Although the 13 United States courts of appeals are the final word on 99 percent of all federal cases, there is no detailed account of how these courts operate. How do judges decide which decisions are binding precedents and which are not? Who decides whether appeals are argued orally? What administrative structures do these courts have? The answers to these and hundreds of other questions are largely unknown, not only to lawyers and legal academics but also to many within the judiciary itself. Written and Unwritten is the first book to provide an inside look at how these courts operate. An unprecedented contribution to the field of judicial administration, the book collects the differing local rules and internal procedures of each court of appeals. In-depth interviews of the chief judges of all 13 circuits and surveys of all clerks of court reveal previously undisclosed practices and customs.

This chapter focuses on two Ethiopian Sharīʿa court decisions related to divorce initiated by the wife (khulʿ) with a focus on the amount and kind of compensation which a wife must pay to the husband in order to terminate the marriage. Sharīʿa courts have a long history in Ethiopia, where Muslims constitute some 30-35% of the population. In the present federal constitution of Ethiopia, the power of Sharīʿa courts to adjudicate disputes is subject to the precondition of ‘consent’ of the disputing parties. The first case presented in this chapter concerns an appeal by the husband for an increased amount of compensation than that decided by lower courts. The second case concerns the court’s decision to accept the decision of family arbitrators to order a wife to pay compensation for the ‘moral damage’ caused to husband by the wife’s demand for divorce.

The Global South, that groups together low- or middle- income countries mainly located in Africa, Asia and Latin America, concentrates most of the world population. Population ageing, caused by the demographic transition and a large decrease in fertility and mortality rates, make these countries face numerous challenges. Among regions in the Global South, the differences in life expectancy at birth were still large in 2022: almost 74 years in Latin America and the Caribbean but only 60 years in sub-Saharan Africa, with some countries barely exceeding 50. Due to many factors that play on health transition, high mortality countries suffer a cumulative burden from both infectious and non-communicable diseases (NCDs). In addition, the lack of old-age mortality data is a dramatic issue when studying longevity in these countries.

Summarizes the industrial policies of the US from 2008 to the present, when the post–World War II consensus in favor of ever-freer trade started to collapse and get replaced by the protectionism and industrial policies of the Trump and Biden administrations.

In order to comprehend various interconnected aspects, such as the historical transformation of identities, shared places of worship and blended socio-religious customs, it is imperative for scholars of religion to adopt a comprehensive viewpoint that considers the dynamic nature of evolving religious cultures. Understanding the diverse religious landscape of South Asia requires going beyond rigid categorisations of ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ and instead recognising the historically embedded connections and conflicts among ‘locally’ developed religious practices. Without acknowledging these complex interrelationships, it is impossible to grasp the full extent of Indic religious diversity. Pre-existing elements of religious cultures may take different and separate routes, can mould and be moulded by social and political forces. But, despite these changes in the (re-)structuring of a new religious worldview, certain shared devotional aspects remain in vestigial forms.

When the Laldas religious order was established in the sixteenth century, it was based on various strands of ‘Sufi’ and ‘Bhakti’ doctrines that promoted the transcendence of two institutional religious identities, ‘Muslim’ and ‘Hindu’. In accordance with the teachings of the saint Kabir, Laldas formed a unique religious synthesis that gave priority to a popular expression of a distinct religiosity. The religious traditions associated with Laldas underwent a gradual transformation, eventually being categorised under a specific religious category. In this process, the concept of ‘religion’ itself, which is a dynamic and evolving network of power, also transformed its meaning. Whether it was the devotion of a ‘Sufi’ or ‘Bhakti’ saint or the creation of ‘locally’ based ‘Islamic’ and ‘Hindu’ reformist movements, they all interacted with one another in a highly intricate manner, often adopting features of their religious opponents in order to accomplish their own goals. The emergence of the Laldas order in the sixteenth century needs to be explored in this context of diverse religious trends vying to establish supremacy over each other. His teachings centred on the promotion of nonbinary identities deeply rooted in the local context of Mewat. He is revered to this day for his ability to bestow blessings and perform miracles. Studying the historical interconnections between different conceptions of ‘Sufism’ and ‘Bhakti’ allows for a clearer understanding of popular religiosity associated with Laldas, which stands in contrast to institutionalised expressions of ‘Islam’ and ‘Hinduism’.

Global history stands out by its intimate relationship to the processuality of history. As they put forms and structures of ‘global integration’ centre stage, global historians have not only made statements about the direction of history the foundation of how they define their area of study; they also ascribe at least partial explanatory power to them. The chapter argues that there is a lot to gain from stronger reflection on how global historians construe historical change over time. It delves into the theory of historical processes to develop more precise questions about directionality and presents responses global histories may offer to the teleological pitfalls of global integration. It also discusses the dialectics involved in processes of global integration and offers the outlines of a global history more attuned to the (unrealised) expectations and ‘futures pasts” among historical actors and to historical uncertainties produced under the impact of global interconnection. While the directionality/teleology problem poses particular challenges for global historians, it also can help think about multiple ‘guiding scripts’ global historians may use, refine and variegate in practice.

Introduction

This book argues that the 2020 labour law reforms in India, where Parliament consolidated twenty-nine federal statutes into four labour codes, fail to meet the Indian Constitution's labour mandate. In so failing to meet the constitutional mandate, the reforms have far-reaching consequences for labour rights in the country. Labour, understood broadly as an individual's personal undertaking contributing to broader socio-economic pursuits, occupies a prominent position in the constitutional framework in India. As a category, labour is pivotal to the social justice agenda envisaged under the Constitution. The Preamble to the Constitution of India, 1950, aspires to social, economic and political justice. The other values fundamental to the foundation of the republic are freedom, equality and solidarity. While the latter values are inherently important for the constitutional framework of the nation, they are also the conceptual and programmatic components of the constitutional social justice agenda.

On the basis of its social justice agenda, India's Constitution could be positioned somewhere between classical liberalism and social democracy. In classical liberalism, on the one hand, the constitution stipulates basic rules of contract, property and tort to regulate market exchanges, which are the primary means of distributing goods and services. In social democracy, on the other hand, the constitution catalogues extensive rules of redistribution that secure citizens’ legal entitlements, such as education, nutrition, work, healthcare, social security, unionisation, maternity benefit, legal aid, and so on. Mark Tushnet notes that in classical liberalism, the distribution of goods and the principles of such distribution are primarily the concern of private law, whereas in social democracy, they are primarily a public law issue. The Indian Constitution uses – balances – both of these approaches by simultaneously allocating a role for the market (structured through private law) and guaranteeing welfare rights (secured through public law).

The Constitutional Social Justice Agenda

The Indian Constitution's social justice agenda is furthered through a combination of individual freedom, social solidarity and participatory democracy. It is the balance among these three aspects of the social justice agenda that captures the uniqueness of the agenda for Indian society. The Constitution guarantees every citizen of India the individual freedom to practise their chosen occupation and engage in a trade or business of their choice without undue interference.

The mythic dimension of the cultural operations of human being represent a vital location for understanding not only the processes of mythopoiesis, but also the theological dynamics of cultural change. The questions of how mythic sensibilities encounter one another and how mythic sensibilities change as a result of such encounters shed light on what we mean by culture, human ways of being, as a participation in the life and activity of God. In what follows, we will observe what is meant, specifically, by the encounter of mythic sensibilities, as distinct from the other dynamics of the flux of culture. Given Milbank’s insights into the origins of the mythos of secular modernity, we will continue to engage with his analysis of mythic difference. By a close examination of his use of mythos in Theology and Social Theory, however, it becomes clear that his agonistic understanding of difference cannot finally serve a Christian theology of mythopoiesis and understanding of difference.

Chapter 4 reviews frequently used machine learning evaluation procedures. In particular, it presents popular evaluation metrics for binary and multi-class classification (e.g., accuracy, precision/recall, ROC analysis), regression analysis (e.g., mean squared error, root mean squared error, R-squared error), clustering (e.g., Davies–Bouldin Index). It then reviews popular resampling approaches (e.g.,holdout, cross-validation) and statistical tests (e.g., the t-test and the sign test). It concludes with an explanation of why it is important to go beyond these well-known methods in order to achieve reliable evaluation results in all cases.

In the three decades from the uprising of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue in 1791 to the recognition of Haitian independence by France in 1825, even amid the bitterest struggles, theatrical productions never fully stopped. When Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed independence, many of the officers surrounding him were directly involved in the theatre, as playwrights, actors, or both. Looking at figures such as Juste Chanlatte, Guy-Joseph Bonnet, Pierre-Charles Lys, Antoine Dupré and Jules Solime Milscent, this chapter makes a case for the importance of the theatre in the early years of Haitian independence as a reflection of the country’s evolving society, but also as a mirror and vector of domestic and international politics. A source of public entertainment and information designed and utilized for the most part by the country’s elites, the theatre was a prime tool in shaping and projecting idealized representations of the new nation and its leaders, within the country and to the outside world.

Simulated markets are a fascinating paradox for Market Studies. They are markets organized around nothing. No real property rights get exchanged when markets are “only” simulated. They are unproductive in the sense that simulated markets produce no surplus for anyone. They are markets that do not actually exist. Yet, simulations of market processes play an increasingly important role in market practices as well as in wider business pedagogy. This chapter uses historical and contemporary evidence on the development and uses of market simulations in various settings – ranging from business schools to Wall Street – to test the post-performativity paradigm in Market Studies. The chapter shows that real-world market arrangements are changed not with the help of economic models, economic theories or economists themselves, but rather through business school teachers, family accountants, software tinkerers and designs that emerged completely outside the sphere of economic theory and modelling. By studying the early uses of electronic spreadsheets for market simulations, we can see that market arrangements require calculative communities rather than economists.

Moving on form the socio-economic to the political side of developments during these years, the sixth chapter describes the meaning of unification and the split between Austria and the new imperial Germany, ruled by Prussia, for many Jews and non-Jews. The act of unification was often felt by them as a painful rupture, but at the same time for Jews it also meant their own full integration in the emerging new Germany. Interestingly, this also included their entry into the political sphere, especially the liberal camp. In addition to their fight for final emancipation, they were also part of the efforts to establish Germany as a liberal state, despite and often against its conservative leadership. The life of Eduard Lasker, from Posen through Vienna and London to Berlin, is related in this chapter as an example. Especially interesting is Lasker’s evolvement into Bismarck’s major opponent among the liberals in the 1870s, standing for another, progressive vision of the new state, supported by the majority of the Jews, now torn from their co-religionists south of the new border.

After a long rickshaw journey along zigzagging dirt paths, my research assistant, Morshed, and I finally arrived at one of the former Indian enclaves in Bangladesh. To be sure, I asked a man in a small shop selling cigarettes, “Is this the enclave of Kotvajni?” Unable to mask his irritation, he replied, “No, this is the former enclave of Kotvajni. This is now Bangladesh.” He placed extra emphasis on the word ‘former’ when he answered. With a smile on my face and a small nod of my head, I said, “Thank you,” feeling a little ashamed of my inauspicious arrival in the former enclave. Yet I was also excited to learn about this new chapter in the lives of the residents who had finally achieved the exchange of the border enclaves after almost seventy years of uncertainty and de facto statelessness.

Even during the many decades when they existed as enclaves, territorially surrounded by India or Bangladesh, they had no apparent marker to distinguish them from their surroundings. They had neither fences nor border guards to control or monitor the flow of people. People in the enclaves were not “different” by any measure from their neighbors beyond their status and lack of papers. Pillars or markers that were used to mark their boundaries either disappeared or remained hidden in the rice field. One needed prior knowledge of where exactly to look for or how to locate them. This made it even more difficult to distinguish the enclaves from their surroundings. Yet for almost seventy years, from 1947 until 2015, residents of enclaves like Kotvajni were not considered Bangladeshis, and these small pockets of land were not territories of Bangladesh. Officially at least, they had been Indian nationals living in Indian territories, effectively cut off from the mainland of India, and vice versa. These were essentially “stateless spaces” because they were not administered by the surrounding state, and the home state did not maintain any connection with them (Jones, 2009b; Shewly, 2013a).

Although these territories and their residents never received any care from their home states, they never lost significance in the territorial and nationalistic discourses of Bangladesh and India, which played a role in delaying the seemingly obvious solution of a territorial swap.