The first chapter examines the Subura’s early urbanization from the Iron Age through the Middle Republic. It shows a mixed occupation of plebeians and patricians from the start. Most importantly, it emphasizes the creation of a sacred landscape composed of multiple shrines dedicated to female deities throughout the valley. Each one evoked the city’s mythological origins to highlight the important role that women played in constructing and uniting Rome’s contemporary social fabric.

Nearly thirty sculpted and painted images decorate Vasari’s high altar for the Pieve. The subjects of some of its paintings relate to saints whose relics were kept in its crypt, whereas that of others was tied to the dedication of the Pieve and local devotions, as well as to the Eucharist that was stored in its sacrament tabernacle. Still others depicted name saints and portraits of Vasari and his family members. This chapter comprises the first systematic analysis of each of the Pieve altar’s images and how they relate to each other, as well as to the altar’s multiple functions and some of Vasari’s other sacred works. It demonstrates the care that went into the conception and execution of Vasari’s high chapel and funerary monument and sets the stage for its contextualization with the other altars and paintings he made for the Pieve, as well as its afterlife as Vasari’s place of burial.

This chapter discusses the importance of the audience in research on forensic performance. “Forensic performance” is taken here to include the dramaturgical techniques that inform Erving Goffman’s account of “the presentation of self in everyday life,” extending not only to ways of affirming one’s own position but also to ways of portraying the various figures or propositions in a legal dispute. These practices include the use of speech, gesture, and ritual to convey arguments, embody or criticize legal authority, and impersonate a party, witness, or any other participant in an actual or imagined scenario. The audience includes those in the courtroom and imagined observers in the larger public. The chapter begins by examining criticisms of forensic performance in the early modern period and then turns to the use of cross-examination in the nineteenth century. Finally, the discussion considers judges’ behavior, particularly when they encourage the audience to laugh in response to their questions. By doing so, judges merge the role of an impartial interlocutor attending to policy questions and the role of an individual to whom the law might apply.

This chapter explores the degree to which Vasari designed his Pieve altars to integrate, alter, or reproduce the liturgical and artistic precedents in the Romanesque church. It evinces a surprising level of stylistic, iconographical, and functional harmony between them and other works in the Pieve—an early sixteenth-century Madonna of Mercy altarpiece in particular. The conception and creation of Vasari’s altars for the Pieve was nowhere near as carefully orchestrated as it was for his better known Medici-sponsored church renovations in Florence, but this chapter shows that his gradual transformation of the Pieve’s interior constituted an important precedent and counterpart to those better-known Florentine projects.

The second chapter focuses on the residential boom in and around the Subura and the building campaigns of Augustus, which betray the emperor’s consternation with the bustling commercial and residential district. A reputation for prostitution began to emerge, so close to the monumental center, and this is considered in the context of Augustus’ building program in the neighborhood, namely the Basilica Aemilia and the Porticus Liviae, which together bookended the lower Subura valley.

Introduction

The growing relevance of global administrative structures within transnational law is not an immediate space in which one would seek climate justice. The constraints of these structures have, in the past, prevented states from being able to achieve environmentally motivated regulatory changes. There are significant examples of corporate actors using investment treaties to protect their interests in the face of states’ environmentally focused law-making. However, there is a growing awareness of the environment in both treaty language and arbitral decisions in international investment law. An opening may be emerging for climate justice to extend into these global regulatory frameworks and even be elevated by the systems that had once constrained it. This chapter attempts to identify these openings.

Climate action, in its limited (albeit growing) possibilities within existing legal frameworks, is typically manifested by private actors bringing claims based on global, regional, or local climate concerns to courts. Despite the decidedly global nature of the issue, the litigation options are more common at the local and regional levels because of the laws available and jurisdictional limitations. Climate justice is often realized in domestic courts, applying local laws but often framed around broader international commitments. Many of these claims brought in the past years involve transnational litigants or issues, attempting to expose states’ or companies’ failures to implement environmentally sound policies (see infra chapter 12, Julia Stefanello Pires, ‘Leading Climate Cases Against Corporate Actors: Understanding Business Accountability for Human Rights Impacts Related to Climate Change’; for example, Milieudefensie et al. v Royal Dutch Shell plc., C/09/571932 / HA ZA 19-379, 26 May 2021; Urgenda Foundation v State of the Netherlands, HA ZA C/09/00456689, 13 January 2020).