People cannot survive without plants. We rely on them for food, shelter, clothes, tools – as much now as we ever did before modernity. Our relationship with plants predated the emergence of written language: that history is archaeological. But as long as we have had the words to write we have written about plants: that writing is the subject of this book. The history of literature about plants is long, rich, and varied: the task of accounting for it would demand many volumes. Nonetheless, this collection is ambitious in scope. Its sections cover historical periods of Greek, Latin, Norse, and Anglophone plant literatures; prominent modern plant genres, and the plant writing of most global regions. The scholars who took on the difficult task of accounting for a region’s plant literature have done so with elegance, many of them focusing on the long history of literature about a single plant species whose place in the region’s culture deserves attention for its sustained national, religious, or ethnic importance.

Explains Doctrine of Discovery as foundation for land divestiture that allowed non-Indigenous ranchers to acquire title to vast areas of Tribal land in 1800s and 1900s.

In this concluding chapter, we review our findings in the context of our initial pre-analysis plan and discuss the limitations of our studies. We then analyze the implications of our study and findings for their scholarly contributions and discuss next steps for future research. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of our findings. Despite the hubbub about Fox News being a bull-in-the-china shop, its effects on politicians were contingent on the context of the district they represented. Even if its effects were circumscribed, our evidence shows that the consequences were real. The implications of our findings are twofold. On the one hand, it throws some cold water on the popular notion that Fox News was a right-wing bulldozer that pulled American politics uniformly in a conservative direction. On the other hand, it makes clear that standard theoretical models of congressional behavior are founded on an assumption that, while useful, is most certainly flawed. Namely, politicians are not fully informed rational calculators. Politicians are people.

This chapter aims to understand the entrepreneurial perspective on legal innovation. How do those who create legal innovation make the services and products that improve the way law is used? The conversation centres on topics such as passion for innovation, identifying needs for new products and services, dealing with failure, keys to success in the market, innovation networks, regulatory approaches to innovation and innovation in the financial services industry. The chapter also considers aspects of innovation that are particular to legal services. Among them are the creation and availability of legal datasets for the application of artificial intelligence and the transferability of legal innovation to other jurisdictions with different laws.

The fiscal burden of government interventions in the rural economy had created growth but led the economy to the brink of crisis. When India implemented full-blown economic reforms in 1991, many assumed these would sideline social policy. This chapter shows that liberalisation pushed social policy up the political agenda. Efforts to enable an ‘exit policy’ for ailing firms by loosening restrictions on retrenchment under chapter VB of the Industrial Disputes Act failed due to opposition from organised labour. The controversy created an opening to strengthen - or at least maintain - existing ‘social safety nets’ to support the project of economic transformation. The Government of India used a World Bank loan initially intended to support the ‘exit policy’ to maintain the rural social policies that had been introduced or expanded in the 1980s, as part of what Finance Minister Manmohan Singh described as macroeconomic adjustment with a ‘human face’. The chapter shows that political regionalisation and the intensification of multi-level electoral competition in the 1990s encouraged subnational social policy innovation and worked against the retrenchment of existing social policies.

The introduction starts by recounting the history of this project, from an ignorant first encounter with the traces of expos, through the enthusiastic embrace of the burgeoning academic literature on them, to a puzzling first experience of an expo in real life. It suggests that the existence of expos, and their endurance in Japan, challenges the existing literature, which either mines them to explore other phenomena, or assumes that as exemplars of modern spectacle they can serve as an effective ideological apparatus. Rather, it argues, they might help us refine our understanding of development, spectacle, and their relationship, and of modern Japan. Doing so, however, requires us to be alert to the limits of our sources, however extensive the expo archive, and to craft our accounts to reflect these.

This chapter charts the historical evolution of second-tier patent systems in Australia – looking at the establishment of the petty patent system, the rise and fall of the innovation patent, and the new focus of the Albanese Government upon breakthrough inventions. In terms of its methodology, this chapter provides a historical study of intellectual property reform in Australia. It also uses socio-legal methodologies to highlight the gap between the aspirations for the innovation patent system, and the operation of the system in practice. The chapter also draws upon empirical research into intellectual property registration data. This work is an investigation of litigation in respect of innovation patents – the so-called ‘patent wars’. As well as exploring intellectual property, this chapter also considers Australia’s innovation policies – particularly in respect of small-to-medium enterprises and lone inventors. It highlights the tensions between the nationalistic vision of Australian policy-makers, and the larger forces of globalization.

This chapter examines the opportunities and challenges for the management of biodiversity in desert and water-scarce regions, in particular sub-regions of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It explores the need for the integrated management of water and biodiversity in the region, how the current legal framework of biodiversity protection can advance an integrated governance approach, the gaps in integrative governance in the region, and how these gaps can be addressed. Although MENA is one of the regions most vulnerable to climate change, it is not homogenous. Its geography deserves a nuanced investigation of the threats of climate change and biodiversity loss to each of its sub-regions. The integrated management of water and biodiversity resources is essential to address the impacts of climate change and other ecological pressures coherently. To advance such integrated governance of water and biodiversity, a wide array of cross-sub regional and cross-national initiatives have been developed. However, problems of diverse political landscape, economic priorities, varied institutional capacities, and transboundary challenges hinder their effective and coherent implementation. This chapter examines the legal framework on the integrated management of water and biodiversity in the MENA region, offering recommendations for improving the current regime of water conservation.

This chapter develops the concept of criminalized governance, defining it as the structures and practices through which criminalized groups control territory and manage relations with local populations. It distinguishes between two primary dimensions: coercion and the provision of benefits. The chapter then provides detailed descriptions of the various activities and behaviors included within each of these dimensions. A typology of criminalized governance regimes is then presented, which contains five ideal types: disorder, benevolent dictator, tyrant, social bandit, and laissez-faire. Finally, existing explanations from the literature on criminalized governance in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas are addressed.

This chapter focuses on collective representation, examining whether Fox News affects how the American public is represented. Chapter 5 revealed Fox News effects on dyadic representation; we cannot assume similar effects on collective representation. Yet, in some ways, the path by which Fox News would affect collective representation is clearer than at the district-level. Because Fox News is a national outlet with a wide following, it could affect collective representation through agenda-setting. If many people across many districts regularly watch Fox News, it may draw the attention of both legislators and constituents to the same set of issues. To test for Fox News effects on collective representation, we examine whether the presence of Fox produced different policy outcomes than would have occurred in its absence. We simulate a world where Fox News does not exist in any member’s district and then compare it to the actual behavior of members of Congress given the observed levels of Fox News. The results suggest a boost for Republican policies in four of the six Congresses we examined. However, the effects are only statistically significant for one Congress, the 108th (2003–2004).

This chapter examines the international legal framework on biodiversity, reflects on the scope of its implementation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and highlights the way forward for enhancing coherent, holistic, and integrated implementation of biodiversity treaties in the region. It provides an overview of the status of implementation, primarily through an assessment of the progress of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity including the Aichi targets (2011–2020), under the Convention of Biological Diversity, and assesses the challenges and opportunities of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. In addition to a literature review, the chapter analyses information from national reports by parties submitted to secretariats to the CBD and on informational platforms such as UNEP’s InforMEA and Law and Environment Assistance Platform.

In this chapter, the student learns how to perform certain classes of definite integrals using contour integration methods. Although the integration variable is real for most integrals of interest, such as the inverse Fourier transform, analysis of the integral is extended to complex values of the integration variable and theorems related to integrating around closed contours on the complex plane are used to solve classes of definite integrals. The key theorems include Cauchy’s theorem for integrating so-called analytic functions, Jordan’s lemma, and the residue theorem for the important case where inside a closed contour on the complex plane, the integrand has places called singularities at which the function is not well behaved. Contour integration is used to analyze and derive results for the constitutive laws of a material when the current response depends not just on current forcing but also on the history of the forcing. This topic is called delayed linear response, which is developed at length. Contour integration, when combined with Fourier transforms, provides the solution of various types of initial-value and boundary-value problems in infinite and semi infinite domains.