Chapter 5 dwells on the legal reasoning that governed New Zealand military disablement pensions. It charts how test veterans experienced law as an arbitrary logic, one that remained simultaneously open and closed to them. Law, many felt, was a force capable of dividing their community according to the vicissitudes of luck. This chapter also engages with the labour of Pension Appeal Board members who tried to fit veteran accounts of injury within legislative notions of reasonable evidence and plausible causation. Sitting face to face in appeal board meetings, veterans and those adjudicating their claims attempted to embody the state’s legal and moral responsibilities to offer benevolent and exceptional military entitlements to veterans. Test veterans reveal how thresholds of proof and exposure become negotiable and unstable objects of law and medicine that shift dynamically throughout the proof-making process. As this chapter shows, flexible and informal proof-making systems that aim to overcome unfair evidentiary burdens of exposure can, for claimants, ultimately reinscribe a sense of injustice and harm due to their seemingly arbitrary, opaque, and inconsistent judgements.

This chapter introduces neural networks as flexible function approximators built by composing layers of simple processing units. A network with no hidden layers performs linear regression if its output layer is linear and logistic regression if its output layer uses softmax. Hidden layers increase expressivity: a network with one hidden layer and ReLU activations can approximate any continuous function on a closed and bounded input domain, though complex functions may require many units. Deep networks, with multiple hidden layers, are more efficient and scalable than shallow ones, especially for learning hierarchical structure. Neural networks are trained using gradient-based optimisation, with gradients computed via backpropagation. Training adjusts weights to minimise a loss function, using small batches of data. Techniques like early stopping and small batches act as implicit regularisers, while weight decay provides explicit regularisation. Convolutional neural networks use convolution and pooling layers to exploit spatial structure in image data. More broadly, architectural choices often reflect domain-specific assumptions.

This chapter introduces directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) as a way to represent multivariate probability distributions. DAGs help clarify the structure of probabilistic models and the dependencies among their variables and serve as a central tool in later chapters. Every DAG corresponds to a specific factorisation of a joint mass or density function into a product of conditional distributions. While a DAG encodes how the distribution breaks down into conditionals, it does not fully determine the distribution itself. Instead, it implies certain dependency constraints among variables. These constraints can be examined using the concept of d-separation, which allows us to infer conditional independence relationships directly from the graph.

This first substantive chapter introduces readers to Truth Commissions as an institution and their relationship with international law; the core problem examined in the book, and the overall argument; the main debates in scholarship and practice, which frame the book’s intervention; and the book’s methodological approach and contribution. The chapter begins with an overview of Truth Commissions, their contemporary role, and historical transformation. The discussion focuses on how the jurisprudential tradition of ‘jurisdictional thought’ offers a way of examining how Truth Commissions have ‘authorized’ their accounts of violent events as the truth by drawing on different dimensions of international law. The chapter explains how the book approaches the analysis of Truth Commissions through the study of their representations of truth and authority. This involves setting out the book’s theoretical orientation, which includes the jurisprudence of jurisdictional thought, law and humanities scholarship, and the theory and history of international law; and explaining the importance of the author’s in-country visits and archival research.

To investigate the micro-level interdependence between technological advancements and institutional diversity in IPR within business corporations, this chapter integrates the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework with the Institutional Complementarities (IC) approach. The former recognizes the importance of informal rules and community characteristics in knowledge governance, while the latter reveals inefficiencies arising from the interdependent nature of knowledge ownership and creation. The combined GKC–IC framework reveals the interplay between the characteristics of knowledge as a shared resource and the formal and informal rules governing its production. This offers insights into how corporations can be understood as knowledge commons within today’s environment that is increasingly shaped by the extensive use of IPR in governing knowledge assets. The chapter shows that the interdependence dynamics between IPR and technology excludes knowledge workers from accessing and utilizing the knowledge they produce, leading to the gradual deterioration of their skills and expertise. This vicious cycle further erodes the institutional diversity of corporate knowledge governance in favour of IPR-based governance mechanisms.

The Conclusion examines the publication, reviewing, and prizing of poetry in the last decade. What are the institutional mechanisms through which poets of color have increasingly been shortlisted for, won, and served as judges for the Forward Prizes and the T. S. Eliot Prize, especially since 2015? Looking to Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant, the Conclusion spotlights how a critically acclaimed and award-winning collection anticipates, questions, and challenges its own racial tokenization in the awards circuit. In the process, however, Allen-Paisant self-fashions Othello through the writings of Aimé Césaire, thereby inventing a radical racial politics premised in impenetrability and bewilderment as his strategy for animating ways of being with difference in struggle and community.

Building on the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework, this chapter examines how processes of knowledge production, transmission, and utilization give rise to various collective action problems and how firms address these problems. Drawing on stakeholder theory in management studies, the chapter distinguishes three governance models – the hub-and-spoke model, the lead role governance model, and the shared governance model – each offering different solutions to these challenges. A case study of the famous Czech firm Bat’a Enterprises in the early twentieth century demonstrates the practical application of the lead role governance model, which grants employees high autonomy while maintaining management’s central role in strategic decisions. Through profit-sharing schemes, decentralized workshops, and internal education, Bat’a effectively aligned individual incentives with the firm’s goals, mitigating collective action problems and fostering innovation. By analyzing Bat’a’s success, this chapter contributes to the understanding of knowledge governance in firms and underscores the connections with the GKC framework and Ostrom’s design principles.

The development of commerce and integrated market exchange is perhaps one of the most dramatic factors determining the nature and evolution of human economies. Among other things, these developments become closely linked to urban communities and other central places as points to assemble and distribute labor and goods. These places, when they developed as part of the broader process of commercialization, were transformative, increasing the ease of day-by-day interactions, specialization, and freedom of movement.

If we take commons to be a kind of institutional arrangement enabling community governance of shared resources, the challenge involved in taking the corporation-as-commons idea forward is to specify what we mean by corporation in this context. We also need to determine who shares the corporation and identify the rules and practices that enable its provision, production, and reproduction in relevant action arenas. This chapter is an attempt to chart this course. Drawing on insights from the literature on the firm, it argues that the firm’s most critical resource is its "corporate mask," a special kind of institutional resource provided by the legal system that enables the firm’s members to operate as a singular actor in the legal and commercial spheres. But the corporate mask is not merely a legal construct – the social recognition of the firm as a corporate actor, a reliable business partner, a reputable producer of goods or services, and so on matter a great deal as well. The corporate mask is a legal and epistemic focal point shared by insiders and third parties with whom the firm contracts and more generally interacts in a network of adjacent action situations.