This chapter explores rules on compensation that are peculiar to cases involving personal injury or death. The wrongful act is usually a tort, but it may also be a breach of contract1 or a statutory wrong. It is assumed that the claim is not excluded by statute; some exclusions are mentioned. This chapter does not discuss rules on compensation that apply to personal injury as well as other types of harm. Those rules are discussed in Part 1 and in the other chapters of Part 2. Furthermore, this chapter, like the rest of Part 2, is concerned only with ‘normal’ compensation. Aggravated damages, which may be awarded in cases of personal injury (and other cases), are discussed in Ch 15.

Comparing ancient societies allows us to observe the variety of relationships that prevailed between states — in different forms and at different scales — and their complex legal environments. This chapter explores five dimensions of this relationship. First, we examine the capacity of law to shape state power. While constitutional law, strictly speaking, was comparatively rare in the ancient world, we can yet observe various ways in which law, law-like practices and other cultural norms operated collectively to both empower and constrain the state. The second and third parts of the chapter look at the inverse relationship: state power over law and legal practice in the form of legislative powers and jurisdiction, respectively. In the fourth part, we turn from ideational aspects of state law to the structure of state legal systems themselves, particularly in the context of private or non-state legal practices. Here we focus on those domains of law in which the state was most intimately engaged, what was left to non-state actors and the engagements between both across a sometimes indistinct boundary. The final part of the chapter explores the role of law in legitimizing state power.

Chapter 6 is the second of three chapters concerned with the institutional development of the gacaca courts, their formation and deformation. In conjunction, these chapters chart the transition from legalism to lawfare in post-genocide Rwanda, one of two explanatory pathways traced in the book. By carefully dissecting the temporally and spatially embedded mechanisms and processes by which elites of the Rwandan Patriotic Front maneuvered to create modified arrangements of things past, these chapters excavate the microfoundations of the authoritarian rule of law in Rwanda. This chapter foregrounds the legislative foundations of the gacaca project. Along with the next chapter, it gives a detailed account of the economy and ingenuity with which Rwanda’s new rulers devised and waged the strategy of lawfare. What it also makes clear, however, is that the deformation of Rwandas gacaca courts – their violent legalization – was not an inevitable outcome.

This chapter discusses how governments and supernational institutions have tried to tackle misinformation through laws and regulations. Some countries have adopted new legislation making the spread or creation of misinformation illegal; this has often been met with criticism by human rights organizations, for instance, because governments cannot act as neutral arbiters of truth. The UK and EU have adopted expansive regulatory frameworks that regulate not only misinformation but rather the online information space in its entirety. The United States is generally wary of any new legislation that imposes limits on speech, and doesn’t currently have legislative initiatives that are as broad in scope as those in the UK and EU. Instead, some entities in the US have tried out investing in communications campaigns about mis- and disinformation; these are aimed at individuals (and not companies or misinformation producers), and their effectiveness is evaluated in a very different way.

The first substantive chapter addresses the structural problem facing wine farmers at the Cape. Much like in France, there was a serious problem of overproduction of wines of indifferent quality leading to unstable prices. The chapter details the struggle between wine merchants and farmers, which led to the constitution of the Koöperatieve Wynbouwers Vereniging van Suid-Afrika (KWV) in 1918. It shows how the KWV successfully lobbied the Smuts government for devolved regulatory powers that enabled it to control the pricing for distilling wines from 1924. At the same time, the chapter shows that the market was constrained by low consumption amongst whites, including the Afrikaner wine farming community itself. This was compounded by the efforts of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and its allies in the South African Temperance Alliance (SATA) to pursue local option for whites and a form of temperance for the black population. The former failed, but the passage of the 1928 Liquor Act prevented the majority of the population from purchasing wine or brandy. Hence the victory of the KWV over the merchants was tempered by the legislative success of the temperance movement.

Chapter 4 focuses primarily on the French colonial administration’s enactment of and measures to enforce legislation aimed at regulating tutelle. It argues that legislation failed due to disregard for the laws enacted in 1857 and 1862 that the colonial administration adopted to regulate and oversee guardianship by providing a legal framework for the process of liberating minors brought to Saint-Louis after 1848 and by outlining the state’s responsibility in finding suitable placements for them. Negligence and poor record-keeping on the part of French authorities led Camille Guy, the French Governor of Senegal, to declare that the management of tutelle was scandalous in 1904 when he discovered the gravity of the damage that has been done for decades. The chapter analyzes the Act of 1862, which officially abolished the Conseilles de Tutelle, whose functions were henceforth carried out exclusively by the Procureur Général. Drawing on data from the Liberations Registers and other sources, the chapter ends with the impact on tutelle stemming from active slave trading that occurred between the 1860s and the 1880s in areas of Senegal where it was still legal, the movement of enslaved people into urban Senegal, and the pick-up in liberations in the 1880s.

Chapter 6 deals with twentieth-century legislation of tutelle in response to earlier legislative failures, revelations about the lack of supervision, abuse of minors, and the disregard for French laws governing slavery and slave trading, all of which led to the crisis of 1903 and 1904.. It begins with the central legislative question in 1903 which revolved around contravention of the 1831 law which prohibited the purchase or selling of slaves. The question was whether the law applied to slave trading in Africa. Were French citizens engaging in outright slave trading or doing so under the guise of rachat? Revelations and judgments rendered in court cases at the time led to state intervention that gave rise to calls for censuses of liberated minors and rigorous accountability of guardianship. The chapter analyzes prominent cases of slave trading and their ramifications. It explores Governor Guy’s Act of 1903, which attempted to regulate guardianship effectively following his complaint that the redemption of minors was a subterfuge for slavery. The chapter offers an assessment of the clashes between leading French officials and ends with the replacement of the Procureur Général by the Secretaire Général as the primary administrator of guardianship.

This chapter examines the ideological, political, and cultural significance of law in the East Roman empire in the ‘Age of Justinian’. It argues that imperial legislation was at the forefront of the political struggles and debates that characterised the era and suggests that knowledge of the law circulated much more rapidly and widely than has often been supposed, even reaching elements of the peasantry. The evidence for the circulation and dissemination of legal knowledge, it is suggested, raises important issues concerning the possible circulation and dissemination of political and religious ideas amongst non-elite strata of East Roman society at this time, and thus may be important for how we think about the broader reception of religious and doctrinal disputes.

As stated earlier in this Part of the guide, it can be helpful to determine the defined standard, or benchmark, for the author’s perspective, action or statement, whether that is for a fictional character or plot, or in a non-fiction work (see Identifying the explanatory framework within a text). Once you have clarified that and the author’s intention, the next step is to consider whether there are any potential legal consequences.

As an editor, you should have a basic understanding of copyright, libel, defamation and related legislation, sufficient to be able to identify when a legal reading is needed. However, you should not be expected to provide that legal reading, regardless of how familiar you are with the legislation.

The Conclusion to the Networked Leviathan calls on political states to act to enable the governance reforms proposed by this book, and to impose additional governance reforms on platform companies. Governments have particular leverage over platform companies via the threat of antitrust regulation, their capacity to bring it about that workers (and particularly offshore contract workers, such as social media content moderators) have more influence over corporate outcomes, and promoting the public disclosure of information about company operations. They should use that leverage. Finally, the responsiblity to protect framework from international human rights law should be applied directly to platform companies.