In this chapter Chris Meckstroth explains how Immanuel Kant responded to the urgent political question of the 1780s and 1790s, how to understand the collective agency of the people or nation, with a novel conception of history. Kant thought we must believe progress is possible if we are to sustain a commitment to acting justly. To this end he re-worked arguments of Leibniz and Pope, who had tried to show that we live in the best of all possible worlds, thereby absolving God of responsibility for evil and saving the coherence of moral duty from scepticism. Kant, however, did not pitch his argument to the religious conscience of individuals. He aimed at political rulers whose authority derived from representing the general will of an entire people. His political thought focussed on principles a ruler must respect to count as that sort of representative. To these his philosophy of history added a concern for improvement over time, which he made plausible by drawing on a mechanism of unsocial sociability familiar in authors such as Pope. The result was a new, secular theodicy of progress favouring peace and republican politics, and designed to contain conflict in an age of democratic reform.

The Epilogue addresses the legacies of wartime neutrality and collaboration in Macau. The war period provided a peculiar blueprint for later developments in terms of bilateral Sino–Portuguese relations and of local practices in the enclave, including towards new waves of refugees. The Epilogue also covers recent written and visual representations of wartime neutrality and collaboration in Macau.

In our 2011 paper on Police Science (Weisburd & Neyroud, 2011) we set our belief that a radical reformation of the role of science in policing will be necessary if policing is to become an arena of evidence-based policies. In this revised and updated version of our paper, we reinforce our argument that the advancement of science in policing is essential if police are to retain public support and legitimacy, cope with recessionary budget reductions, and deal with the myriad of problems that encompass modern police responsibilities. We outline a proposal for a new paradigm that changes the relationship between science and policing. This paradigm demands that the police adopt and advance evidence-based policy and that universities become active participants in the everyday world of police practice. But it also calls for a shift in ownership of police science from the universities to police agencies. Such ownership would facilitate the implementation of evidence-based practices and policies in policing and would change the fundamental relationship between research and practice. We add in this paper a new emphasis to our model that focuses attention to moral and ethical elements of research and practice that are an essential part of science in universities and must become a key element of EBP.

Corporations make decisions that are crucial for sustainability. Can corporations, by taking account not just of profits but of impacts on people and the environment, support sustainability through ongoing reforms? Or does sustainability require a transformation of the global political economy? An evolutionary perspective focuses attention on variation across corporations and the selective pressures that shape their actions. Partial solutions can cumulate to substantial change and buy time for further change. But spillover effects where one action either facilitates or retards another can slow or speed change and seem to vary across the types of action considered. Proposals for change need to take account of not only what would happen if the change occurred but also the likelihood the change will occur.

The 1959 Iraqi Personal Status Code was controversial at enactment, and it remains so to this day. Some of the controversy relates to its progressive elements, which include a ban on child marriage, expanded child custody rights granted to mothers, and limitations on polygamy. Another significant dimension to the controversy, less remarked upon in scholarly and media circles, concerns the extent to which the Iraqi state should have the power to legislate at all with respect to personal status matters, and instead to defer to traditional religious authorities for rulemaking. This chapter highlights some of the key rules of the Personal Status Code, its evolution over time, its treatment in the courts, and the controversies that continue to surround it. The chapter shows that in many ways, the challenges facing the Personal Status Code reflect the cleavages that have posed an existential threat to Iraq since its creation.

This chapter details the literary history of short fiction written in English by African Americans from 1853 through 1934. Beginning in the antebellum era during the age of reform and continuing through the Postbellum–Pre-Harlem era before concluding with the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement, this article traces the aims and goals of activists, artists, and reformers such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, contextualizing and contrasting their efforts to revise and critique the reductive depictions of African American life perceived within the dominant literary trends of their respective times.

Chapter 9 proposes a universal accommodation mandate, which would allow employees to request modifications to the structural norms of the workplace (when and where work is performed) and to request modifications to how the physical tasks of the job are performed. This chapter explains how the mandate would work, discusses various applications of the mandate, briefly addresses logistical issues, and then responds to the anticipated criticisms.

Chapter 8 begins a two-chapter discussion of how we accomplish a workplace reimagined. But first, this chapter explores the body of literature discussing other reforms in order to explain why my proposals are different. I then turn to the first part of my reform proposal—tackling time off. This proposal advocates for two weeks of job-protected paid absences for all employees and for any reason.

The eighteenth century saw a series of reforms in judicial structures and practices, including the creation of the Acordada and the division of the capital city into cuarteles. These reforms may have contributed to more draconian approaches to justice in New Spain, as evidenced by an increasing number of corporal punishment sentences in the late 1780s and a peak in executions in 1790. This year also represents a watershed in the history of the Novohispanic judiciary due to the creation of Mexico’s first salaried corps of nightwatchmen. Arguably, the shock of the Dongo massacre motivated Revillagigedo to create this new institution.

The need to reform international commercial arbitration has to this day timidly–if not hardly–been acknowledged. The authors argue in this contribution that such timid inquiry has in any event been initiated for the wrong reasons. International commercial arbitration should not be reformed merely in response to the ongoing legitimacy crisis of international investment arbitration. To the contrary, time is ripe for a discussion about the general need for reform of international arbitration, as it has become the quasi-exclusive forum selected for the settlement of investment but also international commercial disputes. The disputing parties’ fundamental role in consenting to arbitration cannot exonerate any type of international arbitration from an inquiry as to the greater need for transparency and consistency of the arbitral decision-making process as well as accountability of arbitrators. Acknowledging the need for reform, however, does not imply submitting all types of arbitral dispute resolution to the Procrustean ISDS reform bed. Enhancing international commercial arbitration’s legitimacy inevitably requires tailor-made reform.

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.