Legal personhood is the status accorded those, like humans, who are recognised as the subjects of the legal system. As such, many argue that we can address animals’ weak legal position by having them recognised as legal persons. This chapter first considers what legal personhood is and highlights how this concept has been heavily influenced by metaphysical accounts of personhood that privilege characteristics associated with the ‘archetypal’ human. Through a discussion of cases involving animal plaintiffs, the chapter shows how a range of different – and, at times, conflicting – conceptions of personhood have influenced the courts’ understanding of legal personhood. In addition to the judicial inconsistency that legal personhood seems to invite, we see evidence of how particular conceptions of personhood have been operationalised to exclude animals (conceptions that also serve to further marginalise vulnerable human groups). This leads the chapter to conclude that legal personhood is not a desirable solution to animals’ lack of legal inclusion. More than this, the chapter argues that a concept like personhood should nor underpin legal subjecthood for any being, human or otherwise.

Through this chapter, I explored life in a competitive arena during socialist mass movements in North Korea. Since liberation from Japanese rule at the end of World War II, North Korea has implemented mass movements to increase labor productivity, known as "Socialist Efforts toward Competition Movements." These movements have permeated various settings, including individuals, workplaces, enterprises, and cooperative farms. The Chollima movement, initiated in December 1956, symbolizes North Korea’s path toward economic development. It has promoted labor competition through mass movements such as "Speed War" and "Learning to Follow Hidden Heroes." Socialist mass movements influenced my daily life, fostering competition in schools and workplaces. Through the lens of my lived experiences, I share stories covering my life journey from North to South Korea, historical backgrounds of North Korea’s competition movements, a comparison analysis before and after the North Korean Famine in the mid-1990s, and characteristics of competition in North Korean society.

The Dubliners stories arose from a chance opportunity when George Russell, a prominent revivalist figure, invited Joyce to make a little money by submitting stories to The Irish Homestead. Russell didn’t want the readers to be disconcerted – but that would precisely be the effect of Joyce’s stories. Eventually published ten years later, having overcome threats of censorship and libel law, the expanded collection made a significant intervention in the Irish Literary Revival, pointing unerringly at some unpleasant truths and establishing Joyce as a noted prose realist who disrupted a movement more associated with poets and dramatists. These stories would later come to be seen also as key documents in the development of modernist fiction, their naturalism tempered by symbolism and a multi-layered interpretative openness that makes them among the most prized of modern short stories.

Chapter Eight responds to the likely objection that the proposals presented earlier in the book are unrealistic. The chapter first addresses theories of constitutional change, focusing on Professor Ackerman’s “movement, party, Presidency” model of constitutional transformation. The rest of the chapter lays out a program for revolutionary change, based on the assumption that the Democratic Party will be the main engine of constitutional transformation. If the Democratic Party decides to launch a constitutional revolution to restore the power of We the People to exercise effective control over our government, it will have to change the composition of the Supreme Court. The chapter analyzes proposals for Supreme Court reform, then discusses constitutional transformation related to the electoral process, and finally considers other potential constitutional changes.

This chapter argues that the resurgence of genre fiction in the contemporary period demonstrates alterations in the status of romance kinds rather than the direct impact of postmodernism. Novels make possible worlds; the actions staged in imagined worlds need not be verisimilar or plausible. Though realism has been the dominant mode of the novel, it is not the only option, especially for writers who have read widely in genre fiction since childhood. Postmodernism is not required to explain why the characteristics of romance narratives persist. Genre fiction’s thrilling plots, strong affects of suspense, curiosity, and wonder, larger-than-life characters, and reliance on supernatural explanations or conspiracy theories, have invigorated contemporary fiction. Postmodernism is best understood as a style whose adoption expresses a writer’s desire to be considered experimental, irreverent, up-to-date, and still “literary.” Emergent patterns of prize-winning novels show the erosion of the distinction between literary and genre fiction.

Chapter 10 addresses the question whether litigation against the firearms industry may ever evolve into a mature mass tort litigation, ultimately leading to an industry-wide settlement modeled on the tobacco settlement. The discussion sets forth signposts that historically have been indicators that certain product cases will evolve from individual litigation to an aggregate mass tort. These signposts include (1) developments or changes in the law, (2) regulatory recall, alert, or notice of a defective product, (3) establishment of a track record of litigation victories and settlements, (4) rise in the interest of the plaintiffs’ bar in pursuing litigation, (5) emergence of a critical mass of similarly situated claimants, (6) docket congestion, (7) judicial reception toward aggregating and managing multiple-claims litigation, (8) discovery of underlying facts and public dissemination of discovery materials, (9) development of underlying science or expert testimony in proof of claims, (10) the interest of states’ attorneys general in pursuing relief on behalf of their citizenry, (11) agile, strategic lawyering in response to changing litigation developments, and (12) the willingness of putative defendants and their insurers to come to the negotiation table.

Little attention has been paid to competitive dynamics from a political perspective, despite numerous instances of political competition across cultures and systems. In liberal democratic societies, political competition is legalized, allowing citizens to elect leaders who represent their ideas. Conversely, in totalitarian societies, citizens lack voting rights, and political authority is not challenged through democratic means. However, political competitions still occur among ruling elites, often through purges to seize power. This chapter explores political competition, particularly in totalitarian regimes, where purges eliminate rivals among ruling elites. The collapse of such regimes has marked an evolution toward freedom and equal opportunities for all individuals, regardless of background, which aligns with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Highlighting the lack of research on political competitions from an evolutionary psychology perspective, this chapter underscores the need for future research on human emotions and competitive behaviors in the political arena.

This chapter outlines the content of the written Constitution and describes the historical context, debates, and compromises from which the Constitution emerged. A central theme involves the emergence of “judicial supremacy” or the dominant role of the Supreme Court in constitutional interpretation. At the time of the Constitution’s ratification, many people believed that each of the branches of the national government would interpret the Constitution for itself. Moreover, the Supreme Court was not initially regarded as a particularly important institution. In order to explain the rise of judicial supremacy, the chapter begins to develop the idea, borrowed from political scientific literature, that the Court’s power exists within and is constrained by politically constructed boundaries that are constituted by the willingness of other institutions and ultimately the American people to accept the Court’s rulings as authoritative. In support of the argument that the Court’s power to interpret the Constitution authoritatively depends on the support of political officials and the American public, not the clear mandate or logical implications of the constitutional text, the chapter debunks the myth that the Supreme Court’s 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison definitively settled the question of the Court’s interpretive authority.

Article 1 of the First Protocol (A1P1) to the ECHR states that every natural and legal person has a right to enjoyment of their possessions. The meaning of the text is anything but straightforward. There is no mention of companies but in common and civil law jurisdictions there is no doubt that companies are ‘legal persons’ (‘personnes morales’). Neither is the term ‘property’ used. Instead, the French version uses the term ‘biens’ whilst the English version uses the word ‘possessions’. Nor does the English text proclaim a right to own property but mentions instead enjoyment of possessions. Yet it is well established in the jurisprudence of the ECtHR that A1P1 protects property rights and that companies have standing to launch claims as victims of violations of their right to property. Why was this not made unambiguously clear by the drafters? And why would a human rights treaty include companies as victims of violations of human rights?The drafting history reveals that the wording of A1P1 was a political compromise,obfuscating the legal reach of protection of A1P1 andits dissonance with the moral foundations of universal human rights.

This chapter maps out the trajectory of British postmodern fiction in three specific phases: a gradual emergence characterised by slowly increasing textual experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s; a second phase notable for a high level of fictional critique of the political and economic order in the 1980s and 1990s; and a third period in the early twenty-first century, by which point both the techniques and ideas associated with postmodern literature had become so commonplace that they could no longer be considered critically oppositional. In identifying these phases, the chapter departs from Fredric Jameson’s famous suggestion that postmodernism embodies the cultural logic of late capitalism and is therefore completely unable to generate any effective criticism of the dominant ideology of global capitalist societies and shows that at its height British postmodern fiction constituted a genuinely critical form of writing with regard to that ideology.