This chapter discusses the racial Jesus in relationship to the historical Jesus. It begins with several examples of the racial Jesus, allowing in each case advocates of the racial Jesus to express in their own words the theological work done by racializing Jesus. It then considers objections and counter-objections, both of which turn on valorizing the historical Jesus against the racial Jesus, a valorization which itself turns on valorizing the historical Jesus against the Christ of faith. The chapter concludes by arguing that the counter-objections have reasons to “throw away the ladder” on the valorizations but do not, oddly giving new life to the secular history the racial Jesus teaches us to distrust.

In the absence of its founding figure Jesus Christ, Christianity developed diverse expressions of spirituality and worship. Central to this process is the embodiment of Jesus’s presence via representation and reenactment, traversing the milestones of Jesus’s life – his childhood, adult ministry, and passion. It is marked by a duality of identification with Jesus and counter-identification with others, fostering personal transformation and deeper adherence to Jesus’s example.

Effectiveness and efficiency in judicial decision-making are the most important objectives of any court. While this concerns primarily the final decisions that are rendered, it is also relevant to the judicial process and the legal reasoning that a court or tribunal carries out to reach its decision, in order to ensure continuity and coherence. Traditional understandings of the international judiciary have seen the judges’ role as one where they discover and declare the law by applying it at face value to the legal issues that have arisen within the case, thereby achieving effectiveness through what is said to be direct and clear application of the law. This sits rather uneasily with the identification of customary international law (CIL), which is by its very nature unwritten and established by identifying evidence of state practice and opinio juris. The aim of this chapter is to examine instances of judicial activism in the decision-making of international courts and tribunals during the determination and application of CIL and how that allows for either judicial effectiveness or ambiguity.

The interpretation of unwritten norms is fraught with difficulty, as the boundaries between the existence of a norm and the determination of its content can become blurred. Interpreters may return to the evidence of the norm’s existence in order to determine its content or it may be that interpretation itself is part of the constitutive process of unwritten norms. This confusion is exacerbated by a lack of established methods and procedures for the interpretation of unwritten international law, which includes not only custom but also general principles of law. While it is commonplace to speak of custom and general principles under the umbrella of ‘general international law’, it is unclear whether questions of interpretation are to be approached in the same manner for both categories of norms or whether custom and general principles may assist in the interpretation of one another. The central objective of this chapter is to examine the interactions between these two categories of norms in the context of interpretation. More specifically, it considers whether general principles of law may play a role in the interpretation of customary rules.

In its case law the International Court of Justice has repeatedly suggested the idea that rules of customary international law (CIL) do not operate in a vacuum but, instead, are to be understood against the background of other rules of the international legal system. This observation, although somewhat unsurprising, shows that the sources of international law exist in close interconnection – something that is also visible if one looks at the rules of interpretation contained in Article 31 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Accordingly, ‘any relevant rules of international law applicable in the relations between the parties’ must be taken into account, together with the context, when interpreting treaty provisions. The question addressed in this chapter is whether or not the same can be said of the interpretation of customary rules. In other words, if we look at the practice of international courts and tribunals, is it possible to reach the conclusion that CIL rules, too, must be interpreted with the cognizance of any relevant rules of international law applicable between the parties?

The process of identifying and interpreting norms of customary international law, while appearing to be primarily based on an inductive analysis of state practice and opinio juris, is sometimes a deductive exercise based on logic and reason. Logic permeates every decision in international law. Logic manifests itself inherently throughout the process and can be identified in all steps of reasoning in identifying, interpreting and applying customary international law. Logic, however, can constitute the application of either an inductive or deductive inference. This chapter focuses on situations in which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) applied a deductive approach, identifying or interpreting norms of customary international law without seeming to consult state practice and opinio juris. Specifically, it considers whether norms that can be reasonably inferred or deduced from existing rules, or that are simply logical for the operation of the international legal system, can be identified as norms of customary international law under a complementary, supplementary or distinctive interpretive approach.

Customary international law (CIL) is particularly vulnerable to the accusation that it is no more than ‘mere assertion’, a creation of the courts, if not downright fantasy. Yet it is in CIL that one finds the strongest claim to objectivity in international law. It is expressed in the doctrine that one of the elements of CIL is state practice, which represents the ‘objective’ element of CIL. It is thought to supplement the ‘subjective’ or ‘psychological’ element of CIL: opinio juris. This chapter argues that the notion of state practice as a set of ‘material facts’ that should be ‘identified’ and from which customary norms can be ‘induced’ is grounded in obsolete epistemology. The identification of state practice is more adequately described as a selection of what deserves to be counted as state practice. It is argued that the starting point for this selective process is opinio juris. Opinio juris does not come after the fact, as a subjective feeling of obligation that is superadded to a set of otherwise objective facts. Opinio juris is the indispensable conceptual framework without which habits and usages cannot even be ‘seen’ as state practice.

From this point on, main issues in system theory are tackled. The very first, considered in this chapter, is the all-important question of system identification. This is perhaps the most basic question in system theory and related linear algebra, with a large pedigree starting from Kronecker's characterization of rational functions to its elegant solution for time-variant systems presented here. Identification, often also called realization, is the problem of deriving the internal system’s equations (called state-space equations) from input–output data. In this chapter, we only consider the causal, or block-lower triangular case, although the theory applies just as well to an anti-causal system, for which one lets the time run backward, applying the same theory in a dual form.

This chapter considers queer relations of identification and desire in nineteenth-century sentimental American literature, especially as they relate to the (re)production of the increasingly privatized, middle class, white, family. It considers how texts queer the substitutions of others for mothers (and fathers, and brothers, and sisters) in order to maintain and queer the normative family. The chapter moves from paradigmatic examples to ones that appear to revel in queer visions of identificatory erotics. It then draws upon queer of color critique to examine how white supremacy defines the human and/as normative gender and sexuality, such that Black and other people of color are placed as queer others in order to preserve a fantasy of white gender and sexual purity. This racialized version of queer as non-normative complicates any ideal of a solely celebratory or even neutral taxonomizing of identifications, desires, and their accompanying kinship structures.

This chapter looks at the way that patent law resolved some of the other problems that chemical subject matter posed, particularly in working out how to define the boundaries of what was being examined or protected. While patent law employed a number of different strategies to delimit a fickle, empirically based, and changing chemical subject matter, this chapter highlights the central role that the materiality of chemical compounds played in helping the law to accommodate chemical inventions.

This chapter explores theories of revolution that propose psychological factors as the main driving force for intergroup change. These theories include social identity theory, psychodynamic theory, justice theories, equity theory, and relative deprivation theory. A number of the theories that also give importance to material conditions, such as system justification theory, also give importance to psychological factors through concepts such as false consciousness. The irrationalist perspective of psychodynamic theory is also integral to a number of the other theories discussed in this chapter because of the pervasive assumption that often people are unaware of what is influencing their participation in collective action and displacement of aggression. The most influential contemporary theory is social identity theory, and the key experiment associated with this theory, the minimal group paradigm, is critically discussed. The complex role of relative deprivation and perceived justice is discussed, with reference to fraternal deprivation and equity theory.