Observing judges in action in the Florence, Tel-Aviv, and London first-instance courts, we find that settlement-related transplants that could be interpreted as broadening the judicial role and providing meaningful modes of dispute resolution for disputants in fact often constrict the judicial role, causing both the courtroom and court-related ADR processes to become forums for efficiency-based negotiation. In England, the disintegration of the judicial role is most apparent, as the promotion of settlement has led to obligatory measures preceding the filing of a claim, leaving judges only a marginal percentage of disputes to deal with. We show that the three observed legal systems may be viewed in general terms as presenting three sequential stages of the judicial role, with a possible trend toward disintegration. In addition, the legal systems may offer three transitional views of the tension between efficiency and justice and the way it unfolds. The research provides insights on the role of legal transplants and the impetus for their transformation, and the ways they affect and are affected by the surrounding legal culture.

This chapter outlines the new landscape of judicial discretion in the settlement era, referring to both critical claims of law and advanced perspectives on conflict resolution. It integrates theoretical claims as to the notion of law and legal formalism together with advanced approaches to conflict resolution. It suggests a new model for judicial discretion and provides a theoretical framework to combine the principles of conflict resolution and law as they pertain to the judicial role. In addition, it shows how judges may exercise their discretion in the courtroom (rather than through a judicial verdict). We then entwine our theories and findings, constructing a training scheme suggested for judges, which integrates conflict resolution perspectives as well as normative and ethical considerations.

In this final chapter, I explore how the experience of democratic conflict might be conceptualized by religious traditions in theologically and ethically meaningful ways. I return to the Augustinian tradition and its understanding of love as a resource for thematizing agonism theologically. First, I consider the role of love in Augustine’s moral psychology and political theory, showing how pluralist politics can be understood as a practice of discovering and pursuing “common objects of love” amidst difference. Next, I analyze the notion of political friendship in Augustine and Aristotle in order to show how social relations around these common objects of love might incorporate forms of conflict, disagreement, and parrhesia that are ordered to tending these common goods. I conclude by looking at two figures who extend Augustine’s political theology of love in distinctly liberative directions under the notion of enemy-love. Gustavo Gutiérrez and Martin Luther King, Jr., I argue, develop accounts of the imperative to love the enemy in ways that encompass forms of confrontation, opposition, and conflict in seeking to convert enemies to friends.

‘Does the family [in the West] face complete collapse?’, asked Ferdowsi in 1970. Although the question was somewhat sensationally posed, in the West, from the mid-1960s, social commentators, politicians, the mass media, and trends in public opinion increasingly pointed to perceived signs of rapid family decline emerging at the top of the family structure – rising rates of divorce and deteriorating parenting as fathers and mothers became more concerned with conspicuous consumption and sexual hedonism than with child-rearing. These factors, it was argued, played a key role in the rise of youth antisocial behaviour, violent crime, sexual licentiousness, and drug addiction. These issues were increasingly discussed in Iranian popular and political spheres as Iranians again regarded tendencies in the West as bellwethers for Iran.

Chapter 2, Workshops: Models versus Practice, relates the archaeological evidence of pottery workshops from the eastern Mediterranean within several well-established socioeconomic models of production organization. Then, drawing on more recent theoretical approaches, it considers alternative arrangements as reflecting important cultural practices.

The emergence of Hippieism in the USA and then in Western Europe can be traced back to the end of the 1940s when Jack Kerouac introduced the term ‘Beat Generation’ to describe his social circle consisting of norm-breaking and anti-conformist youth in New York City. ‘Beat’, meaning beat down, was subculture slang from the world of those groups who saw themselves in that condition – petty thieves, hustlers, drug addicts, and other ‘down and outs’. However, for Kerouac and others within his circle, such as Allen Ginsberg, another well-known anti-conformist writer who opposed imperialism and traditional forms of sexual morality, ‘beat’ had a spiritual dimension which rejected the materialist and conformist trajectory that US society had taken after World War II. Behind this dimension were nostalgic visions of life in the USA to which society should return. The term faced distortions as it entered the public arena. In Kerouac’s response to these distortions, we get a sense of the meaning behind ‘beat culture’.

All the programs we have created so far follow the Arduino model of a set of initialization functions that execute once (akin to Arduino setup()) followed by a while(1) loop that executes forever (like the Arduino loop() function).

The Digital Project Lab is an open-ended two day lab session that gives you the opportunity to design and build something of moderate complexity using the WebFPGA and any of the components and techniques we have discussed in the course so far.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between the story of Noah and the New Science. It begins with the contemporary discussions about the date of the flood and the calculations about the numbers of people from the time of the flood to the present. It continues with the late seventeenth-century debate about the universality of the flood. The issue of the date of the flood leads also to the problem of fossils and their relation to the flood of Noah, with particular attention to John Woodward’s An Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the shifting time scales on the age of the earth during the eighteenth century cast doubt upon the role in the formation of the earth that had traditionally been ascribed to the flood, along with attempts to harmonise the Biblical story with the new age of the earth.

As judged by our three proxy measures of corruption, the fifty states vary greatly in terms of the pervasiveness and types they experience. We analyze those contrasts employing a range of empirical measures and find the political, economic, and institutional factors matter greatly. Particularly intriguing are the ways contrasts in corruption relate to Daniel Elazar’s three major political subcultures – Moralistic, Individualistic, and Traditionalistic – and to the ways they differ and mingle state by state. Contrasts in our corruption measures are linked to a range of explanatory variables in ways consistent with theory. Such links to fundamental influences not only point to the systemic nature of corruption, its causes, and consequences, but also help explain its tenacity and the difficulties we face when we attempt to implement reforms.

The PID control loop and the lock-in amplifier are each significant builds and we don’t expect you will be able to complete both of them in a single lab session. Feel free to do one, the other, or both as your time and interest permit.