This chapter provides a preliminary sketch of the Supreme Court of the current era. It describes the distinctive political environment in which the sitting justices were appointed and in which they function. It highlights the role that a conservative legal organization, the Federalist Society, has played in vetting potential nominees and in ensuring that the sitting justices who were appointed by Republican presidents are reliably conservative in their commitments. The chapter also discusses the rise of originalism as a theory of constitutional interpretation and frames issues about the relationship between originalist methodology and substantively conservative values that will be a focus of attention through the remainder of the book. Finally, it gives introductory, capsule biographies of each of the current justices. As later chapters will elaborate, it is impossible to understand the Court’s dynamics without a grasp of how the individual justices, taken one by one, approach their jobs.

Chapter Three develops the argument in favor of strong judicial review to correct malfunctions in our electoral system. The first section analyzes flaws in our current electoral system, explaining why the market for elective office is not sufficiently competitive. The next section reviews the Warren Court’s decisions in key malapportionment cases: Wesberry v. Sanders and Reynold v. Sims. Those cases provide a helpful model for strong judicial review to correct flaws in our electoral system. The chapter then presents a critique of four election law decisions since 1976 where the Supreme Court has contributed to democratic decay by engaging in antidemocratic judicial review. The final section presents several proposals for new constitutional rules that build on the principles articulated in Wesberry and Reynolds. The proposed rules are designed to enhance competition in the market for elective office and improve the quality of democratic self-government in the United States.

The player explores the history of professional unions in tennis up to the current day. It starts by setting out the dual and shifting roles of tennis player unions, which at all times of its history ranged from a collective action to shared governance. It goes on to ponder what actually is a professional tennis players’ union and lays out a framework for the trade union rights of professional tennis players. Its historical account throws light at initial attempts at player unionization and the pivotal role of player unionization in 1967–75. This led to pro tennis’s labor settlement – business in lieu of bargaining, which in turn culminated in the so-called “Seven Kingdoms” – player voice, rights, pay and conditions in professional tennis, which is the current status. The chapter explores these seven kingdoms and the latest development with the PTPA, which was established in 2020.

This chapter discusses the situation of contemporary disappearances in Mexico and explains how the heterogeneity of perpetrators and victims, especially the involvement of non-state actors in the commission of these crimes, poses conceptual challenges under the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances. It specifically addresses two legal questions: the state’s failure to identify dead bodies as a form of enforced disappearance and impunity as a form of acquiescence. Following this, it presents the Committee on Enforced Disappearance’s 2023 Statement on Non-State Actors and examines how the definition of acquiescence provided by the Committee could impact the categorisation of disappearances in Mexico. It is argued that the Committee’s definition could and should be applied in such a way as to consider a large number of disappearances in Mexico today as enforced disappearances, as well as that a presumption of acquiescence would be appropriate in Mexican context, as it places the burden of proof on the state, thereby potentially overcoming a seemingly arbitrary classification of victims into two categories.

FFramework climate laws have been enacted across a growing range of countries, and are often assumed to provide stability in terms of climate policymaking. This chapter provides a more nuanced assessment. I argue that, while some common design elements of framework climate laws do indeed serve to bring stability to climate policymaking, in many respects framework climate laws depart from the ideal design type envisioned by the literature on time inconsistency, commitment devices, and non-majoritarian institutions. Moreover, framework climate laws can actually serve to make explicit political conflicts and sectoral trade-offs, and can thus serve to politicize even as they depoliticize. Furthermore, by seeking to introduce stability to climate policymaking in the sense of stability in policy design over time, framework climate laws simultaneously and deliberately seek to undermine and challenge stability as status quo. The chapter draws on examples of framework climate laws principally in European countries to illustrate the argument.

This chapter describes the long process of awareness and creation of the International Convention for the Elimination of Enforced Disappearance, the role of non-governmental organisations and the national and international cooperation organisations in that process.

It analyses the role of Condor Operation launched as a multilateral agreement between the national security dictatorships of the Southern Cone and the reaction of civil society and the relatives of the victims who began to seek a way to achieve the recognition of enforced disappearance as an autonomous offence and then the adoption of an International Convention for its punishment.

In this chapter, the testimonies about this process are analysed as well as series of concomitant actions gained momentum, as a result of which, the United Nations (UN) convened a Drafting Group for what ended up being the long-awaited International Convention. Finally, there is a brief analysis of the current state of those NGOs which fought hard for such Convention.

Finally, this chapter consists of research about a historic stage of a generation which is giving way to new people with their new rights, their new fights, and their new utopias.

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.

This chapter discusses how writers in the twenty-first century have responded to the legacies of postmodernism. It details various attempts at configuring a post-postmodernism before offering close analysis of a series of British writers who have entered a critical dialogue with postmodernism through their fiction. The novelists are discussed with respect to three main areas. First, the identification of an ethical turn in selected fiction produced by writers associated with postmodernism whose careers were established in the last quarter of the twentieth century (Amis, Barnes, Byatt, McEwan, Winterson). Second, British writers who emerge after 9/11 who, although they adopt several techniques associated with postmodernism, incorporate a new, tentative idealism and elements of realism in terms of both literary form and philosophical belief (Mitchell, Barker, Ali Smith). Third, it looks at how discourses around postcolonialism and multiculturalism impact with postmodernism in selected fiction (Ali, Levy, Rushdie, Zadie Smith).

Tarai was a landmass running along an east-west axis just to the south of the Himalayan ranges and was a part of Himalayan Kumaun ecology. At the stroke of independence, the colonialists had made plans to clear the Tarai and settle it with Indian soldiers returning from World War II. The task of actual clearing fell on the sovereign Indian government as the pressure to settle refugees piled on top of the plan to settle soldiers. With the nation struggling to meet its food requirements a new vision was born to turn the Tarai into a “granary” for the province. Under these contingencies, the Tarai became a landmass wherein new settlers were encouraged to perfect the art of productive agriculture. The post-colonial developmentalist state set up a model state farm to propagate such practices. To the outside developer and modernizer, Tarai came across as empty though, in fact, it was inhabited by a limited number of hill communities and villages. As Tarai was turned into a farming land with settlers from beyond, a local democratic movement for autonomy erupted in the region that called into question the method of land settlement and transformation.

Chapter 2 challenges three conceptions that dominate political economy accounts of financialisation: (a) that financialisation is best understood as a process of marketisation; (b) that financial systems transform in response to external drivers (i.e., marketisation) as ‘national varieties’ conceptually outside the global economy; and (c) that German finance is best conceptualised as a bank-based system which transformed into a hybrid from the 1990s onwards. Critically analysing the debate about the Americanisation of global finance, this chapter shows that the concept of marketisation captures the expansion of markets but struggles to identify fundamental transformations within markets themselves. As a result, political economy scholars rarely study banks in their own rights and underestimate the power and weaknesses of banks as agents of financialisation. Instead, this chapter introduces the theoretical building blocks of the concept of extroverted financialisation, which frames the analysis of the book. EF has four features that each represent a new imperative in global markets for European banks and that have shaped their responses to the rise of US finance: (a) the rise of liability management; (b) the need for USD; (c) the institutional specificity of US money markets; and (d) the contradictions of contemporary banking.

The introduction explains the nature of the study, its motivation, its basic structure, and its organization. It draws special attention to the way the book offers a novel interpretation of Aquinas’s account of individual happiness that is remarkably interesting philosophically. It also emphasizes the roles of individual happiness, common happiness, and Holistic Eudaimonism in Aquinas’s efforts to produce a unified ethical system in which law, virtue, and grace also have an important place.

This chapter considers how, with animals recognised as a part of nature, legally enshrined ‘rights of nature’ could provide a basis for animals’ legal subjecthood. The chapter centres on the case of Estrellita, an Ecuadorean woolly monkey who was declared to be a subject of rights under Ecuador’s constitutionally enshrined rights of ‘pachamama’ or ‘Mother Earth’. Yet, while Estrellita’s case highlights the potential for rights of nature to serve as a source of animals’ legal subjectivity, the chapter stresses caution. First, several rights-of-nature provisions have arguably co-opted Indigenous ideas, and served to justify continued resource extraction under the guise of living in balance with nature. Second, rights-of-nature provisions maintain the ontological human/all-other-nature divide that exists in current legal systems. Finally, the rights of nature may operate as a kind of ‘eco-coverture’ by encapsulating the interests of individual animals within the sphere of nature’s interests, thereby limiting the potential scope of animals’ legal protection. The chapter concludes that we can do better than grounding animals’ legal subjecthood in the rights of nature.

This chapter follows Joyce’s exilic trajectory out of Dublin to embrace a rejuvenated Europe, from early efforts at modernizing Ireland against the archaizing tendencies of the Irish Revival to a modernist program entailing the choice of Europe against England. Joyce found a model in Italian writers like Vico and Ferrero, who rejected the myth of the purity of a national identity and trusted that a universalized history would bring different groups together, thus heralding today’s Europe, a community of nations in which Dublin is the capital of the only English-speaking country. Such a ‘globalatinized’ Europe ought to be able to critique previous imperialist tendencies and practice hospitality by an openness to minorities in concordance with the linguistic melting pot announced by Finnegans Wake.