This chapter discusses the way international law aims to help protect the environment (or does not), by focusing on relevant legal instruments and relevant instances

How did the new kind of deterritorialized, dematerialized, and individualized warfare ‒ extensive in both time and space ‒ become durable? To what extent can it be considered as part of the normal functioning of the states that use drones? This chapter finds that the development of the use of drones in the US, in comparison with the use of France in the UK and France, is best described as one of institutionalization. The institutionalization of drone programs is defined as the process whereby drone practices become stable and durable activities embedded in the normative fabric of the state. This process derives from a combination of factors, from the formation of a bureaucracy – narrowly defined as the structured, harmonized, and depersonalized interaction of agents – to the formulation of legitimizing legal rationales, and the stabilizing force of the technology itself. The US drone program was stabilized through the creation of structures and bureaucratic interactions, a highly legalistic mode of justification, and narratives about drones being tailor-made to fight a transnational and polymorphous enemy.

This chapter discusses how time preferences influence the importance of and actions regarding old age health as well as factors behind taking up protective measures against the financial risks of care at old age. We discuss the complexity of planning for old age including the challenges related to our imperfect ability to predict the future or what our preferences for the future will be when making decisions today. We include the role of social norms and family experience in decision-making as well as the cognitive demands required of old age planning. We also incorporate the roles of biases such as optimism and present bias as well as risk denial and procrastination into decision-making about ageing. The chapter finishes with a consideration of nudges appropriate to this context.

A current critique in international investment law is the presumed lack of democratic legitimacy: Investment tribunals exercise public authority and take indirect influence on public law-making. Awards might create a ‘regulatory chill’ on the respondent’s parliament in enacting legislation; the adjudicatory powers of investment tribunals might affect policy options and thereby democratic space. This contribution highlights different aspects to improve the legitimacy of international investment law. The need for legitimization refers to persons and institutions as well as to measures adopted by these persons or institutions. All of this results in different reference points of democratic legitimization which are examined separately: international investment agreements; investment contracts especially with stabilization clauses; adjudicators as well as tribunal’s powers and decisions adopted; appointment procedures of arbitrators; the consent to arbitration as well as the determination of the applicable law are generally based on agreements or contracts - these requiring inter alia democratic legitimization. Moreover, in the ongoing reform debate a further institutionalization of investment law, the appointment of permanent judges, a concretization of protection standards, a higher personal legitimization to counter a lack of material legitimacy are discussed.

Is the periodization of the Principate according to dynasties also valid for the history of the court? Was there continuous development of court life – such as increasing institutionalization – or were certain elements of court life linked to certain styles of rule, recurring occasionally but then disappearing again? In answering these questions, this chapter focuses on elements that are central in this book: place; composition; activity; and the institutionalization or ritualization of court life. The chapter finds that there were few neatly defined chronological developments of the court, other than changes which were directly related to the increasing absence of the emperors from Rome. There was, however, a consistent moralistic discourse, often created and perpetuated by courtiers, surrounding the emperor’s behaviour at court. This meant that the expectations of members of the Roman court could influence emperors just as they could influence life at their court.

Higher education in the United States is characterized by a decentralized organizational structure in both public and private colleges and universities across the fifty states and five major territories. Institutional diversity is distinguished by fundamental, self-identifying features that include but are not limited to mission and history, location, funding and endowment, architecture and facilities, campus culture, and degrees offered. The history of the US educational system is of interest to the development of undergraduate research in view of the early emergence of college student research in American higher education and US leadership in undergraduate research. In the US undergraduate research began through the senior capstone or honors thesis requirement. Beginning in the late 1990s the growing recognition of undergraduate research as a high-impact educational practice for student success resulted in expansion of undergraduate research across disciplines and institutions impacting curriculum design, academic culture, and student outcomes.

This chapter introduces the concept of the institutionalization of knowledge broadly, and its history within South African universities when radical curriculum changes were attempted in the past. How the institutionalization of knowledge works is described in relation to the scant literature on the subject including the writings of Sarah Ahmed and Larry Cuban. And the stability of curriculum’s ideological commitments is explained in relation to two prominent examples, the English language and formal assessment, both of which remain undisturbed as objects of radical criticism in institutional life.

Even at an abstract theoretical level, the power configuration in China after the 1969 9th Party Congress was highly unstable. On the one hand, Mao continued to be an active and powerful chairman of the party. On the other hand, Lin Biao, the anointed successor, had a great deal of control over the military. Without the possibility of other powerful factions in the party to check a potential fight between Mao and Lin, both sides had much temptation to eliminate the other if they believed they had sufficient power to do so (Acemoglu et al. 2008: 162). Fortunately for Mao, he had cultivated two disparate groups to help him govern China in the event of a purge of Lin Biao: the Fourth Front Army (FFA) and the surviving scribblers. Mao’s strategy of cultivating the tainted FFA paid off handsomely. Instead of having to concede to Lin Biao’s reluctance to carry out self-criticism or being forced to rely on Lin’s followers, Mao forced Lin’s hand, knowing that he could credibly threaten Lin with replacing the Lin Biao faction with FFA veterans. After Lin Biao fled, Mao carried out his threat and eradicated close associates of Lin Biao wholesale from the military, replacing them with veterans of the FFA. The Lin Biao incident on September 13, 1971, finally led to the full installation of the coalition of the weak.

After Mao’s passing in September 1976, the coalition that Mao had put in place at the end of his life, which was composed Cultural Revolution radicals with little revolutionary experience, even more junior officials like Wu De and mass representatives, the tainted Fourth Front Army (FFA) group, and a handful of trusted First Front Army veterans like Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing, took over the People’s Republic of China. An uneasy truce persisted for a very short time before the Gang of Four had alarmed Hua Guofeng by challenging his role as the anointed successor, which compelled him to seek more drastic solutions (Zhang 2008b: 263). In this decisive moment, the FFA swung behind Hua, thus sealing the Gang of Four’s fate, but Hua also became very dependent on FFA veterans. His dependence on military veterans with vastly more experience and greater networks ultimately also brought about his downfall. Within two years of Mao’s death, none of the potential successors Mao had put into place just prior to his death survived as powerful figures in the party. The Gang of Four had ended in jail, while Hua was sidelined at the third plenum in 1978. Even FFA veteran Li Desheng, who had served as vice chairman of the party for a short while, ended his career in the 1980s as the head of the National Defense University (Zhu 2007: 425). Except for key members of the FFA group, the vast majority of Mao’s coalition of the weak had ended in jail or in retirement by the early 1980s. His legacy of continuous revolution also was completely expunged from the party ideology in favor of a single-minded focus on economic development.

Although much of this book concerns political dynamics in the Mao Era, the tumults of the Cultural Revolution and the coalition rule that resulted from late-Mao politics indirectly led to an important political outcome by the 2010s, the survival of Xi Jinping as one of the few princelings among political leaders on the civilian side of the CCP. This created one of the preconditions for Xi to dominate the party soon after taking office as the head of the party in late 2012 – the relative absence of competition and oversight from other highly networked princelings. In the 1980s, two forces drove the selection of future leaders in the party. First, founding leaders such as Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping had a genuine desire to promote a new generation of well-educated, loyal potential successors as their health began to fail them. Second, as the rest of the book has argued, the top leadership and even mid-level officials at the ministerial level did not want serious competitors to their power bases, and each pursued a coalition of the weak strategy within his own jurisdiction. Thus, besides a few senior veterans who had placed their children on accelerated paths for promotion, the vast majority of revolutionary veterans resisted the promotion of princelings due to their Red Guard activism during the Cultural Revolution and to fear of interference by well-networked princelings.

Authoritarian regimes must grapple with a fundamental source of instability that a significant redistribution of power, often unseen or only partially observed, can radically alter the incentives of regime insiders and overturn initially stable equilibria (Acemoglu et al. 2008). Although institutional features such as authoritarian legislatures and a ruling party can alleviate the incentives to usurp the incumbent leader to some extent, especially among lower-level officials (Gandhi 2008; Svolik 2012), they cannot fundamentally remove the incentives to grab power forcefully in the top echelon of these regimes. For one, one-party states by design entrust enormous power in the hands of the top few officials or even in the hands of one person. For ambitious officials just one layer below the very top facing a low probability of ordinary promotion, the reward for achieving an extra step upward can be enormous and can justify a risky gamble, especially if an external shock leads to a significant redistribution of power. Even for those who are already in the top echelon of the ruling party, a gamble to break the existing power-sharing equilibrium can reap enormous rewards as the power and resources of authoritarian colleagues are consolidated into one’s hands. Knowing the dangers of these possibilities, authoritarian leaders also have the incentives to preempt potentially threatening colleagues by removing them from power with coercive measures. In the absence of credible constitutional frameworks or electoral pressure to stop the actions of the top leadership, the stable façade of authoritarian politics can quickly descend into coups, purges, and assassinations.

In mid-1975, a sickly Mao had one of the last meetings with the Politburo. During the meeting, Mao shook hands with the entire Politburo, probably for the last time in his life. When he greeted alternate Politburo member and Vice Premier Wu Guixian, Mao confessed, “I don’t know who you are.” An embarrassed Wu said, “Chairman, we met in 1964 during the national day parade.” Mao compounded her embarrassment by responding, “I didn’t know that” (Mao 1975).

Argued April 22, 1927.Decided May 2, 1927.

Ms. Justice ROBERTS delivered the opinion of the Court.1

This is a writ of error to review a judgment of the Supreme Court of Appeals of the State of Virginia, affirming a judgment of the Circuit Court of Amherst County, by which the defendant in error, the superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded, was ordered to perform the operation of salpingectomy upon Carrie Buck, the plaintiff in error, for the purpose of making her sterile. 143 Va. 310. The case comes here upon the contention that the statute authorizing the judgment is void under the Fourteenth Amendment as denying to the plaintiff in error due process of law and the equal protection of the laws.

Chapter 1 surveys the rise of the pre-Occultation Imamic agents, and their role in ensuring the stability of the Imamate. While previous scholarship has tended to conflate the various roles of the followers of the Imams as a bloc of men (rijāl), it is argued that we must distinguish between different roles, in particular between scholars and agents, although these roles sometimes overlapped. Unlike pure scholars, the prestige and authority of the agents rested upon the fiscal institutions of the Imamate: the systems for collecting the canonical alms taxes, the zakāt and the khums, which were instrumental in ritually and materially connecting the community with their Imams. It is argued that, though the precise origins of an institutionalized Imamate are unclear, by the time of the tenth Imam, legal conventions and institutional protocols for defining the Imamate and its operations had emerged, setting the scene for Occultation-era contestations.

Chapter 12 describe different types of intelligent evaluation. At all group levels, most CI practices are reliant on some degree of explicit evaluation of the collective work. Digital technology also makes it possible to design metacommunicative feedback loops in most group work and organizational work. While some systems build on shared coordination, others let coordinators regulate the collective work. In the political system, intelligent evaluations are at the core of any well-functioning democratic system, from the nomothetai in ancient Athenians to the Citizen assembly in Ireland today. These new institutions strengthen citizen metadiscourses about important societal issues. A strong knowledge commons is also an important basic condition for this type of critical discourse. In general, digitized evaluations are becoming more common in society, exemplified by online reputation systems that rate a person´s trustworthiness, not only on business sites, but also in social media. However, there is increasing concern about the negative consequences of having the current focus on evaluating persons in the emerging reputation society.