The epilogue broaches the wrangling over Zola’s posthumous fortune: principally, the shifting attitudes that were brought about by his heroic support of Dreyfus, and the energetic debates attending his Pantheonisation. At Zola’s funeral, Anatole France famously described the writer as ‘an ardent idealist’, his speech emblematising a wider effort to recast Zola’s literary career in the gilded light of his sacrifice. This epilogue tackles, then, a supposition only alluded to in earlier chapters: that the positing of Zola as an idealist goes hand in hand with his emergence as an exemplary object of idealisation. Reflecting on Zola’s evolution as a writer, it explores the irresistible pull of biographical destiny as something of an ultimate horizon for our reading of his fiction. To account for idealism in Zola is inevitably, or perhaps especially, it is argued, to grapple with the question of teleology that the Dreyfus Affair imposes.

Chapter 8 turns to a consideration of the newly enacted state firearm accountability statutes under consumer protection and public nuisance theories after the passage of the New York and New Jersey firearm industry accountability laws. The chapter canvasses in detail the state firearm statutes enacted between 2021 and 2024 in seven additional states: California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawai’i, Illinois, Maryland, and Washington state. The discussion compares the provisions of these state statutes to the original New York and New Jersey models, focusing on provisions relating to purposes, definitions of industry members, standards of conduct, persons or entities with standing to sue, and available remedies for violations of the laws. The chapter relates, in detail, the challenges by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) to these new state statutes, including arguments based on the First, Fourth, Tenth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, Article I and the Commerce Clause, the dormant Commerce Clause, and void-for-vagueness challenges. The discussion also notes recent Second Amendment challenges to the state statutes based on the Supreme Court’s 2022 in Bruen.

This chapter assesses the extent to which the emergence of Fridays for Future (FFF) resulted in a politicization of climate change and how this affected climate policy and politics in Germany from 2018 to 2022. We show that the politicization resulted in a situation in which the Merkel government decided to gradually phase out coal-fired power plants as the key climate policy decision of the last few years. While this step was triggered by the EU’s announcement in 2017 that it would adopt stricter emissions standards for large combustion plants burning coal and lignite, FFF increased the pressure on the government to act. The politicization of the issue also resulted in changes to climate politics. The positions of mainstream political parties and their candidates have converged in their positions on climate change and the need for climate action. However, this convergence refers to climate policy in abstract terms and not to the specific policy measures supported by the individual parties. While climate change became depoliticized for a while, geopolitical conflicts are expected to repoliticize it and to have an impact on climate politics and policy.

In order to be effective mathematics educators, teachers need more than content knowledge: they need to be able to make mathematics comprehensible and accessible to their students. Teaching Key Concepts in the Australian Mathematics Curriculum Years 7 to 10 ensures that pre-service and practising teachers in Australia have the tools and resources required to teach lower secondary mathematics.

By simplifying the underlying concepts of mathematics, this book equips teachers to design and deliver mathematics lessons at the lower secondary level. The text provides a variety of practical activities and teaching ideas that translate the latest version of the Australian Curriculum into classroom practice. It covers the challenges of middle year mathematics, including the current decline in student numeracy, as well as complex theories which teachers can struggle to explain clearly. Topics include number, algebra, measurement, space, statistics and probability. Whether educators have recently studied more complicated mathematics or are teaching out of field, they are supported to recall ideas and concepts that they may have forgotten – or that may not have been made explicit in their own education.

Authored by experienced classroom educators and academics, this book is a vital resource for pre-service and practising Years 7 to 10 mathematics teachers, regardless of their backgrounds and experiences.

Chapter 1 surveys the landscape of federal and state efforts to effectuate gun control measures. The chapter theme is that in spite of extensive federal and state laws regulating the manufacture, marketing, distribution, sale, and use of firearms, these measures have proven ineffective to stem the tide of gun violence. The chapter reviews the extensive federal and state protection of consumers from defective and harmful products, noting that firearms lobbyists prevented Congress from subjecting the firearms industry to consumer protection regulatory oversight. Instead, the gun industry is subject to the oversight by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The chapter discusses the history of federal gun regulation, discussing the National Firearms Act, the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Records, the Gun Control Act, the Firearm Owners Protection Act, the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, and the Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act. The chapter introduces the firearm industry immunity statute, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA). The chapter concludes with a brief review of the Supreme Court’s recent Second Amendment jurisprudence that has served as a barrier to effective gun control.

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.

This chapter argues that petitions have hitherto been too narrowly studied as bureaucratic acts defined by Roman law and shifts attention to informal petitions, whereby any superior could be petitioned even when they did not have formal power, and to oral petitions, whereby immediate justice was demanded. Petitions then appear as reflecting a culture of entreaty characteristic for a hierarchical society.

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.