Chapter 8 illuminates the intermediary stages of litigation before the early Tudor kings. It takes up the little-studied perspective of defendants in cases heard by the king’s Court of Requests and examines the potential for even this most authoritative kind of justice to be resisted. The chapter begins by studying the testimonies of messengers, recorded in Requests’ order books, for evidence of accused parties evading or rejecting the initial summons into court. It then reconstructs the process by which defendants made formal answers to petitions, and outlines the arguments they raised in their own defence. In line with debates ongoing contemporarily in Parliament and Council, defendants’ answers often contrasted extraordinary royal justice with the due process enshrined in English law. These lines of contestation were crucial to the increasing definition of royal justice under the early Tudor regimes, this chapter argues.

Chapter 13 provides an overview of the institutional framework provided by the Committee on Safeguards, and a description of its multiple functions. Some of these functions ensure that Members exert real surveillance over safeguard actions, and others provide a rather adjudicating function to the Committee, which may collide with the exclusive jurisdiction of the WTO dispute settlement system to adjudicate safeguard-related claims of infringement.

Chapter 6 presents a case-study of response markers and introduces a syntactic analysis within the framework of the Interactional Spine Hypothesis. Response markers are units of language which are used to respond to previous moves. I show that the target of confirmation can differ depending on the syntactic context. Response markers show the same pattern of multi-functionality as confirmationals do, providing evidence that there is a system in place which regulates both types of units of language. I compare my analysis to previous analyses of response markers and show that none of them are adequate because they restrict their attention to response markers used as answers to polar questions. This is, however, only one use of response markers: they can also be used to express agreement, acknowledge the addressee’s belief, or simply indicate that the responder is listening. The interactional spine predicts precisely these functions. I further show that response markers can be modified prosodically to express all kinds of emotional content and I develop an analysis for this pattern.