This chapter shifts the focus from the “masses” to “elites” and examines state legislative roll call votes on bills dealing with school curriculum. It compares how states have approached the teaching of reading over time, a policy area once highly polarized (“This is worse than abortion.”) but now moving toward bipartisan consensus, to debates about the teaching of history and race. I argue that legislators, like voters, follow the cues of national partisan leaders, and that media narratives and coverage play a big role in how education issues become nationalized. That suggests that efforts by highly divisive national leaders to engage in “leadership” on education issues (akin to Kernell’s “Going Public” strategy) are likely to backfire and turn half of the country against their ideas. Importantly, polarization of education policies is not a one-way ratchet that is always increasing, as the reading controversy shows.

This chapter starts by arguing that, for Aquinas, common happiness is a fundamental and crucial notion, despite the fact that he very seldom discusses it and it has largely been ignored by commentators. It then sets out Aquinas’s understanding of the nature of common happiness with special attention to two models of common happiness, namely, the community of heaven and true friendship. The chapter then argues for the perhaps unprecedented claim that Aquinas is committed to the idea that common happiness is the true ultimate end of each human being. It thereby establishes the first element of Aquinas’s Holistic Eudaimonism.

Chapter 5 lays out the institutional grounding for global financial markets and their currency, the USD. This provides an answer to an ongoing puzzle on the origins of the 2008 financial crisis. Scholars of the global banking glut hypothesis recognise that European banks were deeply connected to US finance but do not fully account for why this was the case. By contrast, this chapter demonstrates that, despite their global nature, US and Eurodollars are thoroughly grounded in US financial institutions, which has given US banks an additional competitive edge over other banks. The complex institutional infrastructure made US financial markets exceptionally deep and liquid so that US banks could flexibly fund their practices of liability management (LM) in US money markets and arbitrage between Euro- and USD markets. By contrast, European banks’ money markets were ill-equipped for LM while foreign banks faced heavy restrictions to bank in the US until the 1970s. This posed a key constraint to the international practices of the European banks. In response, German banks expanded their offshore funding practices to access more USDs to be able to compete against US banks.

This chapter introduces several examples from the Australian state of New South Wales that highlight the various institutional barriers in the way of legal redress that currently face animals who are subject to cruel treatment. These examples highlight how apparent animal abuse often goes un-investigated and unprosecuted, and how those who seek to help abused or neglected animals may themselves be threatened with legal penalties. The chapter then addresses the question of why, from the perspective of political justice, we should care about this state of affairs and why, therefore, we might be obligated to seek institutional reform on behalf of the other animals that form a part of our multispecies community. We are, finally, introduced to the book’s proposed Principle of Multispecies Legality, which aims to provide a foundation for the legal subjectivity of animals and all those beings and entities that have interests.

In this chapter, I conclude with a new framework for how to think about reforms designed to improve student academic achievement. My proposal focuses on (1) encouraging voters to care more about student outcomes and (2) shifting political power to adults with the most skin in the game in order to (3) try to align the electoral and political incentives of office holders with the interests of students. Specifically, I recommend holding school board elections “on-cycle” (in November of even years), making student achievement growth information more salient to both voters and parents, and increasing high-quality school choice options. Overall, I argue that future reforms should be evaluated based on how they impact student achievement, not how adults feel about them. Drawing on recent research on housing policy, I conclude that more democracy is not always better and that we should be open to reforms that modestly reduce local control if such reforms are likely to help students.

This chapter explains the various mechanisms for the resolution of disputes, chiefly arising out of violations of the rules of the ITF, ATP and WTA. It focuses on ITF mechanisms, starting with internal processes and on-site quasi adjudicatory mechanisms. It then goes on to examine the ITF’s Internal Adjudication Panel, especially its first-instance, appellate and supervisory function, followed by the Independent Tribunal, which is an arbitral body. It proceeds to look at the various types of powers and functions conferred on the Tribunal and the jurisdiction of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) arising out of appeals against the Independent Tribunal. The chapter examines briefly the very narrow ATP and WTA dispute resolution mechanisms and the role of national courts in dealing with contractual tennis disputes.

Chapter 5 explores in detail the largely failed attempts of plaintiffs’ lawyers representing victims of gun violence to sue firearms defendants after Congressional enactment of PLCAA in 2005. The chapter discusses two types of challenges that plaintiffs’ attorneys raised when gun defendants invoked PLCAA as an immunity shield from litigation. The first universe of challenges embraced various constitutional challenges including arguments based on the First, Fifth, Tenth, and Fourteenth Amendments; Article I of the Constitution; the Commerce Clause; separation of powers doctrine; state sovereignty; federalism; and the takings clause. The discussion then turns to an analysis of the plaintiffs’ repeated failures to pursue their firearms litigation by invoking the six PLCAA exceptions from immunity, including challenges based on negligent entrustment, negligence, negligence per se, design defect, failure to warn, breach of implied warranty of merchantability, and products liability. The chapter ends with an analysis of the plaintiffs’ attorneys repeated attempts to invoke PLCAA’s predicate statute exception, finally culminating successfully in the Connecticut Sandy Hook Elementary School firearms litigation.

This chapter opens the collection by challenging the widespread assumptions that postmodernism is over as a literary period, and waning in its value as a critical framework. While we have moved beyond the late-twentieth century ‘peak’ period of postmodernism, its legacy continues to actually quite a notable degree in contemporary British fiction, and postmodernism remains a valuable paradigm to anyone seeking to make sense of prominent currents within twentieth- and twenty-first century British fiction.

The ratification rate of States parties in the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED) ranks as the second lowest among the core UN human rights treaties. Addressing this issue necessitates a systematic approach rather than relying on ambiguous aspirations. Notably, the Asia-Pacific region warrants particular attention due to its relatively low ratification rate, which serves as a focal point of discussion in this chapter. To comprehensively examine the current landscape, this chapter adopts two key perspectives: the motives behind state ratification and the nexus with interpretative challenges concerning the ICPPED. Subsequently, it delves into a spectrum of strategies ranging from basic to nuanced specific approaches, encompassing targeted interventions and persuasive methodologies. Additionally, this chapter explores symptomatic treatments aimed at mitigating enforced disappearances, acknowledging the foreseeable stasis in the expansion of States Parties. Importantly, the broader argument presented in this paper extends beyond the confines of the Asia-Pacific region, underscoring its relevance on a global scale.

Minoritized groups are often portrayed as “hard to reach” by policymakers yet face myriad obstacles in undertaking – and, in particular, shaping – climate action. For many minoritized communities, the pursuit of climate justice is inherently intertwined with achieving other goals, such as economic, gender, and/or social justice. In this chapter, we examine the experiences of climate actors from Muslim communities in the UK, finding that the politicization of climate action may shape the assumptions of policymakers behind the scenes, generating more effective and inclusive policy outputs. However, this strategy faces complex power inequalities, as Muslims face structural inequalities that hinder, or even threaten, involvement. Muslim communities face a higher probability of arrest when participating in political action, alongside worse conditions following such an arrest. Our interviewees tell us that a wider pursuit of societal justice and alternative forms of politicization beyond protests are integral to achieving more representative and effective climate action for Muslim communities.

This chapter tackles Zola’s incongruous experiment in Le Rêve (1888) with an ‘idealist’ style of fiction. Generally understood as a strategic demonstration of the author’s versatility, Le Rêve also responds to a longstanding negotiation with the language of idealism – one rooted, the chapter argues, in Zola’s complex relationship to the century’s most prominent idealist writer, George Sand. The chapter reads Le Rêve as effectuating a return to Sand’s aesthetic, which Zola had assimilated into the troublesome figure of the dream. It tracks the burgeoning imagination of Zola’s heroine via Freud’s ‘Family Romances’, then via Marthe Robert’s Freudian genealogy of the novel, which together reveal the mutual entailments of authorial creativity and childhood fantasy. Zola’s roman d’artiste emerges as another projection of idealist tendencies onto women – most obviously, Sand, but also the artist-heroine of Le Rêve, who is made to embody Sand’s congenital extravagance.

Chapter Six contends that courts should apply a system of weak judicial review to protect individual rights. Most of the rights protected under current constitutional doctrine are included in the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The United States is a party to that treaty. Congress has the power to authorize judicial enforcement of those treaty rights. If Congress enacts such legislation, and courts practice constitutional avoidance in cases where judicial enforcement of treaties provides a substitute for judicial enforcement of the Constitution, the net result would be a system of weak judicial review. The proposed system would enable judicial protection for rights that is substantially equivalent to, and in some cases better than, the current system of strong judicial review. Moreover, with weak review, Congress could override judicial decisions with which it disagrees. The option for legislative override is necessary to restore the power of We the People to exercise control over our government, a core structural feature of the Constitution.

In 2019, the CED adopted the Guiding Principles on the Search for Disappeared Persons (CED/C/7). This chapter describes the reasons that led to the discussion and adopt this document including the role of so called “Urgent Actions” the Committee had received as well as the dialogues held with states. Both showed, in the vast majority of cases, a serious failure of state authorities to comply with their obligation to search, reflected in deficient norms, inadequate institutions, lack of strategy to search and lack of cooperation with the victims. During three years the Committee collected opinions and proposals from victims organizations, NGOs, States, NHRIs, UN bodies, the ICRC and academics. The final document has been widely disseminated and so far translated into three languages beyond the six official UN languages.

The second part of the chapter looks into the impact and influence the Principles have had so far in different countries and with different stakeholders explaining how quickly the Principles were adopted not only by civil society but also by different state institutions, including legislation and court judgments.

Chapter 3 starts the recalibration of financialisation by telling an alternative history of German finance. It zooms in on the struggles over deposits to provide the historical and institutional backdrop to appreciate the key differences and overlaps in US and German financial markets, and to understand those financial developments that set them apart from the 1960s onwards. This chapter examines the development of the Pfandbrief (covered bond) from the eighteenth century onwards to establish that market-based funding practices have a long history in Germany. After the devastation of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), banks and the state (the Prussian prince and its gentry) together sought new ways to boost lending and borrowing with the help of financial securities and collateral. This chapter shows that German housing finance was historically much more market-based than in the US. While the Pfandbrief has been a key financial security promoting long-term lending, it was used predominantly by specialised mortgage and public savings banks. Universal banks only entered the fray in the 1970s when their corporate deposits declined. Chapter 3 shows that German banking was geared towards market-based finance but different to the one that emerged as part of US-led financialisation.