Chapter 1 outlines the volume’s cases, methods, and arguments. It begins by tracing the linguistic history of the term “martyr” before proceeding to locate martyrdom as an act simultaneously religious and political, personal and collective, and seeking self-actualization rather than self-destruction. In contrast to studies that treat martyrdom as a subset of suicide, I articulate a distinction between self-killing—sanctioned towards certain ends—and self-murder, which is condemned in all religious (and political) traditions. As such, I argue, martyrdom must be approached through a dual window that appreciates both the rationales given by martyrs and their celebration by social groups. I analyze the promise and perils of comparative study towards that end by giving global context to localized crises, and offer a brief reconsideration of the category of sacrifice that will guide my discussion. Finally, I outline the structure of the work and the methodology that uses words written by martyrs in tandem with contemporary accounts and statements by religious and political leaders.

This chapter examines the kinds of legal procedure adopted by various ancient legal systems to conduct legal proceedings in a court. The areas covered include the constitution of courts, preliminary court proceedings, valid evidence, presentation and evaluation of evidence, and the final verdict, including the possibility of appeals. Discussions include judges and court personnel, the physical space of courts, distinctions between civil and criminal cases, plaint and plea, sureties, and legal representation. Under evidence there is examination of witnesses, documents, oaths, ordeals, torture for evidentiary purposes, and forensic investigation, and punishment for perjury. Once a verdict is reached by the court, there are issues relating to the recording and the enforcement of the verdict. There is wide diversity in the legal procedure recorded in the sources from different legal traditions. Some deal with the topic explicitly, while in others we have to deduce the procedure from material on court cases.

Studies and victimization surveys suggest that many, if not most, crimes are not reported to legal authorities. This is problematic because: (1) legal authorities are unable to address crimes they are unaware of, and victim or bystander reporting is the primary route by which authorities are made aware of crimes; and (2) people’s willingness to report crimes is an indicator of the public’s willingness to cooperate with legal authorities, which has long been noted as necessary for an effective criminal justice system in democratic societies. Academic attention to the role of bystanders was catalyzed largely by the story surrounding the assault and murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City in the 1960s, which elicited the question of why bystanders fail to report crimes. This chapter is about situational and bystander characteristics that relate to bystander decisions to report crime and provide information to legal authorities. It identifies gaps in the literature and proposes directions for future research.

My chapter explores the relationship – both personal and philosophical – between Heidegger and Paul Celan, a relationship that is defined in all its various senses in terms of silence, denial, evasion, and responsibility. Against a consideration of the intimate ties between philosophy and poetry, I look at two different but related themes. In the first half of my chapter I offer a biographical/historical account of Heidegger’s and Celan’s interactions in postwar Germany during the 1950s and 60s. I then perform a close reading of one of Celan’s notoriously difficult poems – “Die Schliere”/“Streaks” – that serves as a kind of dialogue with Heidegger and as an intimate conversation with him about the topics of postwar silence, evasion, and blindness.

The final critical step in the IVF process is the embryo transfer. Trans-vaginal embryo transfer, often combined with abdominal ultrasound guidance, returns embryos to the woman’s uterus with the goal of implanting into the uterine wall and creating a pregnancy leading to live birth. Successful embryo transfer depends on the protocols of the clinic, development of the embryos in culture, and optimized preparation of the uterine lining. Embryos can be fresh or frozen–thawed, with or without biopsy for genetic testing, at time of transfer. Good embryo transfer technique is required from both the clinician and the embryologist. In all cases, a fine sterile flexible plastic catheter designed for embryo transfer is loaded with the embryos by the embryologist and handed off to the clinician for insertion into the patient’s uterus. Methods of catheter loading and hand-off to the clinician will be discussed, as well as troubleshooting notes.

In our laboratory, we currently perform verification of specimen identity (VSI) by having two laboratory personnel independently check and verify the identity of each patient, gamete specimen and embryo at each step that is susceptible to a mismatch so that we can assure accurate and complete traceability throughout the processes. Since this is the system currently in place in our laboratory, this method of verification and witnessing is the main focus of discussion in this chapter. In the future, we plan to implement an electronic witnessing system following as recommended by Chapman (2019).

Evidence – its marshalling, disclosure and presentation – lies at the heart of many, if not most, international arbitration proceedings. Yet, perhaps more than any other aspect of arbitral practice, evidentiary issues lay bare the significant divergences between the common and civil law traditions. As result, evidentiary questions can sometimes be among the most contentious that arise in an international arbitration, particularly when a dispute involves parties and/or counsel from different sides of the common law/civil law divide.In this chapter, we outline the process by which evidence is used in international arbitration and highlight some particularly thorny issues that can arise, including in relation to the document disclosure process, the admissibility of evidence and the use of evidence at an evidentiary hearing.It is important that parties and counsel consider these evidentiary issues carefully – and early in the arbitral process. Although every tribunal is different, international arbitration is fundamentally party-driven.Parties should therefore be proactive in fostering an efficient, effective, and fair process as it relates to the gathering, production and use of evidence in an international arbitration proceeding.

This opinion is a crucial part of the problematic foundation of the law concerning for the admissibility of evidence of battered woman’s syndrome in cases of self-defense. The court denied the defendant’s appeal for her manslaughter conviction because she killed her husband while he was sleeping. The reasoning of the court made it difficult, if not impossible, for defendants in the state to argue self-defense based upon long-term physical and emotional abuse resulting in battered woman’s syndrome.

In the final chapter, I examine the question of revelation by looking again at the Emmaus story. In the generally accepted reading of this text, it is a story about moving from blindness to sight. I argue that the event of revelation is more nuanced than this reading allows. God is revealed to the disciples in the event of their burning hearts on the road, in a presence in the affect to which they only advert afterwards (Lacoste). The disciples personally recognise Jesus in the event of the breaking of the bread, in the saturated phenomenon of his appearing and disappearing (using the tools of Marion, otherwise). And Cleopas and his companion reveal the God of Jesus Christ in the event of their joyful witness to the other disciples back in Jerusalem, and in their personal transformation (Romano). That divine revelation might be one of the possibilities of a hermeneutic of the event allows sufficient ambivalence between the immanent and the transcendent to accommodate readings that might sometimes be plausible either way. Learning to discern the movements of the affect takes seriously, however, the possibility that God reveals Godself in experience through a love that appears to freedom.

The House of Slaves at Gorée Island was listed as a World Heritage site in 1978, one year before Auschwitz concentration camp. This chapter examines the process of heritagization of the House of Slaves as one of the African sites for the commemoration of the slave trade. Adopting Michael Rothberg’s perspective on multidirectional memory, it demonstrates how the project of the House of Slaves was indebted to the recognition of the Holocaust as a global trauma: the commemoration of the slave trade is in several ways entangled with the commemoration of the Holocaust. But from Senegal’s independence onwards, the House of Slaves was also inflected by a vision of Negritude. The first curator of the House of Slaves, Joseph Ndiaye, gave it a global significance through his performances as ‘witness’ to the slave trade. By giving testimony, Joseph Ndiaye claimed an epistemic space for the articulation of Blackness. He simultaneously introduced the figure of the witness to the genre of the memorial museum and reclaimed the African legacy of orality against the Occidental epistemology of history. As embodiment of a legacy of the project for human rights, Joseph Ndiaye also claimed this museum as an African project of emancipation.

In Massachusetts, the elite solidified their identity and legitimated their claims to rule by linking veracity, and all the social perquisites that entailed, to gentlemanliness and whiteness. Laws against deceptive speech practices, and prosecutions of them, concretized and reinforced cultural associations between gentility and credibility. These prosecutions also had larger political significance. In naming defendants as false speakers, presentments and prosecutions formally defined them as ineligible for participation in a community of shared civil discourse. In perjury prosecutions, this process meant that certain men were much more likely to be believed in institutional and legal contexts, thus endowing them with greater power in those contexts. In false news prosecutions, the process enabled a small coterie to control sanctioned versions of public information. The outrage manifested over mumpers reveals elite anxieties about the strength and resilience of these still-emerging ideologies of truth-telling. But these tricksters and their interventions in polite society nevertheless managed to expose the inherent deceptiveness of the polite ethos itself.

This chapter illustrates the major claims of the countershelf through its most frequent occupant, Pablo Neruda. Yet his appearance is different than later Latin American authors, who act primarily as stylistic models. Instead, it is Neruda himself who lives on, reincarnated as a “transmigrant,” who acts as a site of internal contestation between projects that are stylistically, even generically, quite distinct. After Neruda’s Nobel Prize and untimely death in the early 1970s, the painter Vivan Sundaram, poets including Agha Shahid Ali, Marie Cruz Gabriel, and Sirsir Kumar Das, and prose writers like Mohsin Hamid and Ravish Kumar all reincarnate Neruda’s persona as a way of thinking about the contest between aesthetic and political commitment through which their own creative endeavors might become global. Their perception of Neruda’s conflictual commitments emerges out of the real arc of his poetic career. These prompt a reconsideration of one of the most discordant – and yet essential – moments of Neruda’s oeuvre: his reincarnation-themed poetry of the first volume of Residencia en la tierra – written while Neruda worked as a consular functionary in British India from 1927 to 1929.

Effective investigative interviewing is at the heart of any police investigation and thus is the root of achieving justice in society. This is because the key aims underpinning any investigation are to: (i) find out what happened, and if anything did happen, (ii) to discover who did what, and (iii) to collect evidence in a way that will be credible to decision-makers. In order to achieve this, investigators need to gather information whose source is usually a person (e.g., a witness, victim, suspect, complainant, first officer at the scene of a crime and so on). Thus, one of the most important tools in an investigator’s toolbox is the ability to interview. This chapter will examine the evidence base examining the most effective methods to interview and assess witness reliability within an investigative context.

Proper testing of evidence, including witness testimony, is key to ensuring due process and procedural fairness, and affirms the legitimacy of systems of international dispute settlement resolution. In this regard, commentators have emphasised that, in international dispute settlement, less weight should be given to witness testimony that has not ‘undergone the interrogation of the court and the cross-examination by the opposing party’. The WTO dispute settlement system sees some of the most active and complex litigation across international tribunals. Yet, the WTO’s standard procedural rules provide no opportunity for the adjudicator or parties to (1) request the appearance of a witness, or (2) pose live questions to the witness. Consequently, most WTO disputes do not involve any in-person testing of witnesses. In this context, this chapter sets out to suggest an approach to fill the gap in the WTO rules on in-person witness testing.

International courts and tribunals are increasingly faced with a number of technical, extralegal issues in disputes before them, often entire disputes hinging on technical questions. Consequently, the international dispute settlement system is witnessing a gradual alteration from a procedural viewpoint. As a tool to assist the adjudicator in decision-making, the ‘expert’ has entered the international judicial process, playing varying roles in various disputes. This chapter looks at disputes where both parties are states. The first section compares the criteria and method of selection of experts by the adjudicator in various fora; this is followed by a study of procedures involving an ex curia expert, and a comparative analysis of procedures involving party-appointed experts. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the possibilities for further lessons from a broader comparative review.

This chapter offers reflections on how to create a sense of belonging for the stateless that keeps them in our purview as historical agents who can determine their actions and meaning. Whereas the legal definition of statelessness remains a key category, the chapter examines the experiential implications of statelessness, understanding these as a form of unbelonging. The rupture of displacement has cut the ties to community and place requiring that we look at the complex process by which refugee communities acquire cohesion through the repetition of their common story of displacement, as anthropologist Michel Agier has shown. Expanding the temporality of the stateless, this chapter seeks to link a deeper sense of history to a future trajectory where a form of belonging discovered through history can shape momentum for the resolution of statelessness in the future. Taking the works of poet Peter Balakian as its key example, the chapter focuses on the impact of the Armenian Genocide on future generations, and how the specifics of this history of mass violence and displacement can move us toward a recognition of the crisis in our contemporary moment.