This chapter explore Churchill’s contribution to the development of the British welfare state from the moment he entered the Cabinet in 1908 to his retirement as prime minister in 1955. It begins by examining the attitudes that shaped Churchill’s approach to social policy – a strong sense of the electoral salience of welfare, a desire to promote personal responsibility and self-help and a paternalistic concern for the ‘left-out millions’ – and then traces how these views shaped his policy and rhetoric from the Edwardian period onwards. It argues that Churchill played an important role in establishing social insurance and the ‘national minimum’ as defining concepts for the British welfare state, though the meaning of these concepts became more conservative over time – a shift which echoed Churchill’s own journey from ‘new Liberal’ firebrand to stalwart Conservative. Though Churchill’s interest in social questions was sporadic by the time he became prime minister, his focus on consumption and employment chimed with the instincts of many other Britons, and helped to shape the distinctive policy settlement which emerged during the 1940s and 1950s.

The epilogue concludes the book by summarizing the book’s key findings. In particular, it draws out five categories of implications following the book’s examination of coherence. These implications relate to fundamental aspects of international legal practice, including, crucially, to conceptual understandings of law, doctrine, epistemology, professional ethics in investor-state dispute settlement, and future institutional design in investor-state dispute settlement.

Concerns of incoherence surrounding investor-state decisions have been widely discussed by scholars over the past several years and have moreover been overwhelmingly raised by state delegations during the UNCITRAL Working Group III discussions on investor-state dispute settlement reform. In the coda, the discussion is briefly brought back to its beginnings and the topic of investor-state dispute settlement reform. Are there any conclusions in relation to reform that may usefully be drawn from the book’s discussion? The coda argues that states may be required to reframe and recontextualise their understanding of the concept of coherence in light of the book’s overall analysis. In so doing, they may also be required to address coherence from the ‘bottom-up’ rather than the ‘top-down’.

Coherence is a highly valued notion in law and it is especially sought after in investor-state dispute settlement. At the same time, coherence is a largely underexplored concept in international law literature. The introductory chapter serves to set the stage for the book’s investigation. To that end, the chapter outlines: (i) the impetus behind the choice of coherence as a subject for inquiry; (ii) the principal, so-called ‘bottom-up’ perspective from which the subject of coherence is examined in the book; and (iii) the core thesis advanced in relation to the dual, substantive and methodological, nature of coherence and its role in judicial reasoning in investor-state dispute settlement.

Chapter 6 traces the One Child Policy’s lifespan from its introduction in 1979 until its replacement with the Two Child Policy in 2015. I show that the extent to which the One Child Policy was actually enforced and the ways in which it was received differed significantly in Shanghai, Tianjin, and Luoyang. For some couples, particularly those in more economically developed cities like Shanghai and Tianjin, the policy simply affirmed personal convictions that smaller families are more economical and allow children to have better educational opportunities. In smaller cities like Luoyang, however, policy violations were more common as family size – as well as the existence of a male heir – remained more important than the opportunities allocated to those children. This chapter also interrogates the renewed interest in eugenics among parents wishing to “optimize” the qualities of their one and only child, as well as the limited scale and scope of sex education, a trend that exacerbated the reliance on abortion as premarital birth control.

Has decentralization contributed to democratic accountability, civic engagement, transparency, and efforts to combat corruption in the contemporary Arab region? This chapter presents key findings from a two-year study assessing decentralization policies and initiatives in five countries – Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yemen. The chapter discusses several findings of our fieldwork. One is the legacy of colonial experiences which made deconcentration rather than decentralization prevail. Another is the simultaneous promotion and subversion of decentralization, which was not only practiced by governments across the region, but was often subsidized by international assistance. Still another finding discusses how effectiveness of local governments in the region is constrained by opaque regulatory environments and limited human and financial resources at their disposal. Finally, our study also points to instances of success and innovation, against many odds, where capable leadership, engaged civil society, and other factors have paved the way toward palpable improvements in service delivery and urban management. Accordingly, we find that, despite many constraints, decentralization policies in the Arab region may occasionally present significant policy windows that could form opportunities for social, political, and economic changes, if mobilized adequately.

Chapter 6, ‘How to Teach It: Finding the Right Direction’, offers a reappraisal of the foundation of mining academies. Subterranean geometry merges here with broader questions about technical education in the eighteenth century. Early attempts to replace the guild-like training and to establish brick-and-mortar institutions prompt a familiar debate between professors and practitioners. Who could best formalize and improve a century-old corpus? Moreover, what was the right way to teach it? Major mining centres, I argue, offered varied solutions to improve theoretical teaching, of which mining academies were but the ultimate step. I focus here on the biography of Johann Andreas Scheidhauer (1718–1784), mining master and autodidact mathematician. His vast geometrical production – unpublished and long forgotten – looms large in the early projects of mining academies, not least through the influence of his student Johann Friedrich Lempe (1757–1801), emblematic professor of the Bergakademie Freiberg.

Chapter 5, ‘“So Fair a Subterraneous City”: Mapping the Underground’, focuses on map-making and the visualization of the underground. It argues that these developments were deeply linked to broad changes in the political structure of mining regions. Drawing mining maps and working on them became widespread in the second half of the seventeenth century, gradually replacing alternative tools such as written reports of visitations, wood models, or annotated sketches. In Saxony, Captain-general Abraham von Schönberg (1640–1711) put his weight and reputation behind the new cartographic technology, hoping that its acceptance would in turn help him advance his reform agenda. At-scale representations were instrumental in justifying new investments, while offering technical road maps to implement them. Johann Berger (1649–1695) spent years producing a monumental cartographic enterprise, the Freiberga subterranea (1693) to support his patron’s ambitions. As surveyors finally realized the old dream of ‘seeing through stones’, the administrations rapidly seized their skills to reform and police their subterraneous cities.

Equity is a chameleonic word, taking its colour from the context in which it is used. Equity refers to the principles, doctrines and remedies applied by Australian courts exercising the jurisdiction of the English Court of Chancery prior to the enactment of judicature legislation which reformed the structure of the court system in the mid-nineteenth century. Equity, in this sense, is intelligible without having to acquire an understanding of legal history, but the understanding will be deeper if that history is known. This chapter identifies some of the landmarks of that history. The final section summarises some of the more common equitable maxims. The student will occasionally encounter them when reading the cases, and should consider their value in applying equitable doctrine to the circumstances of an individual case.

Chapter 4 dissects the origins, drivers and implementation of the 2013 liberal immigration reform in Morocco, which broke with the restrictive rhetoric and policies that Morocco had pursued since the late 1990s. In particular, I examine state formation legacies in migration control, as well as reform drivers within the state apparatus, civil society and the international sphere to show that Moroccan authorities increasingly devise immigration policies within a three-level game – keeping in mind not only domestic and European but also African policy interests. In this context, I demonstrate that Moroccan immigration policy is primarily driven by the monarchy’s foreign policy and domestic regime legitimation goals and that the 2013 reform has been a central tool in fortifying Morocco’s image as a ‘liberal monarchy’ at home and abroad at a moment of regional political turmoil after the ‘Arab Spring’. I also explain how the inconsistent implementation dynamics that mitigate the reform’s impact on migrants’ everyday lives have not jeopardized but reinforced the king’s power position.

Chapter 2 traces the contours of China’s SOE reform since 1978. We divided the reform into five phases, where the first two phases focused on ensuring the survival of SOEs by granting them operational autonomies, first at the firm level and then at the managerial level. The third phase saw the adoption of corporatisation strategies for the ones deemed promising and privatisation of the ones deemed unviable. The fourth phase covered the first decade after China’s accession to the WTO, where the earlier trajectories continued, as we can see in the efforts to continue the market-oriented reform for SOEs with plans of commercialisation and modernisation. At the same time, a worrying trend also started to emerge when the government launched various campaigns to create national champions. This trend continued in the fifth phase as we entered the new era of ’Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’, where SOEs, strengthened by the previous rounds of reforms, started to squeeze out private firms in various forms. At the same time, the CPC also stepped up its efforts to enhance its influence in the SOEs by launching aggressive drives to build Party cells in these entities.

While there is broad agreement that this country incarcerates too many people, there is a distressing lack of clarity about how to address the problem. At one end of the spectrum are “abolitionists,” who view American criminal law enforcement, like slavery, as an illegitimate institution that can only be abolished, not reformed. Broadly speaking, abolitionists want to get rid of prisons, defund the police, and adopt noncoercive strategies to deal with crime. Or, as Woods Ervin, an organizer with Critical Resistance, a prominent abolitionist organization, explains, “abolition is a political vision with a goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.”1 Abolitionists contrast their approach with that of “reformers.” Reformers view the criminal justice system with more optimism or, at least, as a necessary evil. They seek changes to, not the elimination of, existing law enforcement architecture. Abolitionists think reformers are too timid. Reformers think abolitionists are impractical.

This chapter uses a close reading of The Lancet medical journal, and its radical, charismatic editor Thomas Wakley, to delineate the ‘high-water mark’ of Romantic sensibility as an emotional regime. It explores the ways in which Wakley and The Lancet leveraged the emotional politics of contemporary melodrama to critique the alleged nepotism and corruption of the London surgical elites. More especially, it analyses their campaign to expose instances of surgical incompetence at the city’s leading teaching hospitals, demonstrating the ways in which this strategy weaponised the emotions of anger, pity, and sympathy, and considering its implications for the cultural norms of an inchoate profession and for the ultimate stability of the emotional regime of Romantic sensibility.

Death investigation was a central aspect of forensic medicine. However, doctors struggled with uncertainty in defining and evaluating signs of death, at the same time as popular fears of premature burial abounded. Moreover, they faced considerable difficulties in distinguishing between homicides, suicides, and natural or accidental deaths and in determining the cause of death. Anxiety about insufficiently trained and incompetent practitioners who performed medicolegal duties that exceeded the limits of their knowledge and skills fueled demands for medicolegal reform. As medicolegal expertise played a more and more decisive role in criminal investigations and prosecutions, flawed forensic expertise became an increasingly salient problem that sparked ongoing debates about possible structural solutions.