This chapter explores the intersection of legal methodology and beer law, drawing parallels between brewing recipes and regulatory frameworks. It posits that beer law is a distinct legal field, akin to IT law, requiring an understanding of technological and market dynamics. The pragmatic method emerges as the most suitable approach for beer law, emphasizing practical applicability over rigid legal interpretations. The chapter highlights the role of institutions in shaping beer culture and law, using Iceland’s prohibition history as a case study. It discusses performance-based regulation as a potential framework for beer law, advocating for flexibility and innovation in legal structures. Additionally, the chapter addresses the teleological aspects of beer law, stressing the importance of purpose in legal interpretation, particularly concerning trademarks and quality assurance. Ultimately, it asserts that the guiding principle of beer law should be the practical availability of beer, advocating for interpretations that support the brewing and distribution capabilities of relevant institutions.

This concluding chapter summarizes the most pertinent insights from health economics that have been developed in the book. In addition, it includes a section on “debunking” in which economic theory and evidence contradict or heavily qualify views commonly held by experts in health management and policy. The pervasiveness of actionable inefficiency, the emphasis on medical spending rather than health benefits, the value of cost-sharing for nonpoor insureds, and the functioning and tax treatment of employment-based health insurance are all considered.

Chapter 4 first outlines the Indonesian case study and summarizes key regulations and actors affecting renewable energy development, and then examines the influence of the regime complex and its impacts on domestic policy adoption and reform in Indonesia in further renewable energy development. This chapter reveals evidence of Indonesia’s adoption of climate mitigation and emissions reduction policy resulting from the clean energy regime complex, specifically social learning, policy diffusion and international pressure on the Indonesian government to reduce emissions in the wake of the COP-13 in Bali.

This book is a much-needed contribution to our understanding of labour exploitation in global value chains (GVCs). It brings together diverse voices that illuminate the invisible realities behind the products we use daily. This is a necessary step towards business grounded in dignity and justice. Only through informed study of lived experiences can we understand the full scope of the problem.

In my experience with children who have survived the worst forms of labour, I have witnessed first-hand the cost of unchecked greed. In the late 1980s, a few years after my colleagues and I began rescue work, we witnessed an alarming rise in the number of child labourers in South Asia's carpet industry, driven by growing demand for cheaper carpets in the West. I proposed a first-of-its-kind consumer campaign, which eventually led to the creation of Rugmark (now GoodWeave), a child-labour-free certification label, and helped reduce child labour in the regional carpet industry by 80 per cent.

This is the impact we can create when every person in the GVC – from board members to buyers – acts with compassion. Compassion is not a weak emotion; it is a powerful force, born from feeling others’ suffering as our own and taking mindful action to end that suffering.

Too often, I have seen the price children pay so the world can live in luxury. I have met mothers who sold everything to buy freedom, and fathers who broke chains with bare hands. Their stories are not peripheral; they are central to the hidden engine that powers global trade.

I have said time and again that businesses cannot sustain without human rights, and human rights cannot be protected without effective business leadership. Many governments have failed to safeguard the rights of the vulnerable, while the influence of businesses has grown. This places a moral responsibility on corporates to lead the way.

Thirty-two years after Debendranath dictated and wrote out Brāhmo Dharma, the reformer, writer, and public intellectual Keshab Chandra Sen (Figure 3.1) created a unique institution titled “Pilgrimages to Saints.” From 1880, and lasting only a few years, this featured historical pageants to great figures in the history of religion, from the Prophet Muhammad, to Caitanya, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other wise men drawn from across time and space. Drawing from the spirit of comparative religion embodied most clearly by Max Müller, this pilgrimages project transcended mere appreciation of texts or ideas. Drawing from the European intellectual traditions he admired, it rather featured a synthesis of a diversity of texts and appreciation for non-textual sources. This approach, defined by him as “subjective” and which “endeavors to convert outward facts and characters into facts of consciousness,”1 included the facts and character traits of Jesus Christ, as well as a host of other individuals in religious history. Included in this line of saints were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, prominent North Americans central to the mid-nineteenth-century history of religion, as analyzed in chapter 2.

Alive from 1838 to 1884, living through the 1857–1858 rebellions, which shook India, the British Empire, and the world, Keshab emerged as a figure who would pioneer new definitions of religion, building upon the comparative religious scholarship of Rammohan and Debendranath.

This volume publishes selected papers from the 25th British Legal History Conference (BLHC), co-hosted by Queen’s University Belfast and the Irish Legal History Society (ILHS) in 2022. In providing this introductory digest of the papers in the volume, the Editors take an essentially chronological approach, reflecting the main theme of the conference. The first five papers address themes from the middle ages down to the seventeenth century, the latter being a period of profound constitutional change in England and Scotland. The next four papers are set in the eighteenth century, a period of profound constitutional change in Ireland. Themes connected to the tumultuous events in Ireland a century ago are the subject of the next section as well as the final paper in the volume concerning a unique archival reconstruction project. A final section contains three papers detailing constitutional change in other parts of the world as well as a plenary lecture by Lady Hale on a profound constitutional change in the United Kingdom in recent times, the ‘bringing home’ of the European Convention on Human Rights.

How can we make up our minds on whether or not international organizations are different from the sum of their parts? Taking a step back from doctrinal analysis, this chapter explores how the challenges that international lawyers have faced in that regard correspond to broader themes in philosophical discourse on ontological reductionism. This chapter suggests that questions of existence are inherently relative in the sense that they only make sense when considered in relation to other entities that are already admitted as non-redundant. Thus, the key to assessing the distinctiveness of international organizations is to first uncover the rationale that international law employs in buttressing their members as ‘real’ entities and then examine whether it can be equally applied to international organizations.