In preparation for Chapters 5–7 – which detail the three components of the proposed trust-based framework – this chapter addresses three issues. With reference to the social rights literature, it first substantiates the conclusion that social rights are justiciable, justifying the need for an enforcement framework to be used by the courts. Secondly, the chapter describes how the courts can use the concept of political trust as the basis for a social rights enforcement framework. It explains that under the trust-based framework, the courts promote the elected branches’ trustworthiness with respect to social rights. The courts specifically hold the elected branches to a ‘standard of trustworthiness’, effectively enforcing the three constituent expectations of trust in the citizen-government relationship – goodwill, competence and fiduciary responsibility. Lastly, the chapter outlines four justifications – theoretical, instrumental, practical and democratic – for why political trust should provide the basis for a social rights enforcement framework.

Theme #9 is about exploiting dynamics already present in a situation to advance one’s interests. Many Sun Tzu ideas find a place here, reflecting Sun Tzu’s keen appreciation of war’s larger context (Passage #1.1) conjoined with the inherently dynamic quality of Sun Tzu’s core concept of shi.

The author makes the case for a new understanding of the role of consent in international law. She begins by noting that the question of consent should be as central to international law as it is in other fields of law because legal norms give rise to power relations and impose constraints upon those to whom they apply, and those in power want these constraints to be accepted. Yet, the question of consent was, as the chapter claims, never raised in the classical era when State sovereignty made it possible for States to adopt international norms without their subjects’ consent. With the Enlightenment, however, the people’s consent through representation became the foundation of domestic law. Yet, most of the time, representation is, according to the author, formal and serves to justify the law as if it were produced by the general will. Because international law reflects the fickle concurrence of States’ wills, the world community’s law does not rely on popular consent. The world community is confronted with difficult challenges, and it needs, more than ever, norms that can meet this moment.

This chapter focuses on how different governance actors stress the constraining function of IIAs to achieve various goals and how they justify their actions. This chapter looks at how the IIA narratives have been used in reshaping national governance. This was chiefly through the narrative of IIAs as a disciplining and constraining force. We have identified that the general disciplining narrative about IIAs has three variants with different normative bents. These sub-types express how the governance actors evaluate the constraining potential of IIAs. On the one end of the spectrum, this disciplining effect may be viewed as flatly undesirable; on the other end, the constraint is viewed through a largely positive lens as a cultivating and educating force. Somewhat between sits the view of IIAs as simply something one must learn to live and deal with. Generally, the disciplining narratives about IIAs view IIAs as an incarnation of legal rationality superior to other rationalities, such as political or democratic rationality. Other considerations, even those pertaining to national constitutional arrangements, were cast in an inferior position and viewed as obstacles to a smooth implementation of IIAs.

Why is birth so dangerous, even today, with modern medicine? Through historical anecdote and a contemporary case history we explore this question, discussing the process of birth and what can go wrong. By thinking about who is in control of labour – is it the mother or her fetus? – we think about how a couple might prepare for birth. The challenge posed by birth makes us look to human evolution for answers, and we describe the insight it gives into birth in some low-resource settings around the world. We tackle the question of the rising numbers of caesarean sections around the world and the possible consequences. Although it may be widely believed that a smaller baby would mean a less difficult birth, we go on to explore the risks of being small for the survival of the baby alongside new research revealing how the mother’s body limits the growth of her baby inside the womb. We discuss whether the growth of the fetus is set by the genes which the mother or the father have passed on, mother’s size, or her environment. This leads to how the fetus develops and what controls this, the focus of the next chapter.

Chapter 14 begins with a general discussion of how the affordances and constraints of media affect their adoption and use, and conversely how they affect social interaction, language use, culture, and social structure.It then discusses the particular affordances, constraints, and effects of classes of media, beginning with language itself.

Since antiquity, poets have described their experience of versification as one of constraint. The introduction examines examples of this trope, and introduces the book’s central claim: that voluntary submission to formal constraints effaces the poetries and experiences of those who are actually in bondage. It discusses the way poets and critics have aligned the imposition or radical overthrow of formal constraints with conservative or revolutionary politics, and offers some working definitions of lyric. Close readings of a sonnet by Keats, and a discussion of J. S. Mill’s essay ‘What is Poetry’, establish the book’s historicist perspective on the ‘liberal lyric’ in relation to the histories of slavery. The introduction also explains the methodology, and situates my own critical practice in relation to whiteness as a kind of enclosure.

Mechanical testing on a very fine scale, particularly indentation, has become extremely popular. Sophisticated equipment has been developed, often with accompanying software that facilitates the extraction of properties such as stiffness, hardness and other plasticity parameters. The region being tested can be very small – down to sub-micron dimensions. However, strong caveats should be noted concerning such measurements, particularly relating to plasticity. Some of these concern various potential sources of error, such as the effects of surface roughness, oxide films, uncertainty about the precise geometry of the indenter tip etc. Moreover, even if these can be largely eliminated, extraneous effects tend to arise when (plastically) deforming a small region that is constrained by surrounding (elastic) material. They are often grouped together under the heading of “size effects,” with a clear tendency observed for material to appear harder as the scale of the testing is reduced. Various explanations for this have been put forward, some based on dislocation characteristics, but understanding is incomplete and compensating for them in a systematic way does not appear to be viable. A similar level of uncertainty surrounds the outcome of fine scale uniaxial compression testing, although the conditions, and the sources of error, are rather different from those during nanoindentation. Despite the attractions of these techniques, and the extensive work done with them, they are thus of limited use for the extraction of meaningful mechanical properties (related to plasticity).

This chapter explores the novel-writing of the experimental writing collective the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo). Despite the seeming mismatch between the Oulipo's attachment to form and the perceived formlessness of the novel, many oulipians have experimented with writing novels. This chapter begins by considering how oulipians have re-invented the novel form via the transposition of structures and constraints from other genres and disciplines. It then reflects on the various functions of these structures and constraints arguing that, while some serve primarily as architectural devices or creative stimuli, others are intrinsically meaningful. In particular I reflect on the ways in which oulipian-authored novels explore the relationship between self and system, and between the individual and the collective. Indeed, oulipian-authored novels often bear the collective stamp of the Oulipo. As this chapter argues, the group has developed a compelling shared imaginary that marks its novelistic production and that raises questions concerning authorship and creative ownership. Lastly, this chapter considers the ways in which oulipian-authored novels frequently invite the reader into a literary game that draws out his or her own creative potential.

This synesthetic chapter enacts listens for queer poetics in theory, queer theory in poetics. Divers semantic, physical, and spatial positions swerve on formal constraint, and in the swerves, skrrts, and twerks that streak verses, piss, ideas, and tire tracks across this chapter, a sense of the range of queer desire emerges. Written with a viscerally formal, Caribbean, Latinx, Diasporic Black Poetics imaginary, this chapter waters the unruly growths of (indigenous, black, and insurgent) geographic and grammatical grounds.

Frank I. Michelman takes up a proposition from John Rawls that a stricter constraint of constitutional fidelity applies to supreme court judges in a constitutional democracy than to citizens acting politically as litigants, voters, organizers, and otherwise as agitators for political causes to determine whether this proposition fits with Rawls’s other political ideas. It is, however, not immediately clear how this proposition can fit with Rawls’s proposed “liberal principle of legitimacy,” according to which a country’s constitution is to figure as a public procedural pact, by appeal to which citizens justify to each other their exertions of the coercive political powers that they hold as citizens in a democracy. Answering requires careful specification of the respects in which the fidelity constraint is to be looser for citizens than for judges, close analysis of the Rawlsian constitution-centered “principle of legitimacy,” and consideration of Rawls’s later writings that modify in some crucial respects the principle of legitimacy.

Sense of control over one’s life declines in the later portion of the life span, which is not surprising in the face of increased losses and decreased gains associated with aging. Unfortunately, the maintenance of sense of control is a key indicator of successful aging while low control beliefs are a risk factor for poor aging-related outcomes, such as lower concurrent and subsequent cognitive functioning. The simultaneous focus on the person and the environment is an important characteristic of research on control beliefs. We synthesize the state of the field and discuss the current understanding of the complex interplay of control beliefs and cognition. In addition, we propose that awareness of aging, which is the subjective interpretation of aging, may be an important future direction to elucidate the control-cognition relationships.

In this chapter, we discuss evidence about the evolutionary forces that have shaped the evolution of the human pelvis, both in its entirety as well as portions of the pelvis, focusing on studies that have investigated pelvic evolution using experimental and quantitative genetic methods. These methods are tied to information from Chapter 4 about pelvis development, with emphasis placed on the importance of understanding the difficulty of tying development and growth with evolutionary processes. Special attention is placed on the concept of the palimpsest. Further, we review these findings in light of three principal hypotheses broadly offered about the processes that selected for pelvic shape (as reviewed in Chapters 2 and 3): locomotion, obstetric sufficiency and thermoregulation. We show from multiple studies that the human pelvis evolved in response to natural selection as well as through neutral evolutionary processes (e.g. genetic drift). A key conclusion from these studies is that parts of the pelvis evolved in different manners in response to these (and other) selection factors; thus, the shape of the human pelvis reflects a modular response to various sources of selection.