This article examines the earliest rabbinic comment on Deuteronomy 32:36, which is part of Moses’s final words to the Israelites before he dies and they enter the Promised Land without his charismatic prophetic guidance. The Hebrew noun mitzvah and verb tzivah, usually understood to mean “commandment” and “command” (“enjoin” in NJPS) respectively, are understood in their biblical context and rabbinic explication to suggest as well the sense of passing something on at death as a legacy or inheritance. Whereas a commandment is usually understood as authoritatively imposed from without, a legacy is understood as something voluntarily received (transmitted) from within. The midrash suggests that at the age of 120 years, and unable to accompany the Israelites as they enter and settle the Promised Land, Moses can no longer command with authority but must cajole and implore with gratitude the Israelites in each generation to maintain the Torah through voluntary acceptance. In a striking scene, Rabbi Judah the Patriarch is depicted imploring his students in the same words as did Moses. By implication, the auditors of the midrash in each generation, down to the present, are similarly besought, with the greatness of the Torah and Moses being continually at stake.

This epilogue concludes the volume with an investigation of the legacy of William the Conqueror and his age in public culture, international politics, media, and social memory.

Benjamin Britten died before most of his closest friends and colleagues, so in one important sense his legacy ensured their participation in the continuation of the special contribution to local and national musical life represented by the Aldeburgh Festival. More than forty years after his death, that legacy remains a living force. It was a measure of Britten’s perceived significance in the years that passed between his death and his birth centenary thirty-seven years later that attempts to trace his possible impact on younger composers are often combined with critical perceptions concerning the many substantial publications about him. Collections of letters and diaries, biographies, overviews of the music, and more specialised studies of particular works have flowed in profusion at the same time. This examines Britten’s influence – or lack of influence – on, and his continued intersections with, successive generations of composers.

A highly unscientific empirical analysis of one week’s obituaries in my local newspaper revealed the following data: of the ninety-four individuals featured that week, only sixteen died (this includes those who died, died peacefully, or died suddenly). The rest passed away (peacefully or without elaboration), were called safely home, were taken too soon, entered into eternal rest, were reunited with loved ones, came to the end of his or her life adventure, or otherwise departed. Euphemism certainly has its place, and it is understandable that many people will opt for euphemism in obituaries. Nevertheless, it is striking how few of the authors of these announcements chose the most concise and descriptive word for the event.

This chapter provides an account of Graeme Laurie’s research with a specific focus on his commitment to the shift from law on the page to law in action. It draws, in particular, on his work in relation to the role of the public interest in health research regulation. First, the chapter considers the significance of Graeme’s contributions on this topic in his monograph Genetic Privacy, before turning to how this has been operationalised through his work with the Scottish Informatics Programme (SHIP) and the Administrative Data Research Network (ADRN) Scotland. In considering Graeme’s legacy, the chapter outlines how he has both delivered new and innovative governance frameworks that are able to meet the challenges of health research in the twenty-first century and, at the same time, inspired a community of scholars to engage with the public interest, a previously neglected concept.

Chapter 4 begins with an in-depth process tracing of the decisions around political party formation in Egypt after Mubarak’s ouster. We revisit the puzzling variation in party formation across the Egyptian political opposition landscape, particularly examining the decision on the part of Egyptian organized labor and pro-reform activist groups not to form political parties, tracing the link between the structure of the opposition under the Mubarak regime to the strategic incentives and organizational constraints faced by groups at this juncture. We then conduct an in-depth within-case comparison of the mobilization prior to Egypt’s 2011 elections, utilizing granular data on political parties’ specific campaign strategies and methods to trace the link between the adaptations that various groups made during the Mubarak era to the relative organizational and persuasive resources political groups had, and the mobilization tactics and strategies they were then able to use. We also specifically examine compelling evidence for common alternatives or contributing explanations for the Muslim Brotherhood’s success, and show that while these explanations certainly fill in part of the picture, they are incomplete without an understanding of mechanisms linking authoritarian legacies to the 2011 elections.

Graeme Laurie stepped down from the Chair in Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. This edited collection pays tribute to his extraordinary contributions to the field. Graeme has often spoken about the importance of ‘legacy’ in academic work and has forged a remarkable intellectual legacy of his own, notably through his work on genetic privacy, human tissue and information governance, and the regulatory salience of the concept of liminality. The chapters in this volume animate the concept of legacy as a lens of analysis for the study and practice of medical jurisprudence. In this light, legacy reveals characteristics of both benefit and burden, as both a facilitator of and an encumbrance to the development of law, policy and regulation. Overall, the contributions reconcile the ideas of legacy and responsiveness and show that both dimensions are critical to achieve and sustain the health of medical jurisprudence itself as a dynamic, interdisciplinary and policy-engaged field of thinking.

Institutional theories examine shared understandings or ways of doing things which can become engrained over time, developing into interpretative patterns within decision-making frameworks. Similarly, certain concepts within law can become imbued within a body of past practice, which can make legal change difficult to achieve. In some cases, even when legal change is suggested, practice within a field may be drawn back to historical institutional understandings. This chapter focuses on the European Patent Office (EPO)’s approach to interpreting morality provisions for biotechnological inventions, to highlight how traditional conceptions of the limited role of ethics within patent law have become engrained in EPO practice. Even though biotechnologies have advanced, and their patentability poses heightened ethical concerns, the interpretative communities within patent law have remained static. Thus, engrained institutional understandings of the limited role of ethics within patent law continue to dominate. This can encumber decision-making and, especially in areas of rapid technological and societal change, weaken the law’s responsiveness, which warrants much greater examination.

Thinking and practice have evolved about the role that academics play in civic discourse, particularly about the influence of their scholarly, peer-reviewed research in the policy world. This chapter reviews different types of impact that academics have and can have inside the academy through publishing in academic journals, and outside the academy by translating knowledge to policy including through participating on and leading committees and other policy organisations. Both environments also include an under-appreciated type of impact, namely the legacy of one’s work through interactions with others. The chapter describes the changing landscape in which knowledge production and dissemination occur, highlighting the growth of international, collaborative work, to place the changing faces of impact into a broader environmental context. Finally, these two strands of impact and legacy are brought together for some concluding reflections about their future importance.

A ubiquitous issue in medical law is how to strike the balance between affording individuals freedom and keeping communities safe. Legislators strive to do this by examining existing practices (constantly fluctuating due to evidence and experience) and anticipating future ones (notoriously difficult); it is a sophisticated exercise in the context of medicine because of the field’s proximity to science and innovation. The ingrained culture of self-regulation and professional ethos-based governance also obscures practices and emerging trends in a way that frustrates appropriate public debate and timely legislator intervention. This creates a trigger for explosive decompression of public opinion where practices are no longer socially acceptable (or, indeed, never were) and where emerging biomedical practices are poorly communicated or implemented. The resulting scandals create a social legacy which drives the political context of subsequent legislation. This chapter looks at two such events – the Alder Hey organ retention scandal and the care.data controversy – and analyses the legacy they created for the future regulation of the use of human tissues and data for biomedical research.

Ths introduction provides a brief biography of Norman Mailer, addressing his upbringing, his education, his family life, his marriages, his rise to fame as a writer and cultural critic, his political activism and involvement, his honors and awards, and the controversies that swirled around his public and personal life.

Chapter 1 interrogates a referential frame that happened to inform a cultural milieu and legitimize the use of the term “Arabian Nightism” in discussions that relate to presumed sumptuousness and lavish spending. The phrasing shows, however, how the Nights permeates a consciousness and how it inhabits the European and American culture in multifarious ways and contexts that justify addressing it as a knowledge consortium, an epistemic inception that continued to direct or challenge regimes of thought. Its trajectory in these cultures demonstrate constants and variables in reception and appropriation, and invite us to draw a comparison with its native culture in relation to issues of literacy and orality.

“To become a celebrity is to become a brand name,” Philip Roth told Alain Finkielkraut in 1981. “There is Ivory soap, Rice Krispies, and Philip Roth.” This was neither the first nor the last time that Roth would address his public image. In both fiction and nonfiction – from his novels to his memoirs to his “Open Letter to Wikipedia” in 2012, Roth wrote about himself, contending with and processing public representations of “Philip Roth.”

The final chapter in the volume confronts Philip Roth's retirement announcement in 2012, and reflects on the final years of his life, during which he spent his time reading – both his work and the work of others – and intermittently re-emerging to weigh in on issues ranging from political issues of the day to the state of his own literary legacy.

Douglass achieved international celebrity in his lifetime; thus his bicentennial was celebrated internationally. Still, despite his iconic status, Douglass's bicentennial remained more of a lowkey and highly decentralized affair due to complex converging historical forces. Nonetheless, the communities that celebrated Douglass in 2017–19 continue to plan for additional and more enduring commemorations in the years and decades to come.