. A different approach to the interplay of fictive and historical narrative is identified in Ngugi we Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), a novel that locates characteristic postmodern concerns within the late colonial violence of the Kenyan Emergency. The novel is shown to anticipate a contemporary cultural moment in which postmodernism’s choreography of certainty and uncertainty proves increasingly ill-suited.

Policy stability and politicization are not dichotomous. Rather, both disruption of the carbon lock-in status quo and the generation of policy stability around transformation toward decarbonization are inherently political. The desired relationship between policy stability and politicization changes depending on the structural and institutional conditions in place that reinforce carbon lock-in or catalyze and scale decarbonization. In this chapter, we elaborate on the relationship between stability and politicization and discuss how these dynamics are captured by a phenomenon we call the carbon trap. We conclude with the suggestion that the concept and politics of just transition offer ways to understand and pursue desirable politicized disruption of carbon lock-in and to catalyze stable policies and systems around decarbonization.

This chapter argues that in the Late Antique notion of “the people,” a normative aspect is present: the people is not just a social designation, but also acquires a constitutional sense if a group of individuals puts itself in a relationship of justice with the emperor (or, for that matter, a bishop). Indeed, the notion of emperor and people are coconstitutive: the one cannot exist without the other. This helps us to understand the political role the people played in Late Antique society, in the absence of institutions such as voting assemblies through which it could express itself. Seen through this lens, riots are occasions when it was questioned if the ruler truly was just. If the relationship could not be mended, the people could favor someone else as ruler. Thus, although there were numerous riots in Late Antiquity, they never questioned the social system but only sought to establish a personal interaction that could ensure justice.

This chapter charts how the rise of modern racism came to racialize colonial warfare over the nineteenth century, and touches on the role of imperial anxiety and colonial masculinity in such warfare. The extreme violence that was part of colonial warfare might once have rested on structural circumstances, but constant explanation and justification of such violence through racial categories meant that over time racialized notions came to precede the event, becoming generators of violence themselves. The chapter also offers general observations on the nature of colonial war and colonial armies and on the relationship between knowledge and Western militaries. The main point is that detailed knowledge on colonial warfare was largely absent in formal military education at the time, and that such knowledge was largely gathered through (practical) experience and remained concentrated in relatively small groups of ‘experts’. The chapter closes with a description of the manuals of colonial warfare published between 1829 and 1920 in the Dutch, British and German empires, presenting their general characteristics and a chronology and briefly discussing their use as historical sources.

The chapter explores the regulation of professional tennis as a sub-species of transnational law and as part of the lex sportiva. It goes on to show how this transnational character plays out in disputes arising from regulatory matters and then moves on to ascertain the relationship among the three key tennis actors, namely the ITF, WTA and ATP. The chapter next explores the relationship between professional tennis and domestic law, including governance of the sport globally, as well as the relationship between national tennis federations and the ITF, and the latter’s relationship with the International Olympic Committee. The chapter further delves into the labor status of professional tennis players, as well as the relevance of international law in professional tennis, including the sport’s status in the Olympic Movement, as well as the human rights standard-setting role of transnational tennis entities.

A constructed racial otherness of the enemy distinguished colonial warfare from other modes of fin-de-siècle warfare, while it constituted at the same time a unifying element across different empires. It gave rise to a general culture of permissiveness and the fashioning of an imagined ‘native mind’, two preconditions for a specific body of knowledge on colonial warfare to emerge. This featured specific prescriptions as to what colonial warfare was to do, denoted here as the five ‘basic imperatives’: colonial warfare had to generate a ‘moral effect’ on the opponent, it had to be ‘bold and offensive’, it had to create a ‘lasting peace’ by using heavy force first, it had to ‘punish’ and, increasingly, it had to produce high death tolls (the ‘big bag’). The chapter explains how all these imperatives pushed towards extreme violence and demonstrates how all were present in very similar forms in the British, German and Dutch empires. For each, the origins, development and empire-specific appearance are discussed. With a transimperial corpus of colonial manuals as main source base, it is also shown that there was a further convergence in this body of knowledge around 1900.

This chapter aims to provide conceptual clarity on animals’ current legal status by addressing the long-debated question of whether they can have legal rights. By taking a legal positivist approach to legal rights, I suggest that there are no conceptual barriers to animal legal rights – whether we draw on the interest or the will theory of rights. Furthermore, by considering an example of animal welfare legislation that recognises the ‘intrinsic value’ of animals, we see evidence that certain animals already have legal rights. Nevertheless, even the strongest animal welfare laws are replete with exemptions that protect the interests of human individuals and industries that subject animals to poor levels of welfare or outright cruelty. As such, the legal rights that animals do have are weak. Finally, the chapter addresses three counters to the claim that animals have legal rights: welfare, enforcement, and personhood objections. With none of these objections posing a fatal challenge to animals’ legal rights, we can move on to the next chapter to consider what, precisely, is in the way of animals’ greater legal inclusion if not their rightlessness per se.