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.

This chapter unpacks how the discourse of postmodernism has informed conceptions of Scottish literary fiction since the 1980s. Focusing on the works of Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Janice Galloway, Irvine Welsh, and Suhayl Saadi, it suggests that circumspection is required when reading their novels as endorsements of endless textual layers or celebrations of a seemingly liberating plurality of identities and voices. Whilst some works embrace a postmodern playfulness more unambiguously, many of the oft-cited examples of a putatively Scottish ‘postmodern’ tradition resist and challenge the ideological underpinnings of this new (meta)discourse. It therefore seems necessary to detangle these writers’ use of literary strategies which can be labelled postmodern from their overall commitment to mapping the concrete inequalities and divisions that structure the ‘postmodern’ world in their works. Accordingly, this chapter proposes that these writers employ postmodern techniques to counter postmodernism’s own apolitical implications with a quasi ‘post’-postmodern awareness.

Chapter 7 narrates the story of Brooklyn state Senator Myrie Zellnor and describes how he determined to combat the gun violence crisis in his legislative district and throughout New York state by proposing an innovative firearms public nuisance statute tailored to PLCAA’s predicate statute exception. It indicates Myrie’s additional gun control legislative efforts. The chapter delineates the New York legislative process to enact its first-in-the-country firearms public nuisance statute, and the findings and provisions of that statute. The discussion describes the efforts of the New York state Attorney General Letitia James to enforce the statute to deal with the trafficking of ghost guns in the state. The discussion segues to an analysis of the New Jersey firearms public nuisance statute enacted one year after New York’s statute, and patterned on the New York statute. The chapter discusses in detail the ensuing unsuccessful litigation brought by the National Shooting Sports Foundation challenging the New York and New Jersey statutes on various constitutional grounds, including Commerce Clause and void-for- vagueness arguments.

This chapter argues for a fairly radical rethinking of Aquinas’s account of perfect happiness. In particular, it argues that, according to Aquinas, perfect happiness just is the fruitio of God, understood as a complex activity involving both the vision of God and maximal enjoyment of God. This fits very well with the Enjoying Good Activities Reading laid out in Chapter 2, since perfect happiness so understood clearly involves engaging in and enjoying a genuinely good activity. From there, the chapter explains what makes that perfect happiness so special, in part by comparing that happiness to God’s own happiness. After explaining the relationship between the fruitio of God and other heavenly goods, the chapter closes by showing how Aquinas makes sense of the idea that perfect happiness comes in degrees and how it is that resurrected bodies and other people are supposed to make us happier in heaven.

The Introduction makes the case for privileging idealism in our accounts of Zola’s thought and writing, and, in turn for recovering the fundamental role it plays as a cornerstone of naturalism’s self-image. Exploring naturalism’s relationship to its chief antagonist can open up new perspectives on two thorny critical questions. First, how to grapple with the gap between naturalist theory, in all its dogmatism, and the experimental, even contradictory, nature of naturalist writing in practice. Second, how to make sense of Zola’s own eventual destination as the author of utopian novels (1899-1902), where the rhetoric of idealism, of the dream, surfaces as the best expression of the writer’s political commitment. Against prevailing accounts of Zola’s ‘late’ fiction as a product of subterranean, emotional, or instinctual impulses, the Introduction reframes Zola’s idealism as a strategic political and intellectual project.

As shown in Chapter 2, those in favour of including property rights in the ECHR argued that a home and minimum of personal belongings are required to facilitate development of the human personality. In ordinary language, ‘possessions’ include home and personal belongings such as furniture and clothes. This chapter shows that, by contrast, the term ‘possessions’ in law has a much wider technical meaning. Like fictitious ‘legal persons’ , ‘intangible possessions’ were legal fictions in civil and common law systems in Europe to accommodate shares, debts, securities and intellectual property as fictitious commodities. The analysis reveals the profound disconnect between the wide meaning and legal reach of the terms ‘possessions’/’biens’ in A1P1 and the moral discourse which prompted the inclusion of property rights in the ECHR.The obfuscation between the ordinary and technical legal meaning of ‘possessions’, combined with the assignment of human rights to legal persons in A1P1, completed a virtuous fictitious legal circle, facilitating transnational, protection of companies’ intangible assets, profits and intellectual property by a supranational human rights court in Europe.