Does the applicable law have an impact on the legal effects of contract terms? Is there a convergence between the common law and the civil law? To what extent does the principle of good faith influence the effects of a contract? Does arbitration ensure a uniform interpretation of contracts?

The author explores how consent functions as commitment, content, and constitution for international agreements. He argues that consent constructs all forms of international commitment. Consent elucidates an agreement’s contents – what the agreement ‘is’ in terms of scope and substance. Consent can also function as a constitution – delimiting not only ‘primary’ rules encapsulated by an agreement’s existence and contents, but ‘secondary rules’ determining who can make agreements, how they must do so, and ways to recognize, adjust, and end them. For all these functions, consent remains an under-examined and undifferentiated concept. Today, almost any of consent’s functions can be established by almost any formal or informal means. Alongside existing proposals (presumptions/defaults and content-based criteria), this chapter proposes that international law should pursue more – and different – formalities for consent. Having different forms of consent follow its different functions may, according to the author, improve the efficacy of consent and with it the efficacy of international agreements overall.

Chapter 4 addresses some of the issues that have arisen in connection with the ‘authorisation method’ that was set out in Chapter 3. It first examines some of the initial ways the Council has attempted to obtain a balance between multilaterialsm and unilateralism in the design and implementation of its resolutions which have authorised ‘all necessary means’. One issue that has not been resolved, and is apparent in many sections of this chapter, is the authority to interpret resolutions of the Security Council. In this respect, the chapter addresses the possibility of ‘reviving’ past authorisations, something that has thus far been restricted to the use of force in Iraq betweem 1991 and 2003. The chapter then examines the issue of determining the breadth and scope of an authorisation and the issues of ‘implied’ authorisation, in particular in attempts to enforce what might be perceived as the ‘collective will’ of the Council, as well as the Council providing what might be seen as retrospective or ex post facto authorisation or approval for military action. Finally, it addresses the issue of the forcible implementation of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ concept by the Council.

This chapter discusses the basics of the law of treaties: what they are, how they are concluded, what efefcts they generate, and how they are to be terminated. It is built around the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties

This article analyzes women’s access to divine dreams in the Jewish texts of the Greco-Roman era: the Jubilees, the Liber antiquitatum biblicarum, the Jewish War, Jewish Antiquities, and Against Apion. By evaluating women’s dreams in light of anthropological understanding of divine dreams, that is, dreams that somehow claim to have a divine origin, this chapter aims to offer a new model for understanding women’s dreams in ancient Jewish texts. It is argued that while the preserved literature includes only a few dreams experienced by women, these examples nonetheless provide essential evidence of women being recipients of divine information in ancient Jewish texts.

This chapter traces judicial decision making under the Human Rights Act 1998, examining how courts approach their tasks of interpreting legislation compatibly with rights, on the one hand, or, if that is not possible, making a declaration of incompatibility instead. Though the declaration of incompatibility is not legally binding on the Government and Parliament, this chapter uncovers ’the hidden strengths of weak-form review’, highlighting the multiple ways in which declarations of incompatibility tie the hands of the political branches of government. It concludes that declarations of incompatibility are not aptly portrayed as opening gambits in a constitutional conversation, as dialogue scholars would lead us to believe. Instead, they are authoritative decisions in a collaborative constitutional scheme, where judicial determinations of the higher courts that legislation violates rights are entitled to constitutional comity and respect. It concludes by noting the current trend towards ’autochthonous constitutionalism’ under the common law, in preference to litigation under the HRA.

The Introduction begins by outlining the generative tension of the early modern public sphere: debate and defamation, free speech and false news, went hand in hand. Libels were often vicious and violent. Yet they were also essential to England’s emerging media ecosystem. Drawing from public sphere theory, the first main section conceptualizes the viral circulation of libels across speech, manuscript, print, and performance; and it makes the case that theater – urban and provincial, amateur and professional alike – was central to their multimedia careers. The next section follows the intertwined semantic, cultural, and legal histories of libel from the 1550s to the early 1600s. In the process, it identifies a clear and enduring paradigm of libel: as anonymous, extralegal accusation. The third section returns to theater history, tracing the same logic to the core of efforts to regulate the stage. After surveying the relevant scholarship on dramatic censorship, it pins the theater’s proximity to libeling on the vexed question of audience interpretation. The Introduction finally locates the late Elizabethan scenes of libel in the context of the anxious years of the long 1590s (1588–1603).

Freud is not the first to have admitted the existence of unconscious psychic processes. Since the discovery of the reflex function of the spinal cord, many researchers had speculated that this reflex action also extended to the higher areas of the nervous system. For these psychophysiologists, reflex action is the very foundation of psychic activity, and consciousness (the ego) emerges from a background of unconscious automatisms that it inhibits, delays, and represses. Freud inherited this notion from Charcot who postulated that hysteria and hypnosis were a regression to this “unconscious cerebration” caused by a “traumatic shock.” This was the starting point of Freud’s initial theorization of the “psychical apparatus” as well of his first attempts at a therapy of the neuroses: psychical activity is governed by unconscious “primary processes” that tend towards an immediate “discharge” but are slowed down by the “secondary processes” of the conscious ego; the psychotherapy of the neuroses aims at bringing the unconscious part of the mind under the control of the conscious by lifting the pathogenic repression that caused the “dissociation” of the traumatic memory.

This chapter responds to leading arguments about contract remedies, including the theory of efficient breach, contract interpretation, rules of disclosure (or permitting nondisclosure), consideration, and other topics in contract law. It shows how little progress the law-and-economics movement has made in understanding most areas of contract law, despite the obvious connections between contracts and economics.

This chapter aims to identify and analyze Western influences – French, German and English – that played into the conception of contractual consent emanating from the PRC CC provisions on contracts. Looking to the Chinese treatment of contract formation, contract interpretation, mistake as to present or future facts, good faith and abuse of rights, contractual fairness in the context of standard form contracts and some aspects of contract remedies, it is determined that the Chinese code provisions on contract on the whole clearly motion to a continental (French/German) rather than English model, the only exception perhaps being with respect to the duty to inform, which the Chinese code refrains from explicitly endorsing. As between French and German influences, moreover, the PRC CC seems more heavily suffused with the latter, it coming closest to French law only with respect to mistake as to present facts and certain aspects of good faith – at least insofar as the Chinese conception of delictual liability can be analogized to the French, which remains to be seen.

This chapter analyzes Cavell’s interpretive methods to show how he generates novel insights into traditional political philosophy concepts. It argues that methodologists in political theory answer three crucial questions. What texts should one read? Why should one read those texts? How should one read those texts? I contend that Cavell is neither a textualist nor a contextualist. Instead, he is an intertextualist interested in how texts relate to each other and what effect the text has on the reader. Cavell understands political theory as a practice of responding to political texts. To demonstrate the salience of Cavell’s approach, the chapter identifies three interpretive techniques within his work. First, the technique of creative reading juxtaposes at least two disparate texts to draw out a previously neglected dimension in both. Second, through conceptual analysis of the ordinary use of terms such as “democracy,” Cavell can resolve longstanding debates in political theory. Third, through an attention to the authorial voice, Cavell can identify how a text provokes a change in political attitude in its readers.

This chapter details the practical, theoretical, and philosophical aspects of experimental science. It discusses how one chooses a project, performs experiments, interprets the resulting data, makes inferences, and develops and tests theories. It then asks the question, "are our theories accurate representations of the natural world, that is, do they reflect reality?" Surprisingly, this is not an easy question to answer. Scientists assume so, but are they warranted in this assumption? Realists say "yes," but anti-realists argue that realism is simply a mental representation of the world as we perceive it, that is, metaphysical in nature. Regardless of one's sense of reality, the fact remains that science has been and continues to be of tremendous practical value. It would have to be a miracle if our knowledge and manipulation of the nature were not real. Even if they were, how do we know they are true in an absolute sense, not just relative to our own experience? This is a thorny philosophical question, the answer to which depends on the context in which it is asked. The take-home message for the practicing scientist is "never assume your results are true."

This chapter is based on the proposition that translation is about the extension of one language by another, not about the provision of a replacement text; translation is not about interpretation but about inhabitation. The chapter critically reviews different perspectives on interpretation, particularly those supplied by the diachronic and synchronic, by universality and totality, by the signifier and the signified. Our meanings are always just beyond us, in intentions to mean. The chapter goes on to consider the status of je/I in speech and the nature of linguistic performance. It ends with a short reflection on translation’s perturbational effects on language.

In this concluding chapter I briefly revisit the interpretive framework set out in Chapter 1 within which my reading of the Charmides is situated, summarising what I take to be its merits. It is argued, based on the formal separation of Plato as author from his characters (especially Socrates), that the Charmides can be read as a Platonic defence of the written text as a medium for critical reflection on the reader’s part.