Europe is living its Weimar moment. The historic task of the European Union (EU) today, the book argues, is to articulate and institute a new imaginary of prosperity. Imaginaries of prosperity integrate societies around the shared pursuit of a prosperous future, while rendering “political-economic” questions the main preoccupation of politics. The new imaginary of prosperity today has to be both credible (able to provide answers to contemporary challenges) and appealing (conjuring a world in which people want to live). It has to include not only an alternative macroeconomic framework (a different role for tax, public spending, or welfare provision) but also a different set of microeconomic institutions (a new role for the corporation, technology, industry, finance, and consumption). It is exactly in this latter space that the EU has undertaken the first important steps towards reimagining prosperity. The book analyses several policy fields, showing that the EU has already made significant efforts to foster more caring consumption, circular products and technologies, sustainable industry, and fairer corporate activity. But the EU has to go further and faster – if it intends to respond effectively to the soaring problems, while halting another Europe’s slide into tribalism.

Marriage equality was a significant achievement, one that yielded both practical and symbolic benefits for hundreds of thousands of queer households. At the same time, marriage equality is not the same as full equality. In the years since the Obergefell decision, LGBTQ rights advocates have continued to fight difficult and demoralizing battles against harmful laws and policies, which have increasingly targeted transgender rights. However, the movement’s past successes should offer hope for the future. The history of gay and lesbian rights advocacy reveals that small victories at the state and local level, brought about by working with nonlegal actors, can transform both the law and society. Although advocates have not yet achieved gay liberation’s visions of the future, they have attained meaningful reforms. The movement’s history thus offers a crucial reminder that the law can change society for the better.

The fight for gay and lesbian rights has become one of the most conspicuous social justice movements in American history. Although numerous scholars and popular writers have detailed the history of the marriage equality movement, the struggle for marriage equality was only one small part of a more than half century-long movement for queer family rights. Decades before the United States became embroiled in debates over same-sex marriage, advocates were working to support and promote the rights of queer couples and their children. Family Matters uncovers this hidden history of gay and lesbian rights advocacy. Instead of focusing on marriage rights, it highlights the legal reforms that predated the marriage equality movement. The introduction sets out the book’s arguments and methodology. As it explains, the transformation of gay and lesbian rights in America depended on advocacy at the state and local levels, as well as the work of nonlegal actors.

This chapter argues for a concept of ’roundabout reasoning’ as a useful tool for comparative legal studies for the movement and adaptation of legal objects, in understanding domestic law, and in critiquing legal development. Roundabout reasoning is defined as a process to resolve potential conflict between two or more objects by (a) a simple method of sequencing their consideration; (b) where actors apply it autonomously; and (c) consideration takes place through a neutral third space without reference to their earlier state.

An inquiry into the rationale for the protection of animals in wartime confronts a key challenge: tThe progressive philosophical reflection on the improvement of the position of animals in (human) societies is at odds with the human-centred nature of international humanitarian law. Against this background, the chapter critically engages with possible reasons for animal protection in wartime: anthropocentric approaches, speciesism, anthropomorphism and a rights-based approach. It analyses to what extent these paradigms are reflected both in lex lata and in claims de lege ferenda. The chapter also examines to what extent these approaches can be brought in line with the overall objectives of international humanitarian law and reflects upon the challenges that arise from such an alignment. It favours a straightforward reform approach which aims at a specific convention for the protection of animal rights in wartimes.

This Chapter appraises the range and depth of Patrick Glenn’s scholarly legacy by exploring some of the many lessons that can be drawn from his opus magnum Legal Traditions of the World. To this purpose, the chapter will focus on three key notions underlying Glenn’s chefs-d’œuvre: Law, Tradition, and Conciliation. The argument is that Glenn’s findings have in multiple ways enlightened the understanding of what the law is (outside and also inside the West), as well as the relentless dynamics within and between legal traditions. Through these findings, Glenn has also provided us – his friends, colleagues, readers – with a powerful intellectual tool to pursue his conciliatory dream towards a world of tolerance and diversity.

This concluding chapter aims to bring together the themes explored in the book, and to identify several research contexts that can largely benefit from the collection. Part I offers a birds-eye view of all book chapters, noting the differences in the evolution of the analysed systems’ administrative law. Swati Jhaveri’s five-pronged typology of the public law of common law systems, presented in Chapter 1, is discussed in Part II, which explores several aspects of each of these sub-categories, critically considers their internal logic, and assesses the utility of this typology. Part III aims to provide a tentative explanatory framework for the analysis of the reasons that have led to the different transformation patterns of the administrative law of these systems. Three bodies of social science research that study change but have little to say on legal change are addressed, and supplemented by an application of Donald Horowitz’s four approaches to legal change, which offer explanatory paradigms for legal change over time. This part ends with a proposal of a five-dimensional grid designed to ease the process of defining factors that may have implicated on change. The chapter ends with a discussion of the robustness of the classic classification of legal systems into ‘legal families’ in general and of the common-law family in particular.

Medieval Karaite commentaries on incest prohibitions serve in this chapter as a lens for analyzing how notions of kinship and kin belonging developed in that setting. By examining what is required to become a relative with consanguineal or affinal kin belonging, the chapter explores the different notions of kinship and selfness that inform these legal trends and approaches. An innovative account is provided of the legal change that took place among the Karaites though the former half of the eleventh century as an outcome of changing perceptions of kinship, and shines a light on Karaite texts that have been largely ignored in modern scholarship, some printed here for the first time. Karaite authors discussed in the essay include Anan ben David, Ya’qub al-Qirqisani, Leṿi ben Yefet, Yeshu’ah ben Yehudah, Shelomoh ben David, and Yehudah Hadassi.

In this concluding chapter, we discuss avenues of reforms. After a summary of the book’s most important contributions, the authors make specific proposals to change legal practices and discuss why red zones and conditions of release have become such a rights-free area, despite the enormous consequences on people’s lives.